When Thailand and Cambodia clashed along their disputed border last week, analysts were quick to trace the tensions back to the colonial legacy of Western powers, chiefly the French and British, who once dominated the region.

Just weeks earlier, in May, neighbouring India and Pakistan had a six-day conflict over the contested region of Jammu and Kashmir. That too is a legacy of colonialism: both countries were once part of British India, and their borders were shaped by imperial cartographers. 

The Radcliff Line, named after a British lawyer Cyril Radcliff, split the subcontinent in two fractious neighbours who have gone to war four times over the disputed territory in seven decades.

Just like in Asia, colonial fingerprints are found across much of the modern world map.

From the Americas to Africa and the Middle East, many borders were drawn not by the inhabitants of the land, but by distant powers, France, Britain, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, interested less in ethnic or cultural cohesion than in imperial convenience.

The arbitrary nature of African borders alongside the turbulent Middle Eastern borders also owes its existence thanks to the British, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish colonialist projects from Morocco to Iraq, Kuwait, Eritrea and South Africa. 

Among other Western colonialist powers, the British and French, the two permanent members of the UN Security Council, played a more significant role in drawing international borders. 

“Anglo-French carving of colonial space is a significant geographical legacy: nearly 40 percent of the entire length of today's international boundaries were traced by Britain and France,” wrote William F S Miles, an American academic in his critical book, Scars of Partition: Postcolonial Legacies in French and British Borderlands.

Miles was unavailable for comment, currently travelling through the West Indies, one of the regions covered in his book. He did, however, indicate that he will contribute a chapter to an upcoming encyclopaedia of borderlands, which will address the Thailand–Cambodia dispute.

As the recent Thai-Cambodian skirmishes highlight, many borders were drawn with scant regard for local populations, let alone their social, economic, or cultural landscapes. Ancient sites like the Preah Vihear temple were bisected or disputed, leaving border zones in a near-permanent state of tension.

“International borders carry significant colonial baggage, particularly in regions like Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. The modern political map of the world is largely a legacy of European colonialism, and these borders continue to influence conflicts, identities, and governance structures today,” Abdinor Dahir, a Somalian political analyst, tells TRT World. 

Parcelling Southeast Asia

Colonial demarcations have left deep scars across Southeast Asia. 

The Thailand–Cambodia clash is “a vivid reminder of how these inherited demarcations continue to cause friction,” says Sophal Ear, associate professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.

“Many of the borders in this region were drawn by colonial powers, particularly the French and British, without local input, often relying on outdated or inconsistent maps and failing to reflect the realities of geography, ethnicity, or local governance,” he tells TRT World.

The dispute over the Preah Vihear temple stems from early 20th-century French colonial maps, says Ear. While the International Court of Justice awarded the temple to Cambodia in 1962, the surrounding land remains contested, he adds. 

“This ambiguity is not unique. Colonial border-making often ignored functional boundaries used by local communities for centuries, creating overlapping claims and latent tensions that can erupt when political conditions deteriorate,” he says.

The effects go beyond geography. “Western colonialist designs institutionalised asymmetries in legal and military power,” Ear says.

He adds that Thailand, which avoided colonisation, tends to view its historical role in the region through a sovereignty-guarding lens, while Cambodia, emerging from decades of conflict and external domination, often interprets Thai actions as neo-imperial overreach.

“These diverging historical narratives heighten mutual suspicion and reduce the trust needed to manage crises constructively,” he adds, noting that colonial-era borders embedded not just physical lines, but also distorted power dynamics and contested national identities.

“If these are not addressed through durable legal mechanisms, sustained diplomacy, and regional coordination, the ghosts of colonialism will continue to haunt Southeast Asia’s geopolitics,” Ear warns.

Dividing Africa

Beside southeast Asia, colonialist designs also largely divided communities across the large resource-rich African continent. 

Africa’s 38 coastal and island nations rely heavily on maritime industries, from energy to fishing, for development. Yet many of their sea boundaries, drawn during colonial rule, still shape access to resources and security today.

Most current African borders are “direct products” of Western colonialist projects across the continent, says Dahir, the managing director of Taloford Consulting. 

“These borders were imposed without the consent, contribution, or agency of African populations, often dividing communities with no consideration for pre-colonial societal organisation or long-term development,” he says.

Examples abound.

The Maasai were split between Kenya and Tanzania. The Somali people were divided among Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. Meanwhile, rival ethnic groups were often forced to live under shared colonial—and later independent—states, according to Dahir. 

These decisions sowed the seeds of identity crises.

“Many modern African nations, including Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, are amalgamations of disparate groups with no prior shared political identity, leading to persistent internal tensions.” 

While indigenous populations paid the price, colonial powers enriched themselves. “They carved up Africa to serve their own economic interests, resource extraction, administrative convenience, and geopolitical rivalry, without regard for the well-being of local communities,” says Dahir.

Today in a post-colonial age, these divisions continue to spark tensions. Africa remains home to a disproportionate number of border-related conflicts, many of which stem directly from colonial-era demarcations.

Fertile ground for conflict, separatism

The West’s arbitrary border designs have created breeding grounds for not only border conflicts but also separatism and extremism across countries, which experienced colonialist rules.

The impact of Western colonial border designs is all clear across Africa’s wars in recent decades as well as its civil wars, providing numerous examples.

Dahir draws attention to the 1977 Ethiopia-Somalia war that was rooted in Britain and Italy’s colonial allocation of the Somali-majority Ogaden region to Ethiopia. The 1998–2000 Eritrea–Ethiopia conflict was sparked by contested colonial borders drawn between Italy’s former colony and Ethiopia’s imperial territory.

“These conflicts reflect the enduring perception that colonial borders unjustly divided ethnic groups or disregarded pre-existing political entities. Moreover, many borders intersect resource-rich areas such as oil in Sudan and South Sudan or minerals in the DRC, further fueling disputes,” he says. 

Colonial lines have also become rallying cries for separatist movements.

“Regions like Ambazonia (Southern Cameroon), Western Sahara, and Somaliland (in Somalia) seek independence on the grounds that they were administered under different colonial powers and thus should establish sovereign states based on those historical borders,” says Dahir.