Yemen’s war is also fought through roads. This paper shows how checkpoints along the Abyan–Aden–Lahej–al-Dhale’a–Dhamar corridor have become tools for extracting money, sorting people and goods, and enforcing rival claims to authority. It contrasts fragmented checkpoint rule in government/STC areas with the more centralised Houthi system, while showing that both make movement costly and politically controlled.

What kind of authority is built at a desert checkpoint? This paper examines how control over movement around Kufrah, in southeastern Libya near the borders with Sudan and Chad, turns checkpoints into institutions of rule, where armed actors tax passage, define legitimate trade, exclude rivals, and shape the logistics of regional war.

How do checkpoints shape online scam economies? This paper examines how control over border crossings, roadblocks, and gateways sustains scam centres in Myanmar’s borderlands and shapes the uneven effects of anti-scam enforcement.

Why are some checkpoints more violent than others? This paper examines how control over key transport routes shapes violence in conflict zones and affects civilian populations.

This Working Paper proposes that checkpoints along transnational trade routes are central to conflict economies, facilitating the extraction of rents by armed groups without the need for extensive territorial control or bargaining with local populations. In addition, the paper explores the distributional impacts of checkpoint taxation.

This Working Paper looks at how smugglers navigate state and insurgent checkpoints in the Kurdish region of Iran. Through bribes that secure negotiated passages or using modified cars that enable evasion and circumventions, Kurdish smugglers co-produce contingent informal orders that vary significantly across these spatial nodes of power along illegal trade routes.

This Working Paper asks: what are the governance strategies and technologies that armed groups use to project authority? Comparing the use of checkpoints by two armed groups that operate in overlapping areas in Myanmar’s borderlands, Centre-fellow Tony Neil and Saw Day Chit find that armed groups use checkpoints differently to achieve different outcomes that are shaped by underlying ideological and cosmological foundations.

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

This working paper examines the dynamics of checkpoint authority in Somalia, focusing on how kinship, mobility and checkpoint practices intersect to shape political and social orders. The paper argues that checkpoints in Somalia—or isbaaro as they are locally called—are deeply embedded in the social fabric of clan society, where the practice of abanship—the brokerage of passage through clan territory—plays a crucial role. This brokerage not only facilitates trade but also reinforces clan identity and social differentiation

Following Myanmar’s February 2021 coup, checkpoints have exploded, crucial to both the military junta and resistance forces. Based on fieldwork in Sagaing Region and Chin State in 2022-2023, this paper by Gerard McCarthy and Kyle Nyana theorises the relational dynamics at and between their respective checkpoints.