The Fragile States Index shows that the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) rank fifth and sixth, respectively, from the bottom of the scale. Although such metrics matter, they do not fully capture the relationships between power and territory, or authority and population, in what we call “failed states.” In Roadblock Politics, Schouten provides an alternative account based on local control of bottlenecks along supply chains that circulate locally and extend regionally, even globally. As such, this book flips the conventional narrative of state power to show how the “politics of passage” has often been a way to resist centralized political authority.
This story comes alive in the book’s substantive chapters, divided into two parts. Part I (Chapters 2–4) anchors the “prehistory of the roadblock” in nineteenth-century “hongo polities” where local rulers levied tariffs on long-distance caravans of European ivory traffickers. The emergent...