"Along the muddy roads and forested rivers snaking through Central Africa, rebels and soldiers, traditional authorities and civil servants, erect roadblocks where they deploy the threat of violence to impose their will on passersby. This book takes a journey along those roadblocks, on the way offering an exploration of the hitherto invisible web of politics with which these roadblocks mesh-roadblock politics. If established approaches to state-making often emphasize power as having to do with centralized control over territory and population, this book offers a conception in which control over the movement of people and goods is central to patterns of state formation and conflict. Given that part of what travels along Central African roadblocks tangles into global supply chains, this book is then also by necessity an exploration of the politics of global trade and how it links to patterns of conflict and violence in Central Africa, historical and contemporary. Roadblock Politics thus puts roadblocks on the map not only as a pervasive phenomenon with certain empirical features, but also as a key political technique in the struggle to shape mobile economies that extend far beyond the region, ultimately linking to far-flung places"--