Research Seminar Series: Peer Schouten

Presenter: Peer Schouten is a senior research at DIIS, professor at Ghent University, and associate researcher at the International Peace Information Service in Antwerp. He is the author of Roadblock Politics: the Origins of Violence in Central Africa (2022, Cambridge University Press).

Title: Circulation, accumulation, and resistance in the Congo Basin: a view from the rainforest frontier

Abstract: Between 2013 and 2019, an elephant called Ya Mado disrupted trade along the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s national highway number four, the backbone of connectivity and trade running through the heart of the equatorial rainforest. Unharmed by bullets, Ya Mado turned out to be a magical creature summoned by communities to attempt to resist the disruptive effects of unfettered commercial farming and mining in their forest heartland. Based on this anecdote, this talk explores the empirical phenomenon of the roadblock—and disruption of trade more generally—to construe an alternative model of political order and its contestation premised on control over circulation—not territory and population—in the Congo Basin. Because this bioregion combines vast tropical rainforests with low population densities, state-making efforts past and present have resigned themselves to controlling narrow points of passage along trade routes. With value accruing to natural resources and commodities only in circulation, the logistical spaces of footpaths, feeder roads, rivers and highways become the heart of a political geography where political projects and moral economies clash and meet in ‘circulation struggles’ or struggles over the terms of passage and how wealth deriving from it is distributed.