Living by the Gun in Chad by Marielle Debos

Author:Marielle Debos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783605354
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2016-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Governing the inter-war

What is the role of the state in the reproduction of the hierarchies produced by and in war? What is the role of the state in the government of (in)security? In this final chapter, I analyse the production of inequalities and the specific positions of those powerful individuals known as ‘untouchables’. I study how illegal economic activities are paradoxically shaped by the state and the role of impunity in the daily government of the inter-war. I concentrate on a militarised economic space where men in uniform coexist, collaborate or compete: namely, customs. Economic activities at customs are marked both by a gendered division of labour and by powerful political and social hierarchies. This analysis leads me to question the mainstream discourse on the state in Chad and elsewhere in the global South.

The ‘untouchables’: positions of accumulation and impunity

Unregulated economic activities and violent modes of appropriation in the Lake Chad Basin have been studied by Janet Roitman. In her work Fiscal Disobedience, she showed that such practices turn the bush and border areas into spaces for wealth creation.1 The unregulated economy of the border, which is in no sense marginal, provides a space for new forms of social mobility for ‘economic refugees’ and ‘military refugees’; it is a foundation for economic redistribution. The most innovative aspect in Janet Roitman’s work is the way she shows how, in an environment of economic austerity, many of those who take part in such activities ‘exercise claims to wealth through violent means, such as seizure and razzia, thus insisting upon the right to wealth through conquest and asserting that spoils are licit forms of wealth’.2 Income from illegal and violent economic activities comes to be seen as a licit form of wealth. In particular, she examines the way in which seizures are problematised, and concludes that the region is marked by an ‘ethics of illegality’.

Janet Roitman leaves open the question of the production of inequalities in the unregulated economy. If the unregulated economy linked to arms (or to the ‘garrison entrepôt’) is lucrative, which people are able to enrich themselves and enjoy actual social mobility? Who, at the border or in the bush, is likely to reach a position of power and accumulation? Who can engage in illegal activities unmolested? Even in a country affected by decades of conflict such as Chad, only a minority of armed men benefit from war and violent modes of accumulation. In other words, while violent modes of accumulation are ordinary, upward social mobility is exceptional.

The question of social differentiation cannot be separated from the question of the privileges and the impunity granted to those in circles close to the state. Not all men in arms enjoy access to positions of power and accumulation. It is not enough to have participated in the victory of the MPS in 1990 or to be skilled in business to rise in society. You also need to have stayed close to the MPS. However, the protection offered by closeness to power is never total, and falls from grace are common.

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