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Peer Schouten, "Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
00:53:33
An interview with Peer Schouten
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Good morning. This is Susan Thompson of Colgate University, a host on New Books Network in African Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. Thanks for tuning in. My guest today is Pierre Schouten of the Danish Institute for International Studies. He has written a breathtaking book, Robot the Origins of Violence in Central Africa, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. Schouten mapped more than 1,000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between roadblocks and what he calls frictions of terrain. These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in the making or unmaking of state authority and legitimacy. Looking at roadblocks as a kind of infrastructural empire that existed before the Europeans first arrived in Africa, Shouten develops a new framework to understand the ways in which supply chain capitalism thrives in places of non conventional logistical capacity. He thus reframes how state theory fails to capture the nature of statehood and local authority in Central Africa. Schouten calls out governments, the UN and other international actors to highlight how control of roadblocks translates into control over minerals, territory and people. No analysis of the drivers of conflict anywhere in the world is complete without consideration of Pierre Shouten's groundbreaking book, Roadblock Politics. Pier, welcome.
- [01:41]
A
Thank you so much, Susan. The pleasure is all mine. It's really lovely to be here.
- [01:45]
B
Thanks so much. I just want to start with the most obvious question. What motivated you to write the book?
- [01:51]
A
Well, thank you. I think that's a great question. I think there's basically two reasons why I decided to write the book. The first one is really the amount of cognitive dissonance I experienced when doing fieldwork in places like Eastern Congo and the Central African Republic, on the one hand, and really the kind of frames that I came equipped with in my toolkit, my analytical toolkit when doing the field work. So you got to understand that most of the debates that one equips oneself with when one takes to doing fieldwork in Central Africa are theorists have to do with state failure and state quality, with what drives conflict. Very quickly these kind of debates circle in around. On the one hand, the conflict mineral debate, the idea that most of the conflict in Central Africa is driven by control over mining sites and lootable resources, if you will, a discourse very much driven by initially the likes of Paul Collier and other theories of what motivates civil conflict. And on the other hand, we have this really very heavily weighing framework of what it means to be a functioning state. And that usually involves the kind of conventional trappings of control over territory and the population within it, centralized authority over armed forces, et cetera, et cetera. And really none of these heavyweight frameworks helped me to make sense of what I encountered when I was trying to get from one place to the other, navigating through very complex logistical terrains which involved indeed, at a frequency of about once every 10 miles, an encounter with a roadblock. So on the one hand, this kind of very practical empirical reality that I encountered out there, and I hope we can talk about that a bit more, what exactly it means and the fact that it found no place in pre existing theories was something that drove me to explore this matter further. And then on the other hand, I have to also point towards some individuals which really inspired me to write this book. So when I first presented the kind of outline of how I see conflict and roadblocks and capitalism hanging together in the University of California, Berkeley at the center for African Studies, the head of area of African Studies, Leo Arreola, said, this is such a weird history. I've never heard something like this before. Where are you publishing your book? And I hadn't at that point in time made any plans to write a book, but just that reaction in and by itself told me maybe there's a book in here. I have so much to say about this topic. Right. So that really motivated me to continue and do so. So I think these two things together, on the one hand, this kind of cognitive dissonance and clash between what existed out there in terms of theory and what I encountered on the ground. And on the other hand, Leo Ariola, a number of other individuals which really pushed me to, to pursue this book.
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B
I love your answer for so many reasons. First of all, that sense of curiosity that should drive any intellectual project, I'm so happy to hear that. But also the role of mentors and other colleagues, that's just so great to hear. When I was reading your book, I was actually thinking about Carolyn Nordstrom's book Shadow of War. And I don't know if you've read it, but she writes about militarization and shadow networks, the political economy of shadow networks. And your book to me really illuminated grounds zero of these networks. And for me, the primary contribution is your analysis of the role of roadblocks on conflict, but also on local livelihoods. Lots of stories about mamas and other women trying to get to market and of course, how.
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A
Right. I mean, just if I can, yes, If I can interfere. I think that's one of the other things which really pushed me to do this book is that if you ask people in Eastern Congo or the Central African Republic, often in South Sudan, whether it's rural areas or urban areas, like, what is the main impact of conflict? What does conflict mean for you? What is the main thing you feel of it in your everyday lives? People will say it's the costs of things. It's the unsafety at the roads. It's actually the roadblocks. Right. So this was something that was so much in our face as conflict researchers, yet because of these very heavy frames around conflict minerals, what we think, how the state should work, we just collectively chose to disregard something that was so blatantly in our face. So, indeed, the everyday experiences of people living in Central Africa were another kind of driving force for me to pursue this book.
- [07:12]
B
Yeah, I think that's why I appreciated your book so much. And you have a very rich analysis in the second section, which we'll get to in a minute, about the role of rebels and, of course, Rwanda being kind of an unhappy neighbor and being sort of manipulative of local politics. And that individual and community perception of security, I think, is another great contribution of your book. And I wanted to start just at the very beginning. You speak of sovereignty as something that exists on a shoestring. So, you know, roadblocking as a kind of decentralization attempt. Can you explain to us how sovereignty in political science and state theory doesn't really apply to Central Africa and why it's on a shoe?
- [07:54]
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, yeah. I think. I think what I try to do is just to imagine if I myself would be state builder, if I want to build a state and I have limited means at my disposal, I don't want to waste all my energy engaging in state building. What kind of minimal form of the state would I pursue? And the kind of theories we have about what people do when they build states. So what we have about state making is a fairly elaborate process trying to control a whole territory and all of the people inside it and then provide public services. Whereas, I think, if you look, the historical record will speak to you in that in most places, in most times of the world, that's not what state builders, state makers, actually do. If you have limited means, the most intuitive form of practicing exercising a form of sovereignty is and has been, I think, again, almost always been a much more limited form of state making. One which basically boils down to setting up shop by the side of the road. And forcing anybody who has the ambition to pass to simply pay up. And this doesn't go only for Central Africa, but it also goes, for instance, Europe. I mean, in the Great Britain of the 19th century, I was stunned to discover that up until the 1850s, there were about 8,000. And I repeat, this is not a mistake, 8,000 turnpikes and toll gates spread over this territory. In France, there were about 4,000 along the Rhine. This is big European river, 62 toll points. So even in the prehistory of the European state, before states controlled their transport networks, what state actors would basically do most of the time is simply set up shop besides the road and use weapons to force people to pay a toll to pass. And so the kind of African experience that I tried to foreground in this book, roadblock politics, is not in that sense, a historical or regional anomaly. There's no kind of African exceptionalism to the point I'm trying to make. Even though the phenomenon in Africa today of roadblocks is, of course, much out of proportion compared to how you might find it in other places.
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B
That's something I love so much about the first part of your book was that recognition that this is not an African phenomena. It just happens to operate in this way because of particular colonial and pre colonial legacies. And I should just say for the listener that your book is actually divided into two parts. The first is the prehistory of the roadblock told through these European examples that you just mentioned, but also through Hongo and other mechanisms of control. And then the second, of course, is about the application of roadblocks and how they operate in everyday life. In these two cases, can you provide us a more robust prehistory for the listener? I'm thinking like beyond Hangul, of course, your concept of infrastructural empire, and of course, my favorite, the Revenge of Distance in chapter four.
- [11:23]
A
Right. So I think that what you're looking at and what you're really grasping here very neatly is a kind of historical dynamic that I'm trying to outline, a kind of periodization in three parts which hinges on this crucial variable, if you will, which is the infrastructural power of the state. And so infrastructure, road networks, railways, et cetera, et cetera, is something fairly recent. I mean, until the early 20th century, most countries did not have very elaborate transport networks and thus could not exercise the kind of logistical power deploying troops and state agents to all parts of their territory that we associate with the modern state. So before the 19th century, it was much more difficult for A state to practice sovereignty as we usually conceive of it. And instead it made much more sense for states. And that's what they, I think, did in practice all over the world, is indeed sit down by the side of the road, maybe make a nice castle out of it, and basically levy taxes on long distance trade or certain products transiting through these kind of points of sovereignty, if you will. And so then you get this invention of infrastructure. The word itself dates from 1875. And states all of a sudden start to. There's this global construction boom of mostly Western countries, but also other nations all of a sudden expanding their infrastructural reach and kind of overlaying these territories to which they lay claim, colonial or their kind of national territories, with these infrastructure grids, which allows them to kind of exercise new forms of control channel mo instead of kind of taxing it at these simple points. And transport trade becomes administrative trade. Something kind of in the internal tract, lodged in the internal tract of these huge administrations. And this is where I think I disagree with a lot of analysis. For most people, that's kind of the end of the story. This is when the modern state got born. And ever since we've been kind of equipped with these infrastructurally strong states. So we should kind of take this idea of the state as this apparatus which controls its territory and population as a point of departure for analyzing any kind of place in the world. But in most parts of the world, since decolonization, the 60s, perhaps the 70s, structural adjustment in the 80s, the kind of infrastructural grids that had been developed in the first part of the 20th century actually start to recede. There's a lack of maintenance, there's often conflict, which forces administrations to suddenly withdraw from their transport networks. The structural adjustments, which means divesting actually from the public administrations which were there to maintain these infrastructure grids, that means that the conditions of possibility for roadblock politics whereby states do not entirely control their transport networks any longer, comes back with a vengeance in many parts of the world. And I think that what I try to observe for Central Africa is that it's in the wake of this kind of receding of straight infrastructure power, and this is very, very literal, that Congo has a road network of 152,000 kilometers. But it's mostly on paper that exists. This is a World bank document from 1990s saying this is the Congo's road network that it inherited, quote, unquote, from the Belgian colonial administration in the 60s. But now, 30, 40 years later, it only exists on paper. That means that it's quite difficult to practice statehood as we understand it. Conventionally controlling your whole territory and everybody within it and all the activities is fairly difficult, if it's just very practical to get from A to B. And instead, what it makes possible, these kind of disintegrated, deposited road networks is that it's possible locally to force power out of the friction of distance. That kind of exists everywhere across these national territories where the infrastructure grid has kind of withdrawn or has never existed. Right. So basically, in the most general sense possible, I think that roadblock politics is something that can happen under two conditions. One is where states don't control the entirety of their transport networks. And the other one, and I think this is really important, is that it only makes sense to practice roadblock politics if capital is concentrated in the sphere of circulation and not in the sphere of production. So if you're a Congolese farmer and you farm your products and you want to make money out of the kind of surplus you have translated into other goods, you need to take it physically on your back to a market. And the fact that you have to do that means that you have to go to the market, means that it's interesting for someone or possible to stop you and say, well, if you really want to do that, my friend, you have to pay up. The same goes for minerals in the soil or where they are extracted in eastern Congo. They do not have much value. They only have value if they are taken to these global markets. The same with products like Nestle or Heineken beer. They only have value if they're taken to the customer. So there's these kind of mobile economies that forge profit out of moving stuff in a very literal sense. And these kind of economies, this is not something I've invented. This is historically. Fernand Braudel, his long history of, of civilization, emphasizes time and again that before the 19th century, capital was concentrated in the sphere of circulation. And what states thought about was control over mobility or certain channels of long distance trade, as he puts it. Right. And I think that, say, for the 20th century, when we had some kind of form of industrial capitalism, we have reverted back after the 1970s to something to a similar condition, which has been much better described by other peoples. And I really have to defer, particularly to Anat Singh when she speaks about supply chain capitalism, and the way that she does so is really, really brilliant, is to say that we have now transformed into our global economy into something where capital accumulation is Lodged into disjunctured supply chains that move across jurisdictions, making profits from these disjunctures between labor laws, the rise, the cost of labor, and moving stuff across these kind of disjunctured spaces. And I think that understanding roadblock politics therefore means that you have to understand this form of capitalism on the one hand and other hands, what aspiring state makers or people who contest state making projects can do if capital is concentrated in circulation in that way.
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I think that's such an interesting transition to my next question, because you have a whole chapter more or less dedicated to Heineken as the thing that circulates in the eastern Congo. Of course, most analysts think of eastern Congo as a place of intractable violence and how can life actually function? There's the way that you document, but also write about Heineken. Beer is so great. Anyone interested in legacies of circulation should definitely check out that chapter. I was thinking too about your theory. One thing you do, you use a lot of James Scott, and James Scott, of course, is about power and also resistance. What did you find? Roadblocks in Central Africa. Tell us about conflict minerals and the authority of the state in the periphery. You sort of alluded to it, but I want to move us into the second half of the book here.
- [19:50]
A
Yeah, well, I think that it's really important to emphasize that we have mapped over 1,000 roadblocks in eastern Congo and in the Central African Republic. And in the first instance, what is a roadblock? Right? It's this very simple, nimble kind of thing. Everybody can kind of envision how it looks. And it's really people with guns standing at the roadside, forcing people to contribute something. It's a forced taxation, it's kind of rentier capitalism on what used to be a road, and then forcing people to pay simply because they are appropriating that portion and the right to passage. So this is something you could call extractivism or parasitism. It's an extractive act. And people in policy circles, economists, would say this is corruption, this is criminal governance. It's something which ought not to be. And of course, in the experience of many, many people, roadblocks are indeed a form of extraction in which there's no kind of clear counterpart in terms of security or public services that are being offered in counterpart for that money extracted at the roadside. So that's the kind of gloomy part of the story, right? But it's really important to understand that there's a historical dynamic, I would almost want to use the word dialectic But I'm not quite sure I would go that far that many of these roadblocks have a history. And if we take eastern Congo for instance, roadblocks started appearing as a kind of endemic phenomenon in the late 80s 90s when the state really inflation was rampant. The Mobutu state, Zahir was not able to pay for its security forces. And so there wasn't much left for these security forces, but to kind of take to the road and extract wealth by themselves because they couldn't really rely on their salaries. So by the time we get to the 90s when the Syrian state is really in crisis and you get armed groups and resistance, much of this resistance is against this army. This manifestation of the army as something extractive at the roadside. But now get this armed groups also want to have some kind of recognition. Their historical experience with the state has been extractive. The typical encounter of a civilian with the state has been at a roadblock, trying to pass, but getting harassed and taxed instead. A lot of armed groups, the first thing that they do is to also set up these roadblocks. At first this might be as a kind of frontier of resistance against corrupt state apparatus, but in the second instance, the longer these rebel groups operate these roadblocks, the more it becomes difficult to stop doing so because hey, you're sitting there by the side of the road and it becomes a kind of self perpetuating thing that actually it's quite easy to sit down by the side of the road and to make some money. And these rebel groups, which acted as a kind of force of resistance against bad governance initially now become part of the problem for people. What you see is then perhaps a faction of the militia or another group in the community mobilizing against this rebel group. And so roadblocks become a central bone of contestation between the army on the one hand, militia on the other hand, but also between communities and the militia that claim purports to represent them. New factions or militia might appear to dislodge these initial armed groups, but they will in turn maybe also mount their own roadblocks. Because they're under arms full time now, they cannot farm. So they need to get their subsistence, day to day subsistence from somewhere. And the easiest thing to do, of course, is to mount a roadblock. So the kind of proliferation of roadblocks in eastern Congo and today we're talking about at least 800 in just two provinces, is part of this very complicated process of resistance accommodation and then again resistance against these accommodations. And it even gets more complicated because eastern Congo, the Kifu provinces about which I talked about, is a patchwork of communities that have been displaced and that make claims to land and they're neighboring each other. If one community militia raises a roadblock, then in the other community, next community, this is being watched with a bit of anxiety that now they have a roadblock. And then perhaps to restore this equilibrium between communities, they will also want a roadblock. Roadblocks are really part and parcel of this very complex politics of accommodation, regional equilibria, frontiers of resistance against the nefarious impacts of long distance trade on these very unstable equilibria between communities. So that it's not just about imposition, it's not just about extraction. It's also about resistance, as you said. Right? Time is valuable. That's why Lowe's blueprint takeoffs turn blueprints into quotes faster. Bring us your plans and we'll generate itemized material lists to make quoting easier so you can get back to Building plus. At the Lowes Pro desk, you get access to thousands of building materials not sold in store. And when your order's ready, we'll deliver everything to the job site. Improving is easy at Lowe's.
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B
It's such an interesting answer, and I just wanted to direct the listener. You have this great section in the book where you use Katharine Newberry's analysis on how women who used to go to market, they would pay. They were paying because there were services, the roads function, the bridge was working, et cetera, et cetera. And then over time, it became too extractive, as you noted in your analysis. And these women felt resentful. And the local actors manning these roadblocks lost the support of those women because they lost the local resources that they felt they were paying for in lieu of state taxes. I think just bring that up for the listener because of course, you can't really study Central Africa without the Newberries in my mind anyway. I wanted to take like a little bit of a pivot here, if you don't mind. I attended many talks as I prepared for this interview, and I've been reading your book for about six months on and off. And I noticed in many of those talks that many people in the audience were concerned about the role of roadblocks in promoting violence and maintaining violence at the local level. Many people asked, shouldn't we just dismantle these roadblocks? And I always thought when I heard that, this seems to be like the. It's not really the point of your book, like what to do with these roadblocks it's rather that roadblocks are part of a vital chain of local economies that in turn feed into and benefit from global supply chains and non conventional logistics. So my question is, how did you take those comments? Like, what kind of comments is your book generating and what is the role of non conventional logistics and understanding these supply chains, but also just the presence of roadblocks that you noted in your previous response to me are just so easy to set up.
- [27:57]
A
Yeah, right. I think it's a great question. And much of these questions began before the book came out, right. Because the book is based on collective work, collective work with teams of local human rights activists, researchers, community activists in Eastern Congo and the Central African Republic, who work together with the Belgian NGO IPIS to really map this phenomenon. We had teams going out, traveling all these minor roads, sometimes doing 10 days on foot, over footpaths, in foresty landscapes and over hills, et cetera, et cetera, to really create these maps. And so for the listener, if you want, you can access these maps interactively. We have created interactive web maps which are available online, which you can kind of click on any roadblock and get information, often a picture on where it's located, what kind of things it does, it text, how many people are present, what kind of agents. So all this rich empirical material is very much a collective effort. And once we started out doing that work, of course we did around consulting with relevant stakeholders in the eastern DRC and in Bangui, in the capital of the Central African Republic. And the first reaction we got from the UN was a kind of mild interest. So they invited us over to present the idea to map these roadblocks further inside the air conditioned container that is the typical UN office. And one UN high level person, I won't mention the name, just freaked out. He was just like, these roadblocks are perhaps a nuisance, but they're not important. You cannot map them. It's not something that the UN should dedicate resources to. And I don't understand why we're even here having this meeting, wasting my time. And so that was a kind of shock. But it's confirmed to me that basically we were onto something because we rubbed conventional notions of what it means to speak about what is relevant in this context, and that the perspective of the UN really did not chime with the everyday experiences that our local researchers, but the more general population of these places did have. But once we did map all these roadblocks, and again, there's 800 in just two provinces, we presented these results and the first thing we got from the head of office of the mission in Eastern Congo was, can you please give us the coordinates? We will clean up these roadblocks for you. And of course, there's an ethical thing. We can't, as researchers, share information which will then be used for interventions. It's an ethical code of conduct. So we would never do that. But it's quite interesting that the real. The real answer to these kind of proposals should not be like, we can't do so ethically. But what would it achieve to take away this roadblock? Because it is based on the presupposition that if you take away the roadblocks, that thereby the problem of a kind of extractive economy of security, actors would disappear. In other words, to put it plain and simple, the presupposition is that armed actors are stupid. If you take away their roadblocks, they wouldn't invent another way of extracting wealth. That's the same problem with the conflict mineral story. The idea is that if you just certify these mining sites and chase away rebels from the mining sites, then they will say, oh, well, shoot, that was great. We had a good time. Now we'll just stop. Of course not. People in Congo particularly, are very creative, and they will always find ways around whatever you try to think of to disconnect certain economic activities from conflict. So, in other words, if you would take away roadblocks, secure the roads in some way or another, people who have hitherto used their guns to extract wealth through roadblocks from circulation will perhaps resort to less predictable and more violent ways of extracting wealth from productive economies. And so perhaps roadblocks are not an ideal situation. I do not wish to defend roadblocks as something that we should promote, but I'm just saying that if you take them away, you might take away a relatively predictable interface of extraction and violence with relatively well entrenched rules and limitations. There are some checks and balances that if you take those away, those roadblocks, you might. Right now, it's becoming fashionable to do kidnappings in eastern Congo, and those are quite violent. Often the people involved are nervous. They don't know exactly what they're doing. Anything might happen. And that means that there's a lot more risk of transgressions and of violence, et cetera, involved in the possible alternatives. I always caution policymakers to really try and think through what, you know, in the local economy of reason, what would happen, right, if you take this away and what are the consequences for people on the ground.
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B
Your answer raises so many questions for me that we don't have time to address. But I think the biggest One is the UN's love of formalizing and formal relationships. I've noticed that in my own research and with many other scholars I've spoken with, but also the idea that, that African actors don't have agency to solve their own problem with or without roadblocks. And you tell that there's a great story in the book, and I can't remember the name of the leader, but he had access to a mining site and then the negotiation with the un, that he would just move further away from the mining site. So it appeared as if the UN had done something. And your book is full of anecdotes and analysis like that that I appreciated so much. But one thing I absolutely loved was this turn to non conventional logistics, because you note that they're actually kind of based on military modes of delivering resources and delivering supplies and material to local communities. And you write so beautifully in both Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo about rebel groups and the ways in which they've cornered the market on the political economy of roadblocks. And of course, they're very different cases, the density in Congo, but the long haul, long distance avenue in the Central African Republic. And I wondered then about the relationship between taxes, which is presumably a legitimate function of states, and roadblocks. Is there some difference in the two cases? Is taxes the right question?
- [35:04]
A
Yeah, I think it's a really good point. And I think we need to take one step back. Right. To understand what I mean with non conventional logistics. I think on the one hand, the term, I think at the basic level, the term is about a merger of tactics of warfare and tactics of moving through contested spaces. And that merger has been highlighted by other scholars than me. Right. Who speak about how logistics is perhaps per definition, a kind of military invention. It's a military practice that has kind of moved into the civilian field, but not shedding some of its kind of military trappings. And so that I think if you look at the globe more and more places, globalization or global trade is highly contested. You have piracy, you have cartels and gangs in Mexico disrupting trade routes for very conventional products. You have all these roadblocks in conflict zones and fragile states, and there's a lot of highway bandits in other spaces of Africa and other parts of the world. So overall, there's this kind of global frontline in which global trade is being more and more contested. And I don't think this means the End of capitalism? Not at all. But I think that in response to the fact that after the 90s, trade has moved away from places where states could guarantee the security of transport networks and has kind of adapted to, has found a new way of configuring global trade and how it's being organized across these kind of contested terrains without being disrupted. And the secret to it is what Anad Singh describes as supply chain capitalism, which is really something that insiders call, they call it hands off trade or something like that. It's a way of making sure that trades happens across these contested frontiers without global actors, global companies, or multinational or aid organizations actually being involved in it. So there's these chains of outsourcing, always smaller portions of corporate activity, from a global company like Heineken's headquarters to the national brewer, to a regional transport company who outsources it to national transport company, who outsources it to local transporter, who is then faced with these chains of roadblocks along the routes that he has to take to deliver beer to all these villages. Global supply chains have learned to work through local ways of getting stuff from A to B, which involves working through transport companies that might have generals as their owners, who might have connections to rebel groups, and who are not afraid at all to strike deals with or accommodate the very forces that aim to disrupt and profit from disrupting these supply chains. So you see a kind of structural implication or kind of implicit entente between global trade and local conflict economies in which both stand to gain. That kind of perverse condition means that it is actually there's no accountability in the system. It's not possible at all to verify to which extent aid and trade contribute to the funding of local conflict actors. But it has to be. If you just look at the map of roadblocks in South Sudan, in eastern Congo, the Central African Republic, it is impossible to move through that very contested space without contributing to these actors who make claims to the politics, to the possibility of passing. So I think we're at the beginning of learning to understand this immigration. And I've tried to kind of theorize it a little bit by pointing to how I think this works. But it's also important to understand that rebels themselves are very sophisticated actors who are reflective about what they're doing and who are constantly struggling to strike the balance between extraction, imposition and recognition and making claims to symbolic forms of power, but at the same time also remaining elusive and remaining invisible and remaining out of the hands of their enemies, essentially. Right. So there are ways to investigate imbalancing forms of illusion and resistance on the one hand, and on the other hand, forms of imposition. I think that roadblocks are a perfect tool if you try to strike that balance, because it's a form of portable sovereignty. Right. If you will, sovereignty literally on a shoestring that you basically can always just take this cord, put it in your pocket, run and put it up somewhere else the next day. So it's a perfect tool for this kind of guerrilla logistics, if you will. That is very intuitive in Central Africa, but also in other places of the world.
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Yeah, that's a great transition to my next question. So you speak of illusion, you speak of resistance. Rwanda, of course, has just entered into Eastern Congo just as the Commonwealth is arriving in Kigali later this month. I guess it's still May in June. And then of course, you finish the book with cases. Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan. Does your theory, do you think, speak to what's going on in eastern Congo right now, or want an invasion? Does it tell us anything, for example, about the disruption in global supply chains? Wheat in Ukraine, for example?
- [41:26]
A
Yeah, I think that the book starts out actually in Almost nearly exactly 10 years ago, when M23, a rebel group from eastern Congo, Le Mouffman de Marche, first invaded a portion of eastern Congo and started mounting these roadblocks. And now 10 years later, it's back the same group. Right. And this group. Is not a Congolese armed group completely. It is a group which has very strong linkages to. The very small neighbor of this giant, which is Congo. It is the eastern neighbor, Rwanda, which is a very small country, but which has a huge weight, disproportional weight, in the geopolitics of the region and which since its birth, since the birth of the post genocide state, Rwanda and Congo have been intimately linked. And I think that M23, it's safe to say, is a proxy for that influence. But it is quite important to underscore that the regional geopolitics in this area are so complicated because on the one hand, Museveni has tried to expand its influence in eastern Congo. It has sent Ugandan soldiers into eastern Congo to chase the adf, but also to secure trade and to build a road network in eastern Congo so as to facilitate the extraction of timber and gold, et cetera, from the eastern DRC to Uganda for further export onwards. That's one of the big problems, is that much of the natural resources of eastern Congo are being exported legally from Uganda instead of through Congo. So all the taxes are paid in the neighboring country. And so Rwanda and Uganda have their own problems. And when Uganda started interfering in eastern Congo on invitation of President Shisekeri, then Rwanda felt that leads to a kind of disbalance in regional influence in eastern Congo. Right. So they needed to correct that. And so M23 in eastern Congo has in part to do with competition over crucial trade corridors and trade flows from eastern Congo. Where do they go? Do they go to Uganda or do they go to Rwanda? There's a few border points, Buna, Ghana in particular, where trade could go either way. And for these neighboring countries, Uganda and Rwanda, it's quite significant which way teak and tropical hardwood and all these minerals go. Right. So not at least for the kind of balance of power regionally between these countries. So definitely there's something going on there which is really important and which has all potential to escalate. But I have to defer for this kind of big geopolitical dynamics to people like Jason Stearns, Justine Brabant and Sonia Rowley, for instance, who are much better at analyzing these things because as a researcher I'm quite tall, but I'm always looking down with my face down to the ground. And I'm much more comfortable speaking to people in rural areas and people who are not so involved in high politics. And so my analysis tends to kind of shun some of these higher level dynamics in favor of more local or more grounded perspectives and dynamics. But that said, I think that Ukraine has showed how the invasion of Ukraine had huge implications for global supply chains of wheat and grains, and now oil and gas, of course, and these only compound pre existing issues with global supply chains. There's been a number of huge implications of COVID and everywhere around the world, I think people are getting more and more aware that this issue of seamless global supply chains, last minute delivery is not so frictionless as we thought it was. It's not so seamless as we thought it was. And I think it might be possible that, frankly speaking, that we are entering an era in which global trade is not so self evident anymore and in which it is more and more accepted that global trade is something fundamentally contested, deeply political and imbued with its own problems, and in need of constant securing against the forces that try to disrupt it or feel that global trade in itself is a disruption or a disruptive activity. And frankly speaking, with all the evidence accumulating of how unsustainable our global economic metabolism is in terms of its ecological impacts, perhaps that's an important caveat to.
- [46:44]
B
Build out Yeah, I think it's so interesting too because it makes me think of just in time supply chains. And that's part of what we've seen during COVID is that we've lacked supplies, not because of roadblocks, obviously, but because of the nature of the high politics, as you call them. And I think it's interesting to apply the lessons of your theory to these bigger systems because the logics and the innate human reactions of roadblocks, the creation of roadblocks by human beings is not unique to Central Africa by any stress of the imagination. At least that's how I read your book. But I do want to start to wrap up. I've kept you here for about 45 minutes. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wanted to share with listeners?
- [47:30]
A
I thought this was an absolutely wonderful conversation. I think we've covered more ground than I've managed to do in any of my other recent engagements. It's been just such a pleasure to think through together with you around these topics and I hope that this is the start of a conversation we can carry on.
- [47:55]
B
Specific talk with that in mind. Two questions to wrap up. Do you have any books or articles or podcasts that you might recommend to listeners? Number one. And number two, can you tell us what you're working on currently so we can look forward to new publishing from you?
- [48:14]
A
Yes. So right now I'm reading on recommendation of a friend, a very old book, Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, which is an absolutely mind blowing travel through the global political economy of sugar, focusing as well on its extractive frontier and the plantation system in the Caribbean, but also on how, you know, for our societies to become so sugar based, what happened to do so. And I love these kind of entangled global histories of commodities. Something which is not academic but which I've really enjoyed is a book When We Cease to Understand the World. And that book is about mathematics, war and the frontiers of knowledge, Inside Mathematics. And the book is written by a Chilean writer who is, who is called Benjamin Labatout. And it's absolutely a fantastic and mind boggling book that I can recommend to anyone. In terms of podcasts, I don't listen to podcasts. You know, the podcasts I listen to are podcasts for kids that listen to with my kids to try and kind of overcome the clutter of my brain. I try to, you know, with withhold some, some kind of forms of, of consumption for myself. And what I'm working on right now.
- [49:51]
B
Is.
- [49:53]
A
I'm not quite sure you know, I think on the one hand, I want to delve deeper into the history of roadblocks and, and I feel just scratched the surface of how important control over trade and very simple forms of roadblocking were in the prehistory of states that have just been written out of histories of statehood and state formation. And on the other hand, I think there's a lot of important comparative work to be done, some starting up conversations with people who are working in other regions and who focus on similar kinds of issues to see if and how we can do more comparative work around this. Right. So I think that's the most important thing I'm working on these days.
- [50:39]
B
I might just give a podcast recommendation to you. I've been loving recently a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation podcast called Nothing is Foreign. And they bring local level perspectives from places all across the world to a Canadian audience. And it's short. They're 20 minutes, they're 25 minutes. It's really lovely. Yeah, I'll wrap it up there. Thank you so much. You've been listening to the Conversation with Pierre Schutten. I'm Susan Thompson. Thanks for listening.