This paper by Joshua Craze and Ferenc Dávid Markó examines the role of checkpoints in South Sudan’s political economy, challenging the view that they are simply obstacles to trade, humanitarian access and state reform. It argues that checkpoints are a central form of state authority in a country where government salaries and public services are limited, oil revenues have declined and humanitarian funding is increasingly uncertain. The paper shows that rather than representing state failure, checkpoints reflect the longstanding predatory character of state power in South Sudan, with communities themselves sometimes adopting similar systems to resist elite extraction. 

This paper is the 16th 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.

M23’s offensive and capture of Goma have dominated recent coverage of the crisis in the eastern DRC. To unpack what’s happening on the ground — and what it means for the wider region — we spoke with Centre on Armed Groups Fellow Christoph Vogel, an academic, investigator, and writer who has spent more than 15 years researching armed conflict in the DRC. Christoph discusses M23’s end game, the regional power dynamics fueling the conflict, and what we might expect in the weeks and months ahead.

This Working Paper develops a political sociology of roadblocks to demonstrate how roadblocks in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) contribute to the production and reproduction of public authority. The approach offers a refined conceptualisation of agency during roadblock encounters, which provides a better understanding of when and why people comply with demands made by roadblock operators and of the cumulative effects of the micro-practices enacted at roadblocks on broader sociopolitical orders