War over Checkpoints: Nine theses on roadblocks and the politics of circulation in conflict-affected borderlands
Peer Schouten, Joshua Craze, Shalaka Thakur, Abubaker Lndi, Erica Gaston, Olivier Walther, David Mansfield, Ibrahim Jalal, Ferenc Markó, Xu Peng, and Florian Weigand
Roadblocks & Revenues Working Paper Series #11
This working paper advances nine theses on checkpoints (or roadblocks) as central institutions in contemporary conflict-affected borderlands. Drawing on discussions at a dedicated workshop involving researchers working on Chad, DR Congo, Libya, Myanmar, South Sudan, West Africa and Yemen, the paper challenges narrow readings of roadblocks exclusively as security devices or sites of corruption. Instead, it conceptualises them as politically and economically generative nodes through which authority is exercised, rents are extracted and redistributed, markets are shaped, and conflict is financed. The paper shows how control over circulation often trumps territorial control; how checkpoint governance varies systematically with transport geographies and trade density; and how state and non-state actors frequently converge in practice, sometimes with insurgents outperforming governments in predictability and standardisation. The paper further demonstrates that checkpoint proliferation can reflect deliberate coalition management or coping strategies under fiscal collapse rather than governance failure, and that the costs of checkpoint taxation are borne indirectly through commodity chains, disproportionately affecting vulnerable producers and consumers. By organising these insights into nine analytically distinct but tension-filled theses, the paper offers diagnostic tools rather than prescriptions, aimed at scholars, policymakers, and practitioners concerned with conflict financing, humanitarian access and stabilisation in borderland economies structured by circulation.
This paper is the 11th 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.
