Wars over checkpoints: Nine theses on roadblocks and the politics of circulation in conflict-affected borderlands

This working paper advances nine theses on checkpoints (or roadblocks) as central institutions in contemporary conflict-affected borderlands. Drawing on discussions at a dedicated workshop involving researchers working on Chad, DR Congo, Libya, Myanmar, South Sudan, West Africa and Yemen, the paper challenges narrow readings of roadblocks exclusively as security devices or sites of corruption. Instead, it conceptualises them as politically and economically generative nodes through which authority is exercised, rents are extracted and redistributed, markets are shaped, and conflict is financed. The paper shows how control over circulation often trumps territorial control; how checkpoint governance varies systematically with transport geographies and trade density; and how state and non-state actors frequently converge in practice, sometimes with insurgents outperforming governments in predictability and standardisation. The paper further demonstrates that checkpoint proliferation can reflect deliberate coalition management or coping strategies under fiscal collapse rather
than governance failure, and that the costs of checkpoint taxation are borne indirectly through commodity chains, disproportionately affecting vulnerable producers and consumers. By organising these insights into nine analytically distinct but tension-filled theses, the paper offers diagnostic tools rather than prescriptions, aimed at scholars, policymakers, and practitioners concerned with conflict financing, humanitarian access and stabilisation in borderland economies structured by circulation.