SUMMARY

The border issue we have treated was caused by indirect reasons, it was caused because of two civil wars which happened at the same time in countries that are located one next to the other, obviously, the civil wars were more or less interconnected and both influenced each other. And the conflict raised when the citizens of a country that was in a civil war decided to find a shelter outside their country, and as citizens of the both countries thought the same a conflict was created, since one of the countries they tried to migrate to was in a civil war too.

After this research we are going to define some concepts taking into account the aforementioned landscape:

Region: A large area of a surface, space, or body.

In this case we could say that the region is not really limited by borders or anything, since the conflict occurs in the West African zone, because, even though the issue we have treated happened in the Liberian-Sierra Leonean border the whole zone was influenced.

Border: The line that separates one country, province, etc., from another.

In this case the border we have considered as subject of our work is the Liberian-Sierra Leonean border but during the conflict it becomes a really blurry border because of all the migrations and movements from one country to the other.

Sovereignty: the quality or state of being sovereign.

Sovereign: Having supreme power or authority.

This issue is much more complex to analyze, since both civil wars initialized because of a lack of recognition of the supposed sovereign power. During the period of the conflict different organizations considered themselves as the sovereign actor, this is why the conflict existed.

So, in our framework the sovereignty laid on different actors which measured with each other through violence and terror.

Diplomacy: The conduct by government officials of relations between nations.

As we have said in the last definition they proved to each other with violence, so there were no “official relations” between the organizations. During the period the issue happened there were two organizations that took the responsibility of the diplomacy in that situation, the UN and ECOWAS, these two institutions were used as mediators to arrive to an agreement in both countries.

Definitions extracted from http://www.wordreference.com