This chapter examines the impact of European colonial border making – internal as well as external – on the Lake Kivu region. After the border dispute was settled, Belgians sought to eliminate the Rwandan monarchy’s political claims over the region. Yet, local elites, often chiefs, used these new spatial orderings to promote their own interests, bringing the border between Congo and what was then the German territory of Rwanda into practice. After World War I, when Rwanda had become under Belgian tutelage, the Belgian administration transitioned into more systematic interventions in the political organizations of these societies, fundamentally changing them. In Rwanda, it meant increasing control over regions that had before exerted more autonomy, while rule became increasingly tied to one group – Tutsi – even if the large majority of Tutsi never held positions of political power. In Kivu, the reorganization of these societies also implied an increased territorialization of these societies, with an impact on forms of identification becoming more fixed, as well as tying access to resources more firmly to “belonging” to a certain “national” or “ethnic” territory. Thus, while borders could be straddled to escape oppressive circumstances or to improve livelihoods, they also had the potential to increase conflicts over resources, and to be used as a tool for exclusion.