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.