Forced Displacement and Borderlands in International Law: Perspectives from Below

African borders are contentious and arbitrary, shaped by both colonial and post-colonial events. How do communities that straddle borders experience the border and movement around it? The discourse around African borders in international law have often focused on border dispute resolution and delimitation between states or the impact of borders on state sovereignty. These discussions centre the state and sovereignty in the analysis of borders. However, borders have a profound impact on the daily lives and experiences of people and communities on the fringes of the state. This study aims to understand how border communities experience international law in their daily lives and under the limitations of borders using Mubi, Adamawa State in Northern Nigeria as a case study. Mubi is a borderland on Nigerian and Cameroonian lines, which is contentious and shaped historically by colonialism and contemporarily by insurgency and violence. The border between Nigeria and Cameroon has increasingly become securitised based on the anti-terrorism practices of Western countries towards the Boko Haram insurgency. This study is interested in studying accounts of people in Mubi of forced migration and the responses of Cameroon and Nigeria during the height of the insurgency in 2014. The objective is to derive an understanding of international law from below and to trace the link between the realities in border communities and international law. This study uses methods from Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to understand how border communities in the Global South are impacted by international norms and how they counter those norms at their level. TWAIL and legal ethnography has been used by scholars including Eslava, Sunter, and Parmar as a technique to document historical and ongoing struggles against colonialism and asymmetries of power in international law and uses local specificities and regional trends from the Global South to change our understanding of international law. This chapter follows a similar path using perspectives from below to generate critique and significance.