The phrase “ungoverned spaces” has become a bureaucratic reflex. From the Sahel to the Horn, from the Lake Chad Basin to eastern Congo, policymakers and security analysts deploy it to describe territories where the formal state appears to have evaporated. The diagnosis is seductive in its simplicity: where the state is absent, violence proliferates; where institutions collapse, extremism takes root. Send troops, build capacity, restore order.
But the diagnosis is wrong and dangerously so. Political space is never empty. Where the state retreats, other authorities step in. The question is not whether governance exists, but who governs, through what institutional arrangements, with what extractive or redistributive logic, and in whose interests. The territories labelled “ungoverned” are, in fact, governed differently. Recognising this distinction is not semantic pedantry. It reframes the entire architecture of state-building, security policy, and democratic citizenship on the continent.
I. The Myth of the Vacuum
The “ungoverned space” narrative rests on a Weberian fallacy: the assumption that legitimate authority is exclusively bureaucratic, territorial, and exercised through a monopoly of violence concentrated in the capital. Where this ideal-type state is absent, analysts presume a vacuum; an institutional void waiting to be filled. Yet political vacuums are mythical. Authority, like matter, abhors emptiness.
As the political geographer Catherine Boone demonstrated in her analysis of West African regimes, states do not uniformly govern their territories. Instead, they produce spatially differentiated zones of authority: areas where the state is directly present and extractive; areas where it is indirectly present through local intermediaries; areas where it is present but non-extractive; and areas it effectively abandons to alternative power structures. Jeffrey Herbst’s work on state capacity and political geography similarly showed that large African states with dispersed populations and resource-poor hinterlands face structural disincentives to extend bureaucratic control. But where Herbst saw geographic determinism, the more precise reading is political economy: states invest in governance where extraction is profitable and withdraw where it is costly.
Joel Migdal’s seminal insight in Strong Societies and Weak States sharpens the point further. The African state does not confront a passive society awaiting direction. It confronts dense, pre-existing social organisations: clans, religious brotherhoods, merchant networks, and age-grade associations that possess their own rules, enforcement mechanisms, and legitimacy. The state does not simply fail to penetrate these spaces. It is actively resisted, negotiated with, or rendered irrelevant. The result is not anarchy but “hybrid governance”: layered, overlapping systems of authority in which formal and informal institutions coexist, compete, and occasionally collude.
This anthropological and sociological reality has profound implications. When governments describe territories as “ungoverned,” they perform ideological work. The label externalises failure, transforming the consequences of state neglect into natural conditions requiring military remediation. It erases the histories of extraction, the political choices of underinvestment, and the active construction of alternative authority by citizens who have learned to survive without the state.
II. The Political Economy of Neglect
State absence is rarely accidental. It is the accumulated outcome of fiscal priorities, elite bargains, and spatially selective sovereignty. Across Africa, capital cities absorb disproportionate shares of public investment while peripheral regions, particularly borderlands, suffer systematic underprovision of roads, schools, clinics, courts, and administrative presence. The result is not a governance vacuum but a governance market in which citizens shop among competing providers of security, justice, welfare, and economic opportunity.
The Sahel offers a devastating illustration. Between 2016 and 2023, military expenditure across the region nearly doubled from 2.7 percent to 4.6 percent of GDP. In Mali, defence spending surged 339 percent; in Burkina Faso, 238 percent; in Niger, 288 percent. These are not abstract figures. They represent fiscal choices to prioritise coercion over care. The opportunity cost is staggering. The Sahel’s GDP per capita stands at roughly 790, less than half the sub-Saharan African average. Research by the Overseas Development Institute estimates that four years of conflict erodes GDP per capita by 18 percent; over a decade, the loss reaches 28 percent. Meanwhile, humanitarian needs in the region ballooned from 894 million in 2019 to 2.3 billion by August 2024, even as the same states diverted resources to arms procurement.
This is the “guns versus butter” trade-off in its most lethal form. The International Monetary Fund has documented how rising defence spending in conflict-affected African states systematically crowds out health and education expenditure. The Sahel now accounts for 23 percent of violent events in sub-Saharan Africa and 32 percent of fatalities despite housing only 7 percent of the region’s population. The state returns to these territories with soldiers and checkpoints, not teachers and judges. Citizens experience the state primarily as extraction and coercion, not protection and provision. Is it any wonder that alternative authorities, whether jihadist courts, clan militias, or smuggling networks, acquire comparative legitimacy?
The Democratic Republic of Congo presents an even starker arithmetic. With over 7 million internally displaced persons, the largest displacement crisis in Africa, and more than 120 armed groups operating in the east, the DRC ranks 179th of 193 countries on the Human Development Index. Seventy-three percent of its population survives on less than 2.15 per day. The central government retains control of 80 percent of provincial budgets, rendering local administrations financially dependent and politically impotent. Yet the mining sector generates approximately 24 billion annually, with minimal benefits reaching extraction zones. The state is not absent from the east; it is present as a predator, extracting minerals through opaque presidential networks while leaving 0.3 physicians per 1,000 people to manage cholera, Ebola, and the world’s highest malaria mortality rate.
When M23 seized Goma in January 2025, displacing over 700,000 people in a single city, it did not fill a vacuum. It displaced one governance arrangement with another one that, for some communities, offered more predictable taxation and dispute resolution than the predatory formal state. The tragedy is not that no one governed eastern Congo before M23 arrived. It is that the governance that existed was violent, extractive, and illegitimate, and that the international community’s response has focused on military stabilisation rather than structural redistribution.
III. The Infrastructure of Alternative Authority
To understand why alternative governance persists, we must examine its institutional infrastructure. Sociologically, these systems rest on what legal pluralism scholars call “living law”: norms and enforcement mechanisms that operate independently of statutory codes. In Somalia, where the formal state has been fragmented for over three decades, clan-based xeer law continues to regulate everything from blood compensation to commercial contracts. In the Lake Chad Basin, where Boko Haram’s insurgency has killed over 37,500 people since 2011 and displaced 3.3 million, traditional shura councils and merchant guilds have maintained cross-border trade networks that predate colonial borders. These are not primitive survivals. They are adaptive institutions that fill gaps left by absent or predatory states.
Anthropologically, the key insight is that legitimacy is relational, not territorial. Citizens do not grant loyalty to the state because it holds UN seats or issues passports. They grant it because the state delivers tangible goods: security, justice, welfare, dignity. When it fails, loyalty migrates to institutions that do deliver, even if their methods are coercive or their ideologies are extreme. Al-Shabaab in Somalia, for instance, does not merely fight the federal government. It operates shadow courts, collects taxes, regulates markets, and provides rough-and-ready arbitration. Its legitimacy is contested, and its violence is brutal, but its governance functions are real. The same pattern holds for jihadist groups in the Sahel, militia coalitions in the DRC, and clan-based authorities across the Horn.
Technologically, the landscape is shifting in ways that both challenge and enable alternative governance. Africa now processes 70 percent of global mobile money transactions, contributing approximately 190 billion to continental GDP in 2024. In Kenya, M-Pesa’s 34 million active users conduct transactions exceeding 50 percent of the national GDP. These platforms are not merely financial instruments. They are governance infrastructures. They enable tax collection outside state channels, facilitate remittance economies that bypass formal banking, and create digital identities that compete with state-issued credentials. In the DRC, mobile money platforms now channel 40 percent of NGO aid, reducing leakage but also creating parallel financial circuits beyond state oversight.
The technological dimension reveals a deeper truth: governance is increasingly decoupled from territorial control. Blockchain-based land registries, drone surveillance by non-state armed groups, and satellite-enabled smuggling networks all demonstrate that authority no longer requires the bureaucratic apparatus of the Weberian state. The African borderland where citizenship coexists with transnational ethnic belonging, mobile money flows across jurisdictions, and armed groups administer justice through WhatsApp is not a space of absence. It is a space of institutional pluralism, where sovereignty is fragmented, negotiated, and constantly recontested.
IV. The Borderland as Method
Nowhere is differentiated governance more visible than in Africa’s borderlands. The state sees a border as a line of sovereign demarcation. Communities experience it as a membrane: permeable to kinship, trade, language, and culture; impermeable to state services and security. The Lake Chad Basin, affecting 6.5 million people across Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, exemplifies this paradox. Families cross borders that their ancestors never recognised. Pastoralists follow transhumance routes older than the states that now obstruct them. Traders operate in multiple currencies of mobile money, CFA francs, naira, and barter that circumvent central banking.
This is not a failure of governance. It is a different mode of governance, one rooted in social networks rather than territorial administration. The anthropologist Abdi Samatar’s work on Somali pastoralism, alongside more recent research on transboundary water governance in the Horn, demonstrates that communities develop sophisticated conflict-resolution mechanisms for resource competition mechanisms that often function more effectively than state courts. The problem arises when states insist on territorial loyalty while providing no practical reason for it. A border post is not a state presence. A military patrol is not citizenship. Real sovereignty is experienced through comparable dignity, rights, and opportunity at the periphery and the centre.
The Horn of Africa crystallises these dynamics. Somalia ranks first globally on the Fragile States Index with a score of 111.3. Sudan hosts the world’s largest displacement crisis: 11.3 million internally displaced and 4 million refugees. Ethiopia’s Tigray war killed an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people before the 2022 Pretoria agreement, yet the Amhara Fano insurgency and Oromo Liberation Army conflicts continue. In each case, the formal state is not absent; it is one competitor among many, and frequently the least legitimate. The Somali federal government depends on African Union troops (now AUSSOM, replacing ATMIS in January 2025) for its survival. Jubaland and Puntland maintain their own security architectures. Al-Shabaab governs swathes of territory. The result is not ungoverned space but layered sovereignty: multiple authorities claiming overlapping jurisdictions, each with distinct extractive logics and legitimacy claims.
V. From Reconquest to Relevance
The conventional policy response to these conditions is securitisation: more troops, more checkpoints, more counterterrorism operations. But coercive presence is not legitimate governance. A community surrounded by soldiers but without schools, clinics, functioning courts, or economic opportunity is heavily militarised and profoundly disconnected from the state. The more sustainable question is not how to bring the state into “ungoverned” spaces, but what kind of state citizens should encounter when it arrives.
This requires abandoning the fantasy of centralised, uniform sovereignty. The modern African state cannot govern effectively by pretending that every legitimate institution must originate from the capital. Nor can it afford to romanticise informal governance. Some local systems reproduce patriarchy, ethnic exclusion, and corporal punishment. Armed groups that provide services cannot be legitimised merely because they fill gaps. The challenge is to distinguish between institutions that can strengthen accountable governance and those that exploit state absence to establish coercive authority.
Development investment must be reconceptualised as national security infrastructure. Roads, schools, markets, digital connectivity, and justice systems in marginalised territories are not charity. They are the material foundations of citizenship. When the DRC’s 24 billion mining sector delivers none of this to extraction zones, the state is not absent; it is actively choosing extraction over inclusion. When Sahelian states spend 4.6 percent of GDP on defence while their human development indicators stagnate in the bottom 30 globally, they are not combating instability. They are producing it.
Democratic presence, not territorial control, must be the metric of success. Democracy cannot exist only at election time or in national assemblies. For citizens at the margins, it becomes meaningful when they can influence decisions affecting their lives, hold local authorities accountable, and access institutions that recognise their dignity. This requires fiscal decentralisation that matches constitutional promises, unlike the DRC, where Kinshasa retains 80 percent of provincial budgets. It requires engaging traditional and religious authorities as partners rather than threats, provided their practices conform to human rights standards. And it requires recognising that legitimacy cannot be imposed from above. It must be built locally, through sustained presence, predictable investment, and accountable administration.
VI. The Real Cost
Perhaps it is time to retire “ungoverned spaces” from the policy lexicon. The phrase allows governments to describe the consequences of their absence without confronting its causes. It portrays peripheral territories as empty political landscapes waiting for the state to arrive. They are not. They contain communities, institutions, histories, economies, and competing ideas of legitimacy.
The question facing African states is therefore not how to reclaim territory from insurgents, criminals or informal authorities. It is how to rebuild the relationship between citizens and the state before alternative systems become more credible than the state itself. Because when citizens discover that they can obtain security, justice, livelihoods, or belonging elsewhere, the state loses something more valuable than territorial control. It loses relevance.
And by the time governments recognise that loss, the price of restoring trust far exceeds the investment that neglect once allowed them to avoid. In the Sahel, that price is measured in 2.3 billion annual humanitarian appeals, 5.5 million displaced persons, and a generation of children growing up under jihadist administration. In the DRC, there are 7 million displaced, 23.4 million food insecure, and a mining economy that enriches elites while immiserating extraction zones. These are not the costs of ungoverned space. They are the costs of governed difference, the consequences of states that chose coercion over care, extraction over inclusion, and territorial declarations over experienced sovereignty.
There may be no such thing as an empty political space. Where the state does not govern effectively, someone else will. The real cost of negligence begins when citizens start believing that someone else governs better.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
