The idea that new technologies provide us with all the tools we need to literally create “new geographies” has always fascinated me, and I once did a short paper for DLD about it (cf. http://dld-conference.com/users/bright-simons).
Nonetheless, I have always had this nagging feeling that I was missing something, a secret sauce that can make it all very practical. Something that can make it possible to create a “cross-frontier geographic entity” to advance certain economic goals that traditional African countries acting within their normal territories or using the standard inter-national regimes cannot achieve.
At dawn, it came to me. Remember how Adama Barrow was sworn in during the confrontation with Jammeh? That’s the clue: mixing diplomatic real estate with technology and priming it for business!
It may involve some creative re-wiring of the Vienna Convention norms, but the truth is that if the Ghanaian embassy in London in indeed Ghanaian territory, so many fascinating possibilities we have never contemplated become *practical* all of a sudden.
More in due course. All good things come to those who wait. 