162 Borders without belonging: statelessness, displacement, and human insecurity in post-han- as well as international reporting agencies, have largely framed the Bakassi story through the lens of intergovernmental cooperation and legal compliance (Taiwo and Igwebuike 2015; BBC 2013). While these narratives affirm the legitimacy of the ICJ ruling and portray the handover as a diplomatic success, they simultaneously efface the voices and struggles of displaced Bakassi communities. This selective storytelling has significant political consequences. It contributes to the erasure of the displaced from public discourse, policymaking, and civil society mobilization. As Ezeilo (2010) and Unah (2021) suggest, such narrative silencing translates into institutional inaction and funding neglect, thereby sustaining the humanitarian crisis well beyond the formal end of the dispute. This phenomenon of media and policy invisibility also aligns with what McDowell (2008) describes as “infrastructures of forgetting” the institutional processes through which displaced populations are deliberately excluded from national memory and citizenship-making. Our findings align with Beckly’s (2013) research, which found that even local government officials in Cameroon express limited knowledge or political will to address the needs of Bakassi’s displaced populations. Similarly, Ngalim (2019) notes that post-conflict reintegration efforts between 2006 and 2016 largely failed due to the lack of cross-border collaboration, resource allocation, and community participation. As a result, displaced persons have found themselves stuck in protracted liminality, unable to claim full membership in either Nigeria or Cameroon, and left out of regional refugee protection frameworks due to the formal conclusion of the conflict. Crucially, this study illustrates that such exclusions are not isolated, but part of a broader pattern in international conflict resolution practices that prioritize the settlement of territorial disputes over the restoration of justice for those displaced by such decisions. The Bakassi case typifies what Achiume (2019) refers to as “legalistic containment”, meaning the tendency of international law to resolve interstate disputes while systematically ignoring the socio-political and human rights consequences for affected populations. In the case of Bakassi, the ICJ’s ruling may have satisfied the legal conditions for peaceful boundary demarcation but failed to mandate concrete protections for displaced persons. Nor did it provide an accountability mechanism to ensure that state actors would fulfill resettlement obligations. The consequence has been a humanitarian vacuum filled with broken promises, prolonged statelessness, and intergenerational trauma. These findings have far-reaching implications for policy and practice. First, there is a need for more inclusive legal frameworks that integrate Brazilian Journal of African Studies | Porto Alegre | v. 10, n. 19, Jan./Jun. 2025 | p. 144-169