Roadblock Politics

Along the muddy roads and forested rivers snaking through Central Africa, rebels and soldiers, traditional authorities and civil servants, erect roadblocks where they deploy the threat of violence to impose their will on passersby. There are, in fact, so many roadblocks in Central Africa that it is hard to find a road that does not have one.

Peer Schouten has mapped over a thousand of them in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic, and South Sudan. His new book Roadblock Politics: the Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2022) argues that roadblocks aren’t just a symptom of corruption or state failure but encapsulate a distinct and meaningful form of order-making.

Roadblock Politics reveals the connections between roadblocks in Central Africa and global supply chains, tracking the flow of multinational corporations and UN agencies alike through them, to show how they encapsulate a form of power, which thrives under conditions of supply chain capitalism.

The book also traces how crucial control over long-distance trade has been in the deep history of the region. In doing so, he develops a new lens through which to understand what drives state formation and conflict in the region, offering a radical alternative to explanations that foreground control over minerals, territory or population as key drivers of Central Africa's violent history.