Join us for a presentation on "Roadblock Politics: Global Lessons on Trade, Order, and Conflict from Central Africa." Two powerful theoretical frames underpin how we have come to understand intractable civil conflict in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the one hand, such situations are often explained as driven by the existence, and exploitation of vast deposits of lootable natural resources. On the other, deeply held assumptions about meaningful rule--as revolving around control over a territory and population--pervade how we study complex conflicts, framing how we rank states as ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ and qualify rebel groups as powerful or not. 

In this lecture, Peer Schouten asks, what if such seductive frames hide more than they reveal about ongoing conflicts and spatial logics of rule? Based on a mapping of over 1.500 roadblocks — or checkpoints — in South Sudan, DR Congo and the Central African Republic, Peer proposes a new geography of statecraft, one premised on control over circulation, not territory and population.

Based on a deep history of how Africans creatively adapt forms of political organization to the vagaries of long-distance trade and external projects of domination, he proposes that in times and places where wealth concentrates in trade rather than production and control over trade routes is fragmented, projects of state-making and resistance against them play out largely along roads. Peer also reveals how such circulation struggles are not local but globalized, exploring how rebels and rulers fight over the strategic nodes along which global flows of aid, trade, and resources pass. This means that global firms and international aid organizations are part and parcel of new patterns of conflict and state formation in the region, and that the intricacies of global supply chains have political consequences in far-away places. 

This event is part of the 2022-23 PCON Lecture Series "Infrastructures of Peace and Conflict" and is cosponsored by the Department of Geography, the Africana and Latin American Studies Program, and the Environmental Studies Program.