Conclusions
Summary
Roadblocks are an endemic feature of warscapes the world over, and a common sight along roads in many other places, signalling a form of violent contestation that is as pervasive as it is overlooked by political theory. It is therefore hoped that the arguments of this book will have some wider purchase beyond the already broad geographical swath of Central Africa with which it is immediately concerned. Some of the book's arguments and examples should certainly resonate across other settings and times, and indeed the parsimonious lens of roadblock politics has roots in a broad theoretical and historical soil. This concluding chapter explores the extent to which the tangle of roadblock politics, infrastructural dilapidation and the attendant crumbling of central state authority, and the proliferation of global supply chains, is exceedingly common across the world today. It turns out that supply chains the world over are shot through with roadblocks and their attendant circulation struggles. Looking ahead, as we seek to understand the emerging contours of order and disorder in the twenty-first century, the dynamics witnessed in Central Africa might forebode the kind of circulation struggles one can expect to proliferate alongside the spread of global supply chains and their fracturing of twentieth-century structures of political control.
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- Roadblock PoliticsThe Origins of Violence in Central Africa, pp. 257 - 273Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022