Roadblock Politics: the origins of violence in Central Africa by Peer Schouten, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Roadblock Politics analyses the most fastidious, but also most central node of Central Africa's contemporary war economic complex through an in-depth account of the everyday functioning, economic logic and political ramifications of today's militarised checkpoints. From peasant saleswomen to bulk traders to international emergency NGOs, literally every mobile actor circulating on Central Africa's shabby road network contributes willingly or unwillingly to the maintenance of parasitic armed actors by paying them a right of roadblock passage. As its central objective, the book aims to disentangle Central Africa's roadblock geographies: the aggregate landscape of militarised checkpoints where the threat of the use of force is deployed to regulate and tax the circulation of people, goods and capital.