The state can manifest itself in many ways to its citizens, but in northeast Nigeria it manifests itself mostly as a checkpoint operator eager to fill its pockets. In his outstanding new book, Daniel Agbiboa offers a perspective on the politics of logistics from the viewpoint of those who live in a part of the world where Amazon doesn’t deliver to your doorstep. His interlocutors are the foot soldiers of global trade, stitching together places and markets and people. Based on years of research, his book provides an invaluable window not only into local troubles in northeast Nigeria but also the lifeworld and politics of small-scale and informal mobility around the world. Because everywhere where hawkers, peddlers, informal taximen, and other people get by on the margins of the economy and the law, they are subjected to harassment; by virtue of their informality, they are prime targets for the exactions of state agents. As Agbiboa puts it, quoting novelist Ben Okri (The Famished Road, 1992), Nigerian roads are infrastructures that “swallow people” (p. 47). His book is a fantastic and frantic exploration of how these propensities of roads and mobility in northeastern Nigeria lie at the root of the Boko Haram crisis.
While many studies of mobility in Africa focus on the challenges of transport on the continent drawing on the “new mobilities paradigm,” Agbiboa’s ambition is to place mobility at the heart of power and politics. His main argument is that in a context where everything flows, immobilization is the main form of violence deployed by the state. This eventually ignites the Boko Haram crisis, and subsequently, subversive forms of mobility and mastery of terrain become the arsenal of that movement, only to be repelled when the state partners with local hunter societies that have an equal mastery of vernacular mobility and terrain. Each encroachment on mobility that is declared subversive mobilizes a new energy to circumvent it, either inventing a new form of mobility or unleashing a violent counterreaction; each prohibition in turn begets a new landscape of enforcers making money out of its enforcement.
In Agbiboa’s book the contradictory, layered, and entangled politics of mobility become evident—offering a captivating and unique window into the mobile basis of insurgency. To be sure, the counterinsurgency literature has long insisted on the fundamental role of mobility in the strategic arsenal of insurgents and guerrillas. Therefore, while Agbiboa purports to use the new mobilities paradigm to shed new light on the nature of insurgency, I believe his biggest contribution is actually the opposite: using fine-grained knowledge of the Boko Haram insurgency to speak back to the new mobilities paradigm, challenging its penchant for abstract theorizing by speaking back to it from the messy empirical contexts of complex emergencies. It is by drawing on his interviews with local transport operators and the often astute insights of area studies experts that the central role of the politics of mobility in the Boko Haram crisis become evident, more than through the theoretical inflections that the new mobilities paradigm offers. Instead, I think that the new mobilities paradigm can learn from the insights that emerge from Agbiboa’s study of the politics of vernacular mobilities at the periphery.
The Lake Chad region is an awkward geopolitical accident, in that national borders were imposed on a social fabric that has always been mobile and in flux. The climate and terrain itself are inimical to sedentarization, instead urging on nomad and itinerant livelihoods. People there have always utilized this imposition of borders: for profit, by smuggling and using price differentials across tax jurisdictions, but also by hiding just away from where security forces can move, just on the other side of borders, until they desist and security forces on the opposite side get mobilized. These subversive mobilities—to speak with Jacob Shell (Transport and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility, 2015)—thus make clever use of, and even thrive only thanks to, the restrictions that states impose upon them and their inability to fully achieve them. While Agbiboa quotes John Dewey’s assertion that “Without roads which one is free to use at will, men might almost as well be castaways on a desert island” (Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 1954, p. 60), many livelihoods here are instead built out of the frictions imposed by the difficulties of using roads, by people profiting from circumventing impediments to movement.
The figure of the nomad is the antithesis of the sedentary state, of that slow, static machinery that thrives by constraining, channeling, administering, and leaching on mobility. Indeed, in the deep history of states, mobile populations and long-distance trade have been met with mistrust by sedentary states. But mirroring those who manufacture profit out of the incongruent legal terrain around mobility and disjointed regimes of prohibition are those who bank on these differences in another way. These are the agents of the state who are there to enforce these regimes, but who use their position to manufacture profit out of these prohibitions. As Agbiboa notes, from this perspective government agents deployed from faraway centers of power turn roads into extractive spaces and mobility into an oppressive experience (p. 100). As in many other places, it is unfortunately a deep historical experience of Nigerian civilians with their state.
Yet, as Agbiboa shows, despite a constant anxiety of the state with mobility in Nigeria, the hold of the state over its transport network is heavily contested. In such a context, the right to the road and mobility can become a symbolic fight over other questions, pivoting around who can use the privileged space of circulation, showing how political this space and movement along it is (p. 97). It is hard to disagree with his thesis, and I believe it is a window into a more universal principle that has been most forcefully articulated by Fernand Braudel (Civilization and Capitalism Vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp. 231-2): wherever wealth is concentrated in the sphere of circulation, politics will take the shape of people seeking to control its routes and the terms of movement along it. In this context, logistical space is a privileged space for political contestation, and Agbiboa’s work offers a wonderful case study of what Joshua Clover has aptly dubbed “circulation struggles” (Riot, Strike, Riot. The New Era of Uprisings, 2016, p. 144), or struggles over logistical space and the movement through it.
But can one really maintain the opposition between the static and anti-mobile logic of the state and the nomad logic of the guerilla and bandit? A key value of Agbiboa’s work is that he shows that up close, of course, one cannot. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987), the state absorbs the war machine and the war machine mimics the state. And this happens in very practical ways. The checkpoints that are often the only manifestation of states in their hinterlands get copied by their detractors, as Boko Haram did (p. 124). Vice versa, states often enroll mobile proxies in their battles against their nomad enemies—Sudan’s Janjaweed and the hunters used by the governments of Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Nigeria to pursue highway bandits and Boko Haram are cases in point (cf. p. 146). Indeed, perfecting the challenge to the opposition between sedentary states and its mobile enemies, rulers and rebels in the hinterlands and border zones of states in the Lake Chad basin often converge in their use of what Louisa Lombard calls a form of “raiding sovereignty” (Hunting Game: Raiding Politics in the Central African Republic, 2020) perpetually on the move, only temporarily mooring in static “garrison depots” (J. Roitman, “The Garrison-Entrepôt,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 38[150-152], 297-329, 1998). Today, the image of endless convoys of white Toyotas laden with armed men under the waving black banners of the Islamic State or Boko Haram epitomize this collapse of the state and its enemies into a similarly unmoored logistical war machine.
But there is another level of complexity in the challenge to the opposition of state and mobile enemy. The power of Agbiboa’s book lies in making a point and then offering us a glimpse into the truth of the opposite argument. Boko Haram was, ostensibly, ignited by something as ridiculously banal as a motorcycle helmet law, but in fact, Agbiboa shows, something else was going on. The senator Ali Sheriff had funded Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf with the explicit purpose of converting his followers, achaba or motor drivers, into a political force that could help him win the elections; once that was done, he was quick to distance himself from his embarrassing entourage (pp. 73ff). But once mobilized in service of the state, this charged mobile force of the achaba drivers was unleashed and could now be turned against the state. The state prohibited them; once criminalized, they radicalized, turning into the vehicles of terror. But the prohibition and declaration of subversive mobility also mobilized something else. Those working for the state were empowered to use the prohibition on some mobilities as a pretext to increase their extraction of wealth from all mobilities. An instance of a pattern that occurs in many places, the declaration of Boko Haram as a terrorist force released and mobilized enormous financial resource flows towards the security apparatus, which gained a vested interest in perpetuating the threat that releases the operational fund for its lucrative deployments as well as the opportunities to extract wealth from road users (p. 133, 164). In the same way, the Congolese army doesn’t defeat the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) or Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) any time soon, simply because the threat, however marginal, of these groups mobilizes lucrative funding. In more abstract terms, subversive mobilities thrive because of state-issued regimes of prohibition; the agents of the state thrive where its enemies manifest.
In sum, if Agbiboa’s “overriding objective … is to demonstrate how mobility and mobilization are deeply intertwined in the context of insurgency” (p. 60), he has magnificently succeeded, even while challenging the new mobilities paradigm itself—perhaps despite his intentions. As such, the book is a treasure trove for anyone interested in questions of mobility and conflict.
