Making markets, contesting states: The era of checkpoint governance in South Sudan

This report examines the paradoxical place of the checkpoint in the political economy of South Sudan. It argues that in the context of the state’s economic abandonment of the country, checkpoints have emerged as a principal means of marketisation: in South Sudan’s rural peripheries, settlements cluster around checkpoints to take advantage of the hard currency they provide. Yet the blockades strewn across the country’s rivers and roads are also instruments of state predation. The South Sudanese government provides neither wages nor development, but rather functions as a ‘robber-in-chief’ that uses the legal affordances offered by the formal fiction of the nation-state to enable illicit revenue capture. One of its fundamental instruments of predation is the
checkpoint. Over the last decade, as state revenue has collapsed, the number of
checkpoints has exploded. This proliferation has three sources: (1) political and military elites use them to capture revenue; (2) armed young men, no longer paid to serve in the security services, rely on them to survive; (3) communities increasingly set up their own checkpoints, in a mimicry of state function that is also a contestation of elite control of the economy. As much as the state uses checkpoints to predate upon populations, they have also emerged as a means of resisting it. At community checkpoints, commodities are not the socially neutral, easily fungible objects imagined by theorists of the free market, but are coloured by where they are from and where they are going. The putatively impersonal market is viscerally personalised at the checkpoint, which is at once a form of marketisation and a re-embedding of exchange within communitarian logics. This re-embedding is a way of resisting the state, but only by echoing its own logic of predation.