Widening and deepening: territorial strategies and state building in Africa

This article challenges the view of African states as weak regulators vis-à-vis foreign large-scale land acquisitions. Instead, building on theories of state building and territorialization, we argue that state power is contested but reasserted through two strategies: widening , that states actively leverage investment, infrastructure, and conservation to extend territorial authority; and deepening , that states further intensify its capacity to govern territory over time through increasingly sophisticated legal frameworks, policy instruments, and socio-technical innovations. We illustrate these two strategies through 24 empirical cases across 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, drawing on the authors’ primary fieldwork since 2018 in Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Kenya, together with an extensive review of secondary literature covering additional cases across the region. By tracing these processes, we recast the debate on land and power in Africa by showing that far from being eclipsed by the forces of global and local capital, African states actively instrumentalize it to entrench authority, reconfigure territorial relations with communities, and reshape spatial dimensions of governance, thus contributing to wider scholarship on state infrastructural power and the politics of territorialization.