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The African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) held its inaugural meeting in Edinburgh in 2007.  ABORNE is an interdisciplinary network of researchers interested in all aspects of international borders and trans-boundary phenomena in Africa. The emphasis is largely on borderlands as physical spaces and social spheres, but the network is also concerned with regional flows of people and goods as well as economic processes that may be located at some distance from the geographical border. ABORNE is primarily a forum for academic researchers who aim for a better understanding of borderlands, but it also welcomes individual members and institutions whose research is of a more applied nature. ABORNE aims to provide a lively platform for debate, the sharing of knowledge and the co-ordination of research activity, conferences and publications. ABORNE seeks to integrate insights derived from different sub-fields of knowledge - including history, anthropology, development studies, migration studies and refugee studies- that have tended to produce a fractured body of knowledge about African borderlands. ABORNE seeks to develop borderland studies as a sub-field in its own right and to promote research activity, including programmes of study at the postgraduate level. ABORNE aims to provide a mechanism for promoting collaborative research and dissemination amongst researchers based in Africa and those based outside Africa. ABORNE seeks to engage with scholars working on other parts of the world and to bring new insights to bear on borderlands studies in general, both at the conceptual and the empirical levels.
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