By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

In this chapter, the book is introduced by interrogating how a political community is constructed and with what membership boundaries, especially when it lies across borders, or at another level than the nation-state. I argue that the political belonging found at the local level and based on ideas of ‘indigeneity’ – whereby the individual is bound to a particular community and has access to a bundle of rights by virtue of the ‘first-comer’ or ‘early-comer rule’– informs and contributes to the making of other types of political belonging at different levels.

The convergence of citizenship towards indigeneity implies that the instability of one can easily lead to the instability of the other. This chapter analyses how the two main political parties in Ghana capitalized on the blurred boundary between citizenship and indigeneity and how images of exclusion conveyed by the Aliens Compliance Order (that instructed all foreigners without residence permits to leave Ghana within 14 days) in 1969 strengthened the image of the NPP (New Patriotic Party) as seeking to exclude Ewe-speakers from the nation in the 1990s (in political campaigns) and the 2000s (including in the national debate about cross-border voting).

Chapter 7 focuses on more local dynamics over cross-border voting in certain borderland localities where all scales merge, and where palimpsestic political communities emerge even more clearly. It emphasizes the question of authority in the recognition or contestation of belonging. By campaigning in the Togolese borderlands in the 2000s, the Ghanaian political parties aimed to instrumentalize cross-border ties and recognized the authority of the local level in confirming belonging to the nation. This chapter demonstrates that the local level is the authority on and the gatekeeper of national belonging. As a consequence it shows that the local level is the most powerful layer of belonging in the palimpsestic political communities of the region, since it is capable of influencing all the other layers of belonging.

The Ewe-speaking region straddling the border between Ghana and Togo has not been envisioned by much of the scholarship as a viable political community capable of forming a nation-state. Yet this interpretation does not account for the continued identity claims arising from this transnational region. By looking more closely at grassroots perceptions of what constitutes a political community, the diagnostic may be different. This chapter considers how the scalar and genealogical principle underpinning the local indigenous political space, the dukɔ , has come to underpin the transnational Ewe-speaking region to form a larger political community. This is notable in the Ewe Newsletters, which aimed to convene and construct a transnational Ewe nation based on mutual recognition and oral tradition but also today across the border in both oral tradition and the performance of festivals.

Chapter 2 provides the historical context of the Ghana–Togo borderland region. I show how the border communities I have visited manifested both plurality and unity, showing strong remnants of Ewe unity despite the border but also dissensions reaffirming the border as a separation. I then delve deeper into the roots of the historical in-betweenness of the border region explaining the multiplicity of political communities layered on top of each other from the precolonial period to the 1956 plebiscite. Finally, I analyse the scholarship’s approach to nation-building projects arising from the border region in the 1950s. While the literature on political activism in the border region concludes on the failure of the diverse political projects that arose, the persistence of these projects today is not fully explained. I argue that the palimpsestic and interconnected nature of political communities in the borderlands contributes to explain this phenomenon – which suggests that other frameworks smaller than the Westphalian conception of nation-state are at work.

Chapter 5 looks at political communities in the making and historicises the notion of citizenship status during and after colonialism. In Ghana, citizenship criteria have evolved from a combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis principles to a purely jus sanguinis principle, as if to compensate for the porous nature of Ghana’s borders. This evolution shows a tendency to render citizenship more exclusionary, and more dependent on filiation and indigeneity, creating other boundaries within the nation. Yet the unsystematic and deficient systems of documentation prior and after independence cannot provide proof of one’s status with certainty. This is why new nations (such as Ghana) and local communities end up using the principle of indigeneity to prove their legitimacy to belong. This chapter suggests that indigeneity and citizenship constitute each other and that those who belong are those who can convince of the indigeneity of their ancestors. These narratives of indigeneity being prone to contestation, citizenship is at the same time at risk of being undermined. This implies that local belonging and citizenship can easily be conflated.

The reintroduction of multiparty elections threatened the survival of the Togolese regime, but they also represented an opportunity to remove potential enemies in neighbouring countries. In Togo, the transition to multiparty elections initiated a period of power contestation where the dictatorial regime of Gnassingbé Eyadema had to adapt, and by doing so, used cross-border mechanisms to its advantage. Chapter 8 shows the implications of cross-border voting in the international relations between Ghana and Togo when Rawlings and Eyadéma used elections in an attempt to topple each other in the 1990s. As a consequence, the chapter concludes on showing the far-reaching international consequences of the ways in which the local level scales up to the national and the transnational levels.

Chapter 6 tests and illustrates the argument that protest broker availability helps to shape where protests occur by affecting the ability of elites to mobilize collective action. Drawing on a unique combination of original protest data from South Africa, over two years of fieldwork, and a new survey with local elites, the chapter demonstrates that both elites and citizens recognize the pivotal role of protest brokers in enabling protest. The evidence shows that broker presence is a critical factor in explaining geographic variation in protest activity. Through three detailed case studies, the chapter further unpacks the mechanisms behind this relationship. First, it examines repeated failures to mobilize protest in a broker-absent community. Second, it shows how the loss of a broker reduces protest activity in a previously mobilized area. And finally, it analyzes regional protest efforts, revealing that communities with brokers are more likely to participate. These findings confirm that broker availability not only affects local mobilization capacity but also helps to explain larger patterns of protest distribution. The chapter underscores the broader importance of brokerage in collective action, particularly under conditions of elite-led mobilization.