ABSTRACT The debate on decolonial thought has reached an unhelpful stalemate. A core problem in assessing decolonial thought is that the term ‘decolonization’ has been stretched so widely that it now allows for many competing uses. For some critics of decolonial thought such as Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, this overuse points to conceptual bankruptcy. For admirers, by contrast, it is this very conceptual reach and capacity to suture together vast histories under a single interpretive rubric that makes the ‘decolonial’ conceptually powerful. This article takes stock of what has been lost with this stalemate. It asks what might be gained by foregrounding the variation and disagreement about what decolonization means within anticolonial/decolonial political theories and politics. Building on a framework of political theories of decolonization, the author argues that the stalemate can be resolved by paying greater attention to the conceptual and political‐economic variations and differing political futures mapped out in different meanings of colonialism and decolonization. The article presents two models of decolonization to highlight the political stakes of the resonances and tensions between them, arguing that addressing the question of ‘which decolonization?’ can move the debate forward.
Over the past decade, cyber scamming has expanded rapidly across Southeast Asia. These operations cluster in compounds within business parks, casinos, industrial zones and other real estate developments. Although organized crime is often assumed to thrive where states are weak, this article offers a politically grounded explanation for why these economies take root in particular countries through complex and heterogeneous entanglements with the state. Drawing on critical scholarship, political settlements analysis and structural political economy, it shows that scam operations are mediated by existing systems of political authority rather than operating in opposition to them. Focusing on Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines, it demonstrates how scam economies have been integrated into long-standing arrangements shaped by patronage, rent extraction, territorial governance, contestation and conflict. Enabled by mobile transnational capital, including Chinese grey finance, offshore banking and cryptocurrency, these industries operate across borders and have become integral to the exercise and contestation of political power. The article advances a framework explaining how illicit economies become entwined with systems of governance, linking state power and the exercise of political authority to transnational organized crime in ways not unique to Southeast Asia.
In its own evaluation of the civil service reform project that took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2014 and 2021, the World Bank concluded that the project was 'moderately unsatisfactory'. It explained this characterization by referring to complex political dynamics, including a waning political will at the highest level. Built on a conceptualization of the Congolese administration as a socially and historically situated assemblage, this analysis of the reform foregrounds the role of administrative legacies. Both object and subject of the reform, the practices that allowed the administration to survive decades of fiscal collapse - the informalization of civil service employment and pay - proved pivotal. Far from simply failing to respond to external reform pressures, the administration repurposed and refracted reform initiatives according to its own entrenched logics (clientelist recruitment, reliance on salary supplements and the pursuit of positional security), with uneven and contradictory effects. Viewed from this angle, a more nuanced picture of reform outcomes emerges, which acknowledges the multiplicity of interests and responsibilities involved in the design and implementation of the reform, including those of the World Bank, whose tacit acquiescence of implementation dynamics may have further deepened informalization patterns.
This article analyses the recent dynamics of land grabbing in Paraguay, focusing on the Department of Alto Paraguay in the western (Chaco) region between 2009 and 2023. Drawing on a unique dataset based on Paraguay's Rural Landowners Registry, the article combines interview information with a review of academic and documentary sources to show that, unlike the global trend of deceleration since 2014, the land rush in Paraguay has not only persisted but has intensified in recent years, driven mainly by national and regional capital. The analysis identifies three key factors explaining this momentum: the availability of cheap land in an expanding agricultural commodity frontier; state protection and political stability that benefit large national and foreign landowners; and the presence of capital of dubious origin, linked to corruption, financial crimes and drug trafficking. The Paraguayan case thus contributes to the literature by demonstrating that land rush endures in contexts where legality, illegality and agro-extractivism intertwine, drawing greater attention to regional scales, non-institutional forms of capital and 'invisible' land uses shaping agrarian dynamics.
East Asian economies have become major creditors in recent decades. However, while existing studies address the macroeconomic impact on the global economy of capital flows from East Asian economies, the impact of norm and policy diffusion that accompany such flows has received relatively little attention. This article assesses the content and impact of financial market norms that are being disseminated from Japan and South Korea, the largest creditors in the region after China. It finds that the governments of Japan and South Korea have promoted a set of hybrid norms that mix developmental and liberal market approaches in domestic capital management, characterized by emphasis on the prudential management of financial liberalization, policy finance and capital accumulation by promoting savings. These norms do not challenge the existing order in the financial domain but rather help bridge the gap between economic developmentalism and financial liberalization. Evidence for the presence and impact of these norms is established by examining Japan and South Korea's engagement in international financial rule-setting organizations, in multilateral aid and in bilateral aid programmes.
This article examines the impact of natural resources on civil wars by focusing on the challenges faced by armed groups attempting to profit from Myanmar's opium sector. Economic theories of conflict hold that the presence of lootable resources can prolong civil wars by providing non-state armed groups with the resources and incentives to challenge the state. However, the emphasis on the presence of lootable resources and the capabilities of armed groups overlooks how these groups convert resources into wealth. This study examines Shan State in Myanmar during the first three decades of its post-World War II opium boom. While the increased opium production in Shan State offered a potential revenue stream for the dozens of non-state armed groups, the remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang forces dominated the trade. Drawing on the 'politics of passage', an approach attentive to the competing claims on trade in war zones, this article examines the various impediments faced by armed groups attempting to profit from the opium trade. Its findings indicate that revenue generation by armed groups was much more challenging than economic theories of civil war suggest. The article highlights a need to move beyond the mere presence and extraction of resources by powerful armed groups and to pay closer attention to the mundane but formidable challenges of profiting from a valuable resource sector.
This article examines the dynamics of checkpoint authority in Somalia, focusing on how kinship, mobility and checkpoint practices intersect to shape political and social orders. Challenging the notion that checkpoint governance is either an expression of state-like power or indicative of the state's absence, the authors argue that Somali checkpoints (isbaaro) must be understood in relation to the militarization and commercialization of clan-based institutions. The article draws on participatory cartography and semi-structured interviews with more than 80 Somali road users to contend that checkpoints serve as sites of social navigation and identity formation, reflecting broader historical and contemporary struggles over mobility and trade. This dynamic is understood through the principle of schismogenesis, the process of social division and differentiation whereby fiscal disagreements drive kinship groups to distance themselves from one another, resulting in new political forms and identities, while also entrenching political-economic marginalization along clan lines. Checkpoints thus offer a locus for observing the gestation of some of the more complex and fluctuating political dynamics of the Somali territories that have long confounded analysts, international practitioners and policy makers, helping to explain the persistent challenge of state building in Somalia.
The United Nations has declared 2026 the International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development. Against that backdrop, this article examines the experience of volunteerism, and specifically self-help voluntary labour in Tanzania in the early colonial period, to explore the place of volunteerism in the construction of the post-colonial state and its role as a site of alternative understandings of the nature of that state. The article draws attention to the long history of Global South volunteering, which pre-dates the rise of neoliberal state roll-back and increased reliance on private actors (including volunteers) for public provisioning. It seeks to understand the ways in which volunteerism by Tanzanians, in Tanzania, was a critical part of the (contested) imaginaries of what a new nation might look like after the collapse of colonial occupation. In doing so it challenges analyses and critiques of volunteering which present Global North mobilities as the normative experience. The analysis presented here explores volunteerism as a form of labour rather than primarily an experience and expression of civic engagement, and through that explores the relationship between volunteerism and the state in public provisioning and state construction.
This article critically examines the political economy of hydropower in India since its global reconfiguration as 'green energy' in the early 2000s. While an opportune convergence of interests among key global, national and subnational stakeholders contributed to the greening of hydropower in India, this reframing did not produce the expected flows of private capital into the development of hydropower projects. Yet the state persists in its support of hydropower, citing its importance for grid stabilization and national security. To understand why the Indian state frames hydropower as green energy and continues to pursue it despite challenges in attracting private investment, the article posits that this greening experiment must be situated within a longer continuum of state policy on hydropower. It argues that the greening of hydropower in India is driven less by global finance and more by the country's domestic political economy. In particular, the Indian state has adopted political and financial derisking techniques that include diluting environmental regulation, easing access to credit and placing stalling projects under public control when private capital flees. The article concludes that the Indian case of greening hydropower represents a distinctive form of green developmentalism through which the state pursues its long-term agendas, protects powerful interests and leaves the hegemony of coal intact.
Roadblocks, or checkpoints, are obligatory passage points that are erected by entities claiming authority over a given crossing. They are often the most common everyday interface between civilians and armed actors in conflict-affected contexts, but are overlooked in studies on either trade or authority amidst conflict. This article, which introduces a special issue on the topic, argues that roadblocks are a useful empirical entry point to questions regarding the practical, political and theoretical interplay of economic circulation and political contestation. It proposes the framework of 'the politics of passage', which focuses on the entangled struggles over movement and authority arising from the interaction of a claim to the right of passage and claims to power over it. Through this politics of passage a range of broader social, political and economic claims are made and contested. Within this framework, checkpoints are a privileged field site and useful heuristic device to understand the relationship between trade, conflict and authority in contexts of contested statehood. Roadblocks function as critical nodes where otherwise implicit claims by states and non-state actors are made explicit in the encounter - or confrontation - between people, capital and goods on the move, and those who claim authority over them. Understanding the nature of these claims, and what shapes the types of claim making that emerge in different contexts, is a central contribution of this article.
This article examines cooperation in roadblock politics. It discusses how the border closure between Colombia and Venezuela from 2015 to 2022 and the subsequent bilateral tensions created a political economy of smuggling whereby state officials delegated basic state functions to organized crime groups in order to contain political dissidents and rival non-state actors, to oversee illegal economies and to maintain social control. The roots of this political economy are instances of negotiated mobility that occur at checkpoints along the multiple informal border trails, where smugglers, organized crime groups and state officials interact. The article builds upon previous research on borders and extra-legal governance in Colombia through direct observations, in-depth interviews and secondary data. It contributes to the crime-conflict nexus literature, improving our understanding of the rationales behind the arrangements that exist between organized crime groups and states at borders and expanding the research agenda on extra-legal governance.
Following Myanmar's military coup in February 2021, the State Administrative Council (SAC) established checkpoints between towns under its control and rural areas increasingly governed by anti-junta resistance forces. Here, military personnel command trade and extort from people, inflating the price of consumer goods and agricultural inputs and restricting the mobility of civilian and anti-junta actors. In response, resistance forces set up their own checkpoints to cut supply lines, monitor the movements of SAC troops and tax the passage of (mostly) high-value goods. Based on fieldwork in Sagaing Region and Chin State between 2022 and 2024, this article develops a theoretical framework to understand the relational dynamics at and between checkpoints operated by SAC and resistance forces, and examines the resulting shifts in livelihoods and social roles. Interactions at roadblocks and their structural consequences highlight the adaptive and relational nature of the fiscal social contract between armed authorities and civilians during wartime. The junta deploys checkpoints to extract revenue and impose punishment, while resistance forces use them to undermine military supply lines and levy taxes to fund the armed struggle and social governance. Rural livelihoods have been upheaved as the complexities, costs and risks of navigating checkpoints prompted reduced cash cropping, deepened reciprocity practices and altered social roles, particularly for women. Despite the junta's goal of suppressing organized dissent, these shifts have ultimately reinforced rather than weakened sustained community support for resistance forces.
This article examines how Kurdish smugglers navigate state and insurgent checkpoints in the borderlands of western Iran. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyses two key navigational tactics: persin, a form of negotiated passage involving transaction, recognition and the contingent toleration of authority; and jimi, rendered here as fugitive passage, comprising situated manoeuvres to evade, avoid or escape checkpoint control. These tactics operate as constitutive practices that forge the informal and contingent orders emerging at checkpoints. Smugglers co-produce these checkpoint orders by physically and relationally navigating the infrastructures that govern mobility. Grounded in the 'politics of passage', the analysis positions checkpoints as active arenas of claim making where authority is enacted, transacted and reconfigured in practice. Attending to divergent checkpoint regimes, the article demonstrates that state checkpoints rely on personalized and unpredictable extraction, whereas insurgent checkpoints impose routinized, moralized systems of taxation. Smugglers adjust their tactics accordingly, revealing how infrastructures of mobility are shaped by both sovereign enforcement and those who navigate, subvert and rework their constraints.
Territorial control is a central concept in the study of civil wars and rebel governance. However, scholars often fall into a 'territorial trap', assuming that territorial control is either an outcome of or a precondition for armed governance. Based on immersive fieldwork in eastern Myanmar, this article traces how different spatial orderings of power can emerge either territorially or extra-territorially. The use of checkpoints as a comparative device demonstrates that sovereignty is not a geographically fixed attribute, but instead an effect of the everyday practices of armed groups, contingent upon and shaped by the presence of other violent actors. The findings challenge both dyadic models of conflict based on the technology of warfare and Weberian ontologies of power based on territorial control. The authors find alternative sovereign formations of armed group organization that operate through different rationalities, registers and practices, rather than exercising power over subjects within a bounded territory. They argue that future research agendas should move beyond the structural determinism of the rebel territorial trap and instead investigate agency-based explanations for how and why armed groups seek to govern.
This study examines the role of checkpoint taxation in both the emergence and the disintegration of neo-patrimonial political order in Afghanistan. While it focuses on the administrations of Hamid Karzai (2001-14) and Ashraf Ghani (2014-21) and the Taliban's insurgency (2001-21), it situates these dynamics within a long historical trajectory. It argues that control of checkpoints as rent-generating sites and the allocation of access to them are crucial for consolidating patrons' influence over strongmen and powerful elites. While neo-patrimonialism and checkpoint taxation have each been studied independently, their intersection and the implications for political order and disintegration remain under-explored. Drawing on interviews, secondary sources and the author's professional experience with fiscal reforms in Afghanistan, the article suggests that access to checkpoint rents is central to sustaining neo-patrimonial political order, while its disruption fuels conflict and ultimately regime change. It further demonstrates that the Taliban's victory was enabled in part by the failure of the Afghan government and its international partners to recognize the historical importance of trade route control in shaping conflict cycles.
Along arterial roads in northeast India, bordering Myanmar, various armed groups and state actors collect 'taxes' at checkpoints. These checkpoints are sites of interaction where the power dynamics between armed groups, state officials and civilians are constantly negotiated, embedded in a larger network of social and political relationships. Based on over 100 interviews with armed groups, businesspeople, state actors and truck drivers, this article develops a figurational framework to throw light on the linkages between checkpoints, authorities and civilians in conflict zones. Drawing on Norbert Elias's work, the framework provides a structured yet flexible approach to investigate the interconnectedness of different levels of interdependent relationships - between actors at the checkpoint, along the road, and beyond. The article explores how, together, these figurations at different levels constitute a fluid political order, shaping processes of legitimization and violence. Going beyond providing an understanding of the politics of roads in northeast India, the framework can be used to better investigate power, conflict dynamics and political ordering across conflict zones.
Informal settlements are often portrayed as marginal spaces, excluded from formal economies and property regimes - a framing that obscures the social differentiation within them. This article examines how the landlord-tenant hierarchy structures inequality in Zandspruit, an informal settlement on the periphery of Johannesburg. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, it shows how land and housing operate as income-generating assets, producing a divide between landlords - typically long-standing residents who lease backyard rooms or subdivided plots - and tenants - often newer arrivals or migrants reliant on insecure wage work and rental housing. Situated within South Africa's history of racialized dispossession and post-apartheid labour-market precarity, the article brings theories of rentier capitalism into dialogue with anthropological work on distribution. It shows how grassroots rentierism, grounded in popular notions of ownership and legitimacy rather than formal title, involve intra-local distribution and extraction that intensify inequalities within marginalized urban communities. The article demonstrates how class differentiation is reproduced through rent extraction within local distributional circuits, rather than solely through employment.
Financialization shapes the ways in which middle-income countries and their non-financial corporations integrate into global value chains and the global financial system. This integration, in turn, shapes the ways in which these corporations engage with financialization. Focusing on large listed non-financial corporations, this article unpacks these dynamics. It advances an integrated analytical framework to facilitate an exploration of financialization sources and processes that are specific to the middle-income country context, and that emerge and operate across micro, meso and macro levels. The authors identify financialization sources related to different types of profits and rents, and articulate financialization processes through which value is extracted. The framework is then applied to three case studies of non-financial corporations across different sectors in South Africa, a middle-income country undergoing premature deindustrialization and financialization: Sasol in chemicals, Shoprite in retail, and MTN in information and communication technology. The analysis reveals three main elements that are characteristic of middle-income economies and their subordinate position within the global hierarchies of production and finance: (1) rents feature strongly as a financialization source; (2) the need to attract foreign capital and manage external vulnerabilities shapes financialization processes; and (3) extracted value is primarily channelled abroad.
This article uses the notion of crisis complex to analyse the relationship between labour migration and crisis from an institution- and process-oriented perspective. Such an interrogation is timely, given the increasingly crisis-prone dynamics shaping global labour systems and migration governance, including recruitment, skills recognition and the political privileging of temporary labour - all reinforcing a structural reliance on migrant workforces in capitalist development. Temporary labour migration from the Global South is increasingly framed as a development 'solution' to both unemployment in origin countries and labour and skills shortages in the Global North, precisely because its temporary and conditional nature is seen as politically palatable within contexts of anti-migrant rhetoric and economic nationalism. These migration schemes reflect the unequal exchange between Southern and Northern regions, contributing to the exploitation and protracted precarity of migrant workers. Drawing on empirical evidence from a 2024 pilot project, this article examines how temporary labour migration is shaped by a broader crisis complex, understood as a policy solution that has emerged through a multilayered process driven by political framings, institutional logics and actor involvement across three dimensions: skills and development, governance institutions and business models.
