The politics of passage: Roadblocks, taxation and control in conflict

From Afghanistan and Yemen and from Mali to Somalia, research shows, roadblocks are central to dynamics of armed conflict, funding insurgents, driving violence and shaping the forms of order espoused by various types of armed actors, state and non-state alike. Despite increasing evidence, roadblocks and the forms of circulation they interact with have not yet received the theoretical attention they deserve and are often overlooked in debates over what drives conflict and how we should understand order in areas of contested statehood. Our premise is that a focus on checkpoints has the potential to enrich engrained approaches to conflict and order-making because roadblocks represent a window into dynamics of authority and power that only partially follow the script of ‘stateness’ as it is usually understood: as revolving around claims to territory and the population or resources within it.

This paper, which introduces the working paper series Roadblocks and revenues, argues that checkpoints constitute a distinct claim to authority with their own logic and effects on conflict dynamics and political order-making. We coin the idea of the ‘politics of passage’, which refers to the mutually constitutive struggles over movement and authority that play out at roadblocks in fragile and conflict-affected settings. We propose that attending to the politics of passage means exploring how both authority and passage—and through them trade and revenues, as well as mobility and order—are contingent on the sometimes routinised, sometimes unpredictable processes of negotiation that take place at checkpoint encounters. We provide a definition of roadblocks, explore the historicity of circulation struggles in relation to state formation, and outline a new research agenda on roadblocks, advancing debates on state-building, war economies, informal taxation, global value chains and rebel governance, offering reflections from existing research and avenues for future work.