The image of the corridor a central pathway of road and rail carving its way through Africa's
interior has guided the coordination of transport and trade developments on the continent in
recent decades. Existing analysis of the Corridor - a label with a great capacity to change
shape guiding funding and infrastructural priorities at different times and in different
settings - tends to be presentist technical and conveyed in the language of transport
economics. The chapters collected here showcase a more varied approach offering perspectives
from academics and policy-makers coming from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. They capture
the varied forms of the corridor concept (developmental transport and trade corridors) the
multiplicity of actors (including China and the European Union) as well as the different
permutations of the infrastructure itself in corridors linking coastal states and in others
that link coastal states with the hinterland. The breadth of cases allows for a comparative
perspective of East West and Southern Africa as well as the basis of comparisons outside of
the continent in Europe South Asia and elsewhere. The motivations behind corridor initiatives
in Africa range enormously from resource extraction to urban development and poverty
reduction. A lot depends on scale and this collection places the grand designs thrashed out at
continental and regional economic forums alongside the individual concerns of drivers and
cross-border traders hauling goods across the continent's checkpoints. What emerges are a
number of central tensions in the study of transport corridors: between short-term optics and
long-term durability between road and rail as modes of transportation between regional
integration and national interest between the facilitation of trade and the generation of
corridor revenue between different port configurations and between local dynamics and the
dynamics of long-distance transportation. This book is available as Open Access under the
Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.
