Governing routes across the contested Sahara: Checkpoints and the political economy of trans-Saharan trade around Kufrah
Roadblocks & Revenues Working Paper Series #14
This paper by Abubaker Lndi examines how checkpoints govern trans-Saharan trade and political authority around Kufrah in southeastern Libya, near the borders with Chad and Sudan. Focusing on Subul al-Salam, a local armed group that emerged after Kufrah’s post-2011 conflicts and came to control the city’s main checkpoints, it argues that checkpoints are not only sites of taxation or smuggling control, but institutions that decide who may move, whose goods count as legitimate trade, and whose mobility is blocked. The paper shows that in desert borderlands, authority rests less on holding territory than on licensing movement. By tracing parallels between the nineteenth-century Sanusiyya tax-for-passage system and today’s checkpoint regime, it shows how control over routes shapes local development, communal rivalry, and Kufrah’s role in Sudan’s war.
This paper is the 14th in a working paper series on Roadblocks and Revenues, a collaboration between the Danish Institute for International Studies, the International Centre for Tax and Development and the Centre on Armed Groups.
