By David Kujabi
On the afternoon of Thursday 16 July 2026, Senegalese soldiers arrived at the Bulock Military Border Post in Foni Berefet , West Coast Region. They demolished about 200 metres of the perimeter fence of a Gambia Armed Forces installation. The fence was new. The National Assembly had approved public funds for its construction and maintenance. Gambian soldiers stationed at the camp watched without intervening. Their restraint prevented what could have become an armed confrontation between two armies that call each other brothers.
Two days later, on Saturday 18 July, Senegalese gendarmes crossed into Jimbala Kerr Musa in Lower Saloum, Central River Region, and ordered farmers off lands their families have cultivated since before independence. They announced that no farming would be permitted this season because the land belongs to Senegal. The same day, more than twenty armed officers arrived at Panchang in Upper Saloum carrying maps and marking territory. Foni sits on the southern border. The Saloums sit on the northern border, hundreds of kilometres away. These were not the improvised actions of a local commander. They reflected a position.
Both governments have spoken. Banjul called the demolition profoundly provocative and totally unacceptable, while committing to dialogue through the Joint Military Committee and other bilateral channels. Dakar responded that the area has been the subject of discussions for several years, that it had repeatedly drawn attention to encroachments affecting its territorial integrity, and that those discussions produced no clear commitment to resolve the outstanding border issues. Senegal insisted the action was not intended to undermine Gambian sovereignty. Strip away the diplomatic language and the message is plain. One side believes negotiation has failed and has chosen to act. The other side is asking why the established mechanisms were bypassed.
The demolition of the Bulock fence is not, in itself, the crisis. It is the latest manifestation of a century-old failure by both states to complete the work of defining and jointly managing their common border. Until that unfinished business is resolved, similar confrontations will recur, regardless of which government occupies State House in Banjul or the Palais de la République in Dakar.
A border that was never finished
To understand why a fence became the focus of an international dispute, one must look beyond the events of July and revisit the history of a boundary whose legal definition has remained incomplete for generations.
The fact is that both countries have been living with an unfinished border for a century. The 765-kilometre boundary was delimited and demarcated by the Anglo-French commission between 1889 and 1929. Over the decades, many of the boundary markers were uprooted or displaced by human activity, leaving communities and governments without clarity on where the line actually runs. The two states created a Joint Boundary Management Commission in 2011 to address this. Fifteen years later, not a single stretch of the border has been re-demarcated. An attempt at Darsilameh and Touba Tranquil in 2013 collapsed over disagreements about the tools used. After renewed tension in the same area in 2023, the two governments agreed in November of that year that their forces would return to pre-2016 positions, that they would jointly patrol a buffer zone, and that the Commission would properly demarcate the border within three years. That three-year window closes at the end of this year. The demarcation has not happened.
This is the context in which Bulock must be understood. Where a boundary is undefined, every fence is a claim, and every claim invites a counterclaim. In territory claimed by both sides, even routine infrastructure becomes an assertion of sovereignty. The new perimeter fence at Bulock inevitably forced that unresolved question into the open. The question should have been settled across a negotiating table rather than with a bulldozer. But the deeper failure belongs to both capitals. It is the failure to finish the work their own commissions were established to undertake. The question should have been forced at a negotiating table rather than with a bulldozer. But the deeper failure belongs to both capitals, and it is the failure to finish the work their own commissions were created to do.
Border communities saw this coming
None of this is news to the people who live on the border. Earlier this year, a participatory mapping study on the experiences of communities at thirteen border crossing points across all five regions of the country. What those communities described reads today like a warning that went unheeded.
At Sareh Musa in Lower River Region, residents described an unresolved demarcation dispute with Senegal in which farmlands are actively contested. Women reported being attacked when collecting firewood or walking to their farms, and they have reduced their movements as a result. Criminal actors exploit the jurisdictional ambiguity at the disputed borderline, knowing that neither state can confidently enforce the law on ground it cannot define. Successive administrations have been unable to resolve the matter.
At Darsilami in West Coast Region, communities reported armed Senegalese security actors entering Gambian territory, conducting exercises in community space and intimidating residents without legal consequence.
At Amdalai, one of the busiest formal crossings in the country, the study found no clarity on where exactly the borderline runs, which feeds informal crossing routes and makes consistent enforcement structurally impossible. At Nyamanar in Upper River Region, residents described encroachment on Gambian farmlands, with the border post located far from the actual borderline. At Kartong, the border supposedly runs through water, but there are claims that the border actually lies beyond the river.
The conclusion of that research was blunt. Unclear demarcation is not a technical cartographic problem. It is a governance failure with direct consequences for community security and for sovereignty itself. Investment in personnel, infrastructure or accountability mechanisms at these sites will produce limited results until the question of territorial demarcation is resolved. What happened at Bulock this month is the moment the state experienced what borderland communities have been living for years.
The cost is measured in planting seasons
It is tempting to discuss border disputes in the language of sovereignty and leave it there. But the immediate cost of this crisis will be measured in planting seasons. The farmers of Jimbala Kerr Musa and Panchang have been told not to cultivate land on which their households depend, at precisely the moment the rains demand planting decisions. Rice, millet and groundnut cultivation sustain the local economy in the Central River Region. A lost season for these communities means real hardship in real households, whatever flag eventually flies over the disputed plots. Any diplomatic process that does not first secure the right of these farmers to plant this season, pending final resolution, will have failed the people it claims to protect.
There is also a relationship to protect. Senegal surrounds The Gambia on three sides and takes half of all Gambian exports. The border communities of the two countries are bound by family, faith, trade and language, and it is those ties, more than any treaty, that have kept recurring border friction ever since becoming violent conflict. That inheritance is strong, but it is not unbreakable, and neither state should test it carelessly.
The implications extend well beyond the two countries. The Gambia and Senegal lie at the heart of West African integration, where ECOWAS has long championed the free movement of people, goods and services. An unresolved international boundary creates uncertainty for trade, investment, infrastructure planning and cross-border security cooperation. Resolving the dispute would therefore strengthen not only bilateral relations but also the wider ambitions of regional integration.
International law favours the peaceful settlement of boundary disputes through negotiation, technical demarcation and mutual agreement. While neighbouring states may hold competing interpretations of an undemarcated boundary, unilateral actions in contested areas invariably heighten tensions and erode confidence in established bilateral mechanisms. Completing the demarcation process is therefore not merely a political preference but the most credible means of safeguarding peace, protecting sovereignty and preserving good neighbourly relations.
What must happen now
Four steps suggest themselves.
First, the two governments should urgently convene the Joint Boundary Commission and the wider Senegalo-Gambian institutions at the highest level, with a single agenda item. Agree a time-bound, funded and independently supported demarcation process, and publish the timetable. The African Union Border Programme exists for precisely this kind of work. The pre-demarcation roadmap the two commissions agreed in July 2023, covering sensitisation of border communities, technical training, document research and verification of boundary lines, already provides the blueprint. What has been missing is not a plan but political will and money.
Second, The Gambia should establish a permanent National Boundary Commission, anchored in the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of National Security and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a mandate to maintain a database of borderland communities, coordinate demarcation and track security concerns linked to specific locations. The border question cannot continue to be handled episodically, resurfacing only when a fence falls, or a farmer is evicted.
Third, both states should agree on interim arrangements that protect civilians while the line is settled. That means a standstill on new construction and new enforcement actions in disputed areas, joint patrols where both sides agree, and an explicit guarantee that farming communities on both sides can cultivate their customary lands this season.
Fourth, the Gambian state should show up for its border communities. The people of Nyamanar built a thirty-member community policing network with radios and records, and allocated land for a relocated border post. Communities at Tabanding built a cross-border platform that recovers stolen livestock through cooperation with counterparts on the Senegalese side. This is civic investment of the highest order, made in the absence of the state. It demonstrates that borderland residents on both sides want order, safety and cooperation. That goodwill is genuine, but it is finite, and it will not survive another cycle of institutional silence.
Draw the line
The Gambia goes to the polls in December. Senegal is navigating its own difficult political and economic season. Both governments will be tempted to posture, and both publics will be tempted to anger. The wiser course is available. The fence at Bulock did not create this dispute. It revealed it. For more than a century, the line between The Gambia and Senegal has existed on maps, but not always with sufficient clarity on the ground. That unfinished work now demands political courage rather than political theatre. Draw the line. Protect the people who live along it. Then let history remember Bulock not as the place where a fence between brothers fell, but as the place where two neighbours finally chose to mend it
