There is much to like about Peer Schouten’s fine book on Roadblock Politics, which offers readers an innovative approach to studying violence in Central Africa—the war capital of Africa. The multiple intersecting mobilities analysed by Schouten challenge sedentarist and blinkered narratives of violent conflicts in that region (including apolitical imaginaries of roadblocks). The figure of the roadblock signals immediately a contradictory, even subversive, space that is at once mobile and immobile, accessible and inaccessible, ubiquitous and elusive, connected and frictioned, everyday and political. In short, at the epicentre of Roadblock Politics is the imbricated logic of logistics and power as enacted and contested on the fast and slow lanes of mobile life. Beyond the parochial attention to territory and population, Schouten invites readers into a world of perpetuum mobile in which control over circulation and hongo (transit levies), as well as the strategic use of brokers—“dubious middlemen” (p. 147) and “armed escorts” (p. 164)—constitutes the source and summit of power, profit, friction, and political agency writ small and large. What emerges from this textured narrative of entangled lifeworlds is the strength of so-called weak states and the “consistent rules” (p. 115) of chaos. As Schouten notes, “While Central African trade routes seem chaotic and under-governed to the uninitiated, a whole set of rules, formal and informal, shapes the flow of traffic” (p. 120). What do these insights reveal about the nature of the postcolonial state in Central Africa?
It is seemingly strange to claim that violent conflict and political order could originate from something so generalized and banalized as roadblocks. But it is precisely this strangeness that Schouten sets out to make familiar in this seminal book on the centrality of “roadblock politics”—or rather, roadblocks as political—to the longue durée of violence, order-making, and statecraft in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). Schouten’s overarching aim is to reconfigure the margins of violence through the obvious but oft-overlooked infrastructure of roadblocks in Central Africa, a region where “hardly any footpath is spared the presence of roadblocks” (p. 206). What if we see the conflict economy in Central Africa through the eyes of roadblocks rather than “conflict minerals”? What do we find when we think conflict with roadblocks? These vital questions are front and centre in Roadblock Politics.
Schouten’s book may be divided into two main parts. The first part sheds light on the “prehistory of the roadblock,” focusing specifically on “how [and why] control over logistical space has formed a pivot of patterns of contestation and order-making in Central Africa’s turbulent history” (pp. 114-5). The second part takes a deep dive into the messy politics of contemporary roadblocks, with particular attention to “the role of control over circulation for local patterns of order-making, the entanglement of global supply chains with such patterns via roadblocks, as well as the different spatial patterns of control and contestation that emerge at the confluence of both dynamics” (p. 115). Schouten’s central argument is that the conflict economy in central Africa is not so much about control over natural resources (i.e., “conflict minerals”) as about the struggle for control over strategic spaces of circulation (i.e., checkpoints). In other words, roads constitute the organizing logic of (negotiated) violence, profit, and political order in Central Africa. Roadblocks become a mirror that reflects the fiscal character of the state in Central Africa. Schouten declares his intention early on (p. 2): “This book is about … roadblocks, about how control over passage points along trade routes embodies a key form of power and an object of struggle in Central Africa,” from the past to the postcolony. From Schouten’s vantage point, roadblocks reflect and reinforce power. Schouten’s approach to “infrastructural power” (p. 84) echoes Michel Foucault’s non-elitist notion of power as coming from everywhere, to wit: dispersed and pervasive.
To make sense of his central argument, Schouten undertakes what may be described as a mobile ethnography, which involves travelling with mobile subjects and experiencing their lived realities en route. Through such co-present immersion, Schouten was able to directly experience the workaday world and struggle economy of mobile people getting by and getting ahead on major roads and footpaths. This going along approach allowed Schouten to defamiliarize and refamiliarize a shifting and contradictory world of flows and fixities—one that is too often simplified, reduced, conflated, and shunted to the anarchical margins of the conflict economy in Central Africa. Given that the fieldwork that underpins Roadblock Politics was undertaken by “a sizeable team of human rights activists and local researchers” (p. xvi), the reader is not entirely clear about what specific role Schouten played in the data collection process, and how much agency and oversight Schouten had over the field data. Schouten could help shed light on this.
Through an empirically grounded and analytically sound discourse of roadblocks, Schouten drives home the neglected yet fundamental linkages between the everyday and the political, the global and the local, the formal and informal, the visible and the invisible. The roadblock emerges as an exceptionally dense space of negotiation, resistance, collaboration, profit and loss, connivance, even ambush. At the roadblock, rebels and soldiers participate in a “complex choreography of predation” (p. 114). What insights does the roadblock—as a theatre of ceaseless suspicion and negotiation (p. 121)—furnish about perennial tensions between the extortionist and the extorted, between the centre and the margin? Schouten usefully (if briefly) speculates on a trickle-up economy that governs roadblock politics in Central Africa, offering readers a fascinating inlet into patterns of wealth redistribution. He surmises that proceeds from roadblocks often find their way “into the pockets of figures in the upper echelons of power” (p. 129)—a rumoured reality that I have also encountered during my fieldwork on checkpoints in Nigeria. Related to this is “the profound way in which roadblock taxation structures military deployment and internal hierarchies within the state” (p. 131).
Schouten could have drawn more contiguous examples and, perhaps, richer empirical and theoretical insights from cases in West Africa and the Lake Chad region (e.g., the Tuareg rebellions and desert wars in Mali and Niger in the 1990s; the mobile strategies of Islamists in Mali and Nigeria), where the dramaturgies of control over movement and crossroads could have expanded and complemented the original insights offered in Roadblock Politics. For instance, the discourse of “paid armed escorts” and “dubious middlemen” resonates very much with a rich literature on real governance, practical norms, smugglers, fixers, “men in arms,” and “marginal gains” on the predatory roads, junctions, and terminals of West Africa. Instead, Schouten sometimes appears too wedded to “long distanced” examples offered by Western scholars like James Scott rather than closer examples from elsewhere in the Sahel-Saharan.
Given “the threat implicit in roadblock politics” (p. 40) in Eastern DRC and the CAR, I would like to know how Schouten was able to (socially) navigate the real threat of violence, disappearance, and death. How was Schouten able to move around this dangerous space to conduct fieldwork? We learn little about Schouten’s emotions on the move (e.g., are there times when he feared for his life? Was he ever detained on the move? Did he require “paid armed escorts”?); about how his mobile subjects perceived his identity as a white male navigating a Black space marked by infrastructural voids; and to what extent that identity (as property) rendered certain spaces (in)accessible to him. I wanted to know more about how Schouten was feeling when “a boy armed with two Kalashnikovs suddenly emerges from the bush and appears at our side” (p. 209). Surely, this is not a normal, everyday occurrence. In short, the linkages between the mobile and the personal needs further attention.
Furthermore, I found myself wanting to learn more—beyond the “coping strategies of evasion and withdrawal” (p. 101)—about the various arts and strategies devised by road users in Central Africa to “deal with” roadblock shakedowns, including humour, strategic ingratiation, situational friendship, appeal to ethnicity, etc. From my own study of transport workers in southwest Nigeria and northeast Nigeria, it is often when such strategies fail that violence ensues. My invitation here is for Schouten to draw more attention to the human character of roadblocks. This is particularly important since, as Schouten writes en passant, “frequent circulation along a same road means that faces become familiar; road-block operators and drivers get to know, or to solve things ‘on friendly terms’ once in a while” (p. 125). It would be particularly revealing to hear more about the affective logic and socially charged life of checkpoints that surely constitutes what Schouten calls “roadblock geographies” (p. 116).
In Roadblock Politics, the mobile appears as coextensive with the masculine. The reader is left to wonder about what (subversive) role, if any, women play in the “friction of terrain” (p. 72). Are roadblocks in Central Africa exclusively phallic spaces? In short, the gendered dimension of the political economy of roadblocks seems missing from the story of Roadblock Politics. How do women figure in the “roadside sense of community” (p. 125) taking shape in Central Africa?
Overall, Schouten has written a remarkably innovative and generative book about a subject—roadblocks—that is too often taken for granted yet central to the political economy of everyday life in conflict zones. Roadblock Politics is, in my view, an instant classic.
