Introduction

As the introductory chapter explained, collaboration was popularized as an idea across much of the globe in the 1990s and 2000s, including the Global South, and was considerably influenced by international actors and donor non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as ideas circulating through nation states about modernizing public governance and management. From the basis of multiple definitions and mixed practices of collaborative governance, this chapter explores trends found through the comparative study of our eight cities, in the decade after the GEC. We aim to examine the impact of austerity on localized collaborative structures of policymaking. Specifically, the chapter elaborates three dimensions where interesting comparisons and contrasts were identified: in discourse, in agency and in the spaces utilized to facilitate alliance building and joint working. Trends in discourse, agency, and spaces of collaboration after the GEC are linked to the historical events and traditions highlighted in the introductory chapter.

Collaboration as a state-led discourse

With the exception of Baltimore (Pill, 2020), the state played a leading role in fomenting collaborative governance discourses across the cases, though not necessarily an exclusive role. There were three cases in which the dominant discourse about governance was crafted strongly at the national level: Athens, Dublin and Leicester. All three cities had a heavily centralized mode of governance which defined local relational dynamics more compared with the other cities in this study. While local democracy rescaling and devolution of responsibilities have been part of reform programmes across these centres stemming back to the 1980s (see Chapter 4 for more detail), budget cuts have at the same time meant that local governments were not equipped to absorb new responsibilities, including the leadership of participation. In turn, the weak position of local governments meant that national governments (and their financiers) continued to set policy parameters and collaboration was narrowly conceived at the local level as a necessary mode of policy delivery, though not of policy definition.

Post-GEC, austerity provided an opportunity to reframe governance discourses in a way that consolidated and extended the reach of neoliberal restructuring, including accelerating processes of decentralization, wage freezes, employment terminations and greater emphases on partnering with NGOs with an ability to attract resources and deliver services with efficiency dividends.

This chapter seeks to better understand how austerity governance has been experienced in the eight cities, from the perspective of the local state. As earlier chapters demonstrate, austerity governance is a real challenge for cities and local states, which can often have competing priorities and imperatives. This is because traditionally, local managers and elected politicians are more inclined than those of the upper tiers of the state to listen to and be responsive to the residents of their local constituencies, because they are closer to them. Consequently, the principles and rules in municipalities for managing public budgets are usually more responsive to social demands. However, if the democratic local state is a political unit, with at least some autonomy to enact its values and citizen preferences, it is also subject to a range of structural and contextual constraints. These include cultures and practices of neoliberal marketization and the level of resources available through transfers and taxation. In that respect, local state managers and elected representatives are caught in a difficult situation. On the one hand, they seek to respond to the needs and priorities of their constituents while, on the other, they operate within the constraints set by national priorities of neoliberal marketization and cuts to resources. This leaves them looking two ways, trying to overcome continuous contradictions, conflicts and uncertainties that arise from this difficult positioning.

In addition to these immediate and contradictory demands on local officials, questions of local state power are strongly connected with urban culture. This idea can be captured, at least in part, through the concept of ‘mémoire du lieu’ (memory of place), as defined by Todd (2017: 468). This ‘mémoire du lieu’ frames the way local actors perform and build collaboration, and is an important component of local culture which, in turn, informs popular preferences. Thus, local culture, local preferences and pressures arising from the national and international sources discussed in the previous chapter all combine to set conditions in which local states operate in juxtaposition with market and civil society forces. The compromises reached are therefore partly the result of different strategies of civil society resistance that have proven more or less effective in promoting local autonomy and social solidarity.

If one picks up the travelogue of any nineteenth-century explorer, chances are it will discuss the payment of transit levies, or hongo as it was commonly called. Most European travellers dismissed hongo as mere blackmail. But to understand roadblock politics today, we need to acknowledge how significant such transit taxes were for the transformation of African politics. Chapter 2 zooms in on the heyday of these roadblock polities, roughly between 1820 and 1890, along two of the main long-distance trade routes into Central Africa: the Congo River and the trunk road from Zanzibar. Out of the narrow points of passage along them, the increasing circulation of goods valued in Europe and the USA allowed African communities to manufacture veritable roadblock polities. They forged power out of the capacity to withhold the minimal logistical requirements necessary for these pre-colonial supply chains to operate: the right of way, protection against robbery, and access to water and other basic supplies on which caravan travel relied. Control over such points soon became so important that it overtook other sources of power as the central driving force behind state formation in the region.

Thus far, this book has explored the ‘prehistory of the roadblock’: how control over logistical space has formed a pivot of patterns of contestation and order-making in Central Africa’s turbulent history. The remainder of the book delves into contemporary roadblock politics. Popular accounts of the region often contain anecdotes of swaggering thugs running improvised checkpoints along the road. It is tempting to read these as symptomatic of a total lack of political order in Central Africa. Yet one should not be fooled by this superficial randomness. Chapter 5 tries to undo the image of anarchy tagged onto conflict in Central Africa by piecing together the rough-and-ready patterns that structure the geography of roadblocks. Instead of an open political terrain -- anarchy -- the occurrence of roadblocks is bound by certain vernacular logics which only become apparent if one is attentive to the material and environmental features of terrain which place important limits on the circulation of people and goods in contexts where infrastructure is absent. The distribution of roadblocks, and the control they afford over logistical space to different kinds of roadblock operators, follow these features of logistical terrain to produce entangled geographies of movement and appropriation that structure everyday mobility in Central Africa.

Focusing on coltan, Chapter 9 describes how increasingly complex global commodity chains became entangled with conflict in Central Africa. For the majority of consumers of electronics downstream, most of what happens in Central Africa remains out of sight and out of mind. But the violence of supply chains now reaches into many corners of that region, casting people in the dangerous role of foot soldiers of globalization in a context where the wealth they carry is often violently contested. This chapter shows how the disaggregated and patchwork-like nature of global supply chains makes them ideally suited to latch onto eastern Congo’s equally dispersed and fragmented artisanal mining economy. Today’s mineral supply chains, unlike their twentieth-century predecessors, are able to accommodate -- indeed work through -- forms of ordered anarchy such as are found in contemporary Central Africa. In accommodating local forms of violence and competing claims to order-making, they more closely resemble the fragmented political order that emerged around the pre-colonial caravan trade than colonial-era systems of monopolies on the extraction and long-distance conveyance of minerals. However much ongoing supply chain initiatives promise corridor-like, closed-pipeline solutions, they will always remain leakier than the integrated industrial extractive machineries they replaced.

In the previous chapter, we saw how colonial administrations attempted to eliminate African roadblock polities and obtain exclusive control over mobility, relying on road building to enhance their grip. To understand contemporary roadblock politics, we need to turn to another set of connections: the negative dialectics between the disintegration of colonial transport networks and new forms of power and survival in its ruins. Chapter 4 shows how the story of Central Africa since independence is largely one of the demise of centralized control over logistical space, and with it, the return of the friction of terrain, to adopt James Scott’s vocabulary. In 1960, Congo entered upon independence as one of Africa’s most industrialized countries. In the wake of the Belgian colonial drive for logistical control, it boasted one of the continent’s most sophisticated transport networks. Yet half a century later, most of this road network was gone. Meanwhile the road network of the Central African Republic shrank by half. Concomitantly, the conditions necessary to manufacture power out of the friction of terrain once again fell into place, and within fifty years of independence, control over roads again became a central pivot in the region’s political economy of war.

If the intricacies of global supply chains form one crucial aspect of roadblock politics, we also need to investigate another aspect of logistics in order to unpack Congo’s roadblock proliferation. Focusing on Central African hinterlands where roads are a fading memory, Chapter 8 asks how contemporary rebel groups adapt to a terrain that is inimical to military logistics as usual. Rebels themselves have best theorized what military logistics might look like in the debris of infrastructural empire. By providing a glimpse of the inner workings of a few of Central Africa’s many rebel groups, this chapter explores what one armed group itself dubbed ‘non-conventional logistics’. From the perspective of conventional, centralized states, this form of organization is suboptimal, but it is perfectly geared to withdrawal from and rebuttal of the reach of outside powers. Yet the purchase of this approach extends beyond rebels: given the overbearing logistical and geographical constraints, state agents by necessity also practise versions of guerilla foraging, blurring the lines between enemies. Taken together, the examples provided in this chapter prompt one to consider political control not as a fixed property of mutually exclusive territorial configurations, but rather as a mobile and temporary achievement in the political economy of circulation.

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.

All across Africa, local transporters ferry humanitarian shipments, beer, powdered milk, mobile phones, soft drinks, and other ‘global’ commodities all the way into the interior of the continent. On their return journey, they feed local products like tropical hardwood, minerals and peanuts back into global supply chains. Through these logistical connections, whatever conspires in the dense forests of Central Africa is linked to the rest of the world. Whether it is to export timber from the Central African Republic, deliver food aid in South Sudan, or access consumer goods markets in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for logistical entrepreneurs, Central Africa is a ‘supply chain frontier’ where vast profits are made. But these expanding supply chains are also the engine behind new patterns of predation on the continent. To explore this hidden side of the global economy, Chapter 6 asks, how does a multinational corporation navigate roadblock politics? Or, put differently, how come today’s panoply of Central African roadblocks doesn’t disrupt global supply chains? Chapter 6 makes the case that transnational circulation is not somehow detached from the terrain through which it transacts; global supply chains come to life by empowering and sustaining a host of actors along their routes.

Early colonialism took shape in efforts to control trade routes, replacing hongo polities with its own stations. But at the end of the nineteenth century, new forms of logistical power emerged that would allow for a radical intensification of colonial control, a connection so tight I propose we need to approach it as ‘infrastructural empire’. Whereas much ink was spilled in colonial metropoles hailing the unlimited possibilities afforded by railways and motorable roads, the reach of colonial control in the Congo Basin actually proved quite limited. Across most of Central Africa, it was restricted to the slender lines of individual transport routes, and new forms of resistance beset the advancing logistical machinery. Whereas before colonization Africans had moved to the trade routes to impose taxation, now that these pathways became vehicles of colonial violence, they systematically moved away from them to avoid it. From the cover of the bush and at crucial nodes in the transport system, Africans started to sabotage the logistics on which the new colonial order relied. Such forms of resistance precipitated a colonial obsession with mastering unruly and impenetrable landscapes beyond the logistical reach of the colonial state.