Charcoal economies in central-east Africa are deep and powerful: they connect military and state financing with everyday family cooking. This article, based on new fieldwork in the understudied charcoal economy in South Sudan, explores the hierarchies and systems of self-employed producers, cash-for-piecework workers, middlemen and transporters, large-scale investors, and the public and defence sector financiers, landlords, brokers and security providers who all work in this political economy of forestry and charcoal-making. Drawing on local colonial archives and extensive fieldwork over 2020–2022, we break down the forms of work, investment and exploitation across this historical post/colonial landscape of labour, tree cultures, land rights and regional trade. In doing this we expand and escape the dominant and neatening metaphor of the value chain; we present a wider view of the expansion of the armed, privatised state economy; and we highlight current debates over the value, commodification and sale of forests and rural life.
