The Politics of Passage: Roadblocks, Taxation, and Control in Conflict
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Research in Brief 167
Modern states have only recently monopolised the authority to control movement across territories. Prior to this, checkpoints helped rulers assert jurisdiction over territories and finance their claims to power by concentrating control over strategic passage points along key trade routes. Today, struggles over mobility are central to livelihoods and wealth in postcolonial contexts, where displacement, and extracting payments from the flow of goods, cattle, and migrants, sustain and fuel conflict. Research shows that roadblocks are particularly integral to the dynamics of armed conflict – driving violence, and shaping the forms of order espoused by various types of armed actors, state and non-state alike.
This introductory paper to the DIIS/ICTD/CAG working paper series, Roadblocks and Revenues, argues that roadblocks deserve more theoretical attention, as they constitute a distinct claim to authority. The authors propose that the connection between roadblocks, conflict dynamics, political order-making, and state formation can be explored through the ‘politics of passage’ – contestations over movement and authority that take place at roadblocks in fragile settings.
Max Gallien is a Research Fellow at the ICTD. His research specialises in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa and development politics. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics. Max co-leads the informality and taxation programme with Vanessa, as well as the ICTD’s capacity building programme.
Shalaka Thakur is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, where she works on
the role of power in conflict zones. She has been conducting extensive field research in
north-east India over the last decade, looking at armed group governance, local political
economy and borderland politics.
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at the ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. Vanessa leads the ICTD’s new programme on civil society engagement in tax reform and co-leads the research programme on informal taxation.
Florian Weigand is the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups at ODI and
a Research Associate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work
focuses on armed groups, illicit economies and international interventions and explores the
politics and societal dynamics of conflict zones, borderlands, and other complex
environments. He has conducted extensive research in South Asia and Southeast Asia and
is the author of Waiting for Dignity: Legitimacy and Authority in Afghanistan (Columbia
University Press, 2022) and Conflict and Transnational Crime: Borders, Bullets & Business in
Southeast Asia (Edward Elgar, 2020) and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of
Smuggling (Routledge, 2021).
Citation: Schouten, P. et al. (2025) The Politics of Passage: Roadblocks, Taxation, and Control in Conflict, ICTD Research in Brief 167, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/ICTD.2025.047
