Understanding East Africa's Power Politics, One Core at a Time

Like any geographic space, sub-Saharan Africa is governed by underlying factors that guide its direction and account for its actions, both at home and abroad. Political maps -- those that demarcate state borders -- rarely tell the full story, because they frequently fail to reflect the true power relationships beneath the surface. So how can one make sense of what's happening in a place when the often artificial lines on the map fail to explain what's going on? One way to assess the underlying power structures on the continent is to examine the region's power cores -- population areas that form entities much larger than a city and don't conform to state boundaries. Sometimes they are smaller than national frontiers; sometimes they are much larger. It is these power cores that can give these political borders meaning, by demonstrating either the extent of power projection or the geographic limits of...