Trade-based statecraft: the new spatial logic of the state (TRADECRAFT)

What:

What does Helsingør 500 years ago share with Bunagana in eastern Congo today? For centuries, the Øresundstold constituted the Danish crown’s main source of revenue; transit taxes levied at the Bunagana checkpoint are today a key source of financing for the rebel group M23. Both are instances of a widespread phenomenon whereby rulers gain power from, and fight over, control over points of passage along transport routes where wealth can be extracted from flows of trade. The project explores this phenomenon, positing they exemplify a new spatial logic of statecraft—trade-based statecraft—that was widespread before states gained the capacity to exercise control over the populations within their territories, and that today still prevails, outliving efforts to build territorial states in developing countries.

How:

Preliminary evidence of thousands of checkpoints in the developing world suggest we urgently need a better understanding of how control over passage along trade routes drives conflict and builds states. Running from 2023-2026, TRADECRAFT brings together an interdisciplinary research group that develops an innovative combination of historical and geographical methods to analyze and cartographically visualize evidence from surveys and historical archives. Generously funded by the Carlsberg, we hope to challenge the deeply rooted definition of statehood in terms of control over the population within a bounded territory, which prevails within the political sciences and adjacent disciplines and informs policy interventions.

The Roadblocks in Conflict Working Paper series is edited by Peer Schouten, Vanessa van den Boogaard, Max Gallien, Florian Weigand and Shalaka Thakur, as part of the TRADECRAFT project.

Interested in submitting a working paper? Get in touch via checkpoints@diis.dk

Paying the price
The political economy of checkpoints in Somalia
Report, 2023
Peer Schouten

Roadblock Politics
The Origins of Violence in Central Africa
Book, 2022
Peer Schouten

Checkpoint economy
The political economy of checkpoints in South Sudan, ten years after independence
Report, 2021
Peer Schouten, Ken Matthysen & Thomas Muller

It’s the Roads, Stupid
Armed checkpoints along key trade routes—not natural resources—are the key to financing rebel groups and insurgencies around the world
Journal article, 2021
Peer Schouten
 

• Finn Stepputat, DIIS
   
• Vanessa van den Boogaard, ICTD/University of Toronto 
   
• Max Gallien, IDS 
   
• Florian Weigand, Centre on Armed Groups
   
• Luca Schotz, University of Manchester