Roadblock politics in Central Africa

Abstract

A frequent sight along many roads, roadblocks form a banal yet persistent element across the margins of contemporary global logistical landscapes. How, this article asks, can we come to terms with roadblocks as a logistical form of power? Based on an ongoing mapping of roadblocks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, it sketches a political geography of “roadblock politics”: a spatial pattern of control concentrated around trade routes, where the capacity to disrupt logistical aspirations is translated into other forms of power, financial and political. While today’s roadblocks are tied up with the ongoing conflict in both countries, the article shows, roadblock politics has a much deeper history. Before colonization, African rulers manufactured powerful polities out of control over points of passage along long-distance trade routes crisscrossing the continent. The article traces how since precolonial times control over long-distance trade routes was turned into a source of political power, how these routes were forcefully appropriated through colonial occupation, how after the crumbling of the colonial order new connections were engineered between political power and the circulation of goods in Central Africa, and how control over these flows ultimately became a key stake in ongoing civil wars in the region.

Taking the trouble: science, technology and security studies

“…What emerges from reading across the diverse contributions to this Special Issue is that the relation between researchers and research objects is of special concern when we take the trouble to analyse the roles of science and technology in security practices (see also de Goede 2020). Besides seeking new ways of politicising, critiquing and raising novel questions, it is also important to emphasise that 'taking the trouble' to engage with STS also enables us to see different things that can then be politicised and explored critically -for example, the use of tweets as evidence in court cases (Anwar 2020), or the role of roadblocks and prisons in intervention practices (Schouten 2019; Lindskov Jacobsen 2020), to name but a few.…”

Logistical geographies

“…These attributes are further highlighted in other research. Stenmanns (2019), for example, explores the challenges faced by logistics company Bolloré to impose the operating procedures expected of an advanced port on the everyday realities of Freetown, Sierra Leone, while Schouten (2019) details how rebels in the Congo use the “nonconventional logistics” tactic of roadblocks to exert the power that comes from the ability to disrupt trade flows. Studying “logistics off the beaten path” in this way can also serve to productively expand what are understood to be logistical actors As Schouten et al (2019:782–3) describe, “smugglers, peddlers, independent truckers, women selling cassava tubers at local markets and elephant riders turn out to be just as skilled logistical entrepreneurs as the high‐paid experts of multinational transport companies and they have the same deeply engrained aspirations to overcome frictions, eliminate middlemen…and increase profits over distance.” Shell (2019), for instance, profiles the use of elephants in the mountainous borderlands of Myanmar as a form of “subversive logistics.” In a landscape that is largely impenetrable by standard modes of transport, elephants and their minders become important off‐road logistical actors capable of enabling both resistance against the distant state but also rescue and disaster recovery operations.…”

States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path

“…Schouten’s (2019) contribution focuses on the geographical margins constituted by the decay of colonial-era transport infrastructure in Central Africa. Rather than a “black hole” in the global logistical order, economic life in this logistically rough terrain is even more dependent on mundane, improvised projects of circulation.…”

“…The conveyance of livestock across geographical, and ecological boundaries requires physical infrastructure, such as ports and shipping; but more importantly, their case study shows, Somali livestock trade has historically depended on a social infrastructure of personal relations, clan-alliances, and common norms that together ensure protection, agreed upon modes of exchange, and access to water and pasture across vast and rough terrains. Considering, as the papers of Schouten (2019) and Stepputat and Hagmann (2019) do, contemporary logistical modalities in marginal spaces as part of a longer process of the formation of states of circulation at once challenges us to acknowledge historical continuities and allows us to identify what is distinct in contemporary rearrangements. Rather than new projects of circulation, Somali and Central African livestock has for ages transacted across vast distances, along the way profoundly shaping regional political economies.…”