This book focuses on the Nande traders of eastern Congo, who for decades have successfully built intensive trade relations across East Africa and Asia in an extremely difficult environment marked by violent conflict, state retreat and rebellion. They have been seen as the embodiment of the informal economy in Africa and lauded by some scholars as an example of genuine liberal resistance to authoritarian rule in Africa.

Raeymaekers' book challenges this view of the formal and the informal as discrete and different domains of action. The book's main argument is that the secret of the success and the hallmark of the identity of the Nande traders is their position as brokers between local semi-autonomous systems of economic production and political order on the one side, and the paired dynamics of expanding global capitalism and state encroachment on the other. This hybrid identity was born out of a rejection of the colonial order, but it gradually adapted to the opportunities and constraints of this order. Due to their skills in managing risks associated with cross-border trade and their collaboration with Zairian administrators, these middlemen succeeded in consolidating their position during the postcolonial period to become pioneers and local strongmen in the booming cross-border economy of Central Africa. During the wars of the 1990s and early 2000s they were able to shape rebel governance and became one of the most important authorities in the Congo–Uganda borderland. By the same token they profoundly shaped the emergent political order in the postwar transition. In this way they partially succeeded in reversing the hierarchy of power between the centre and the margins of the state. In continuously adapting to changing circumstances the Nande traders have become decisive producers of an ethos of fend-for-yourself-ism, which permeates the political economy of daily survival in eastern Congo today. Thus rather than challenging the existing political order they have ended up reproducing the violent capitalism to which it is indissolubly wedded.

The book is much more than a case study of the Nande traders. Through the study of the Nande traders and their relationships with armed groups, state authorities and religious authorities he shows why the current situation in the Congo cannot simply be understood as a ‘crisis’ or a ‘complex emergency’, but must instead be understood as a gradual transformation of local society under the weight of the expansion of global capitalism and state encroachment towards a highly unequal society in which strategies of power and resistance are fatally tainted by violence and coercion.

Raeymaekers engages with several theoretical debates and deploys a broad spectrum of concepts. This eclectic theoretical style opens up a wealth of thought-provoking perspectives on the political economy of violent political orders. But at the same time the relations and correspondence between the various theoretical concepts and frameworks evoked are not always made explicit, which implies that their explanatory value in relation to the central arguments of the book are unclear on occasion. Nevertheless, the book represents a remarkable contribution to the study of violent political orders and the political economy of conflict. It is built on extensive field research and unique historical material and is exceptionally well researched.