I want to begin by thanking Perspectives on Politics for organizing this Critical Dialogue. Daniel Agbiboa and I share many commitments—to the politics of mobility, to the vagaries of armed mobilization, and to approaching the world from the viewpoint of those who have to move around in it. His review raises many good points, only a few of which I’ll be able to address given constraints of length—the rest will surely inform my future research and hopefully a more sustained conversation between our research agendas.

First, I surely have only scratched the surface of what there is to say about the politics of circulation in Central Africa. In the book, and the collective reports that gave rise to it, my closest local collaborators and co-authors—particularly Janvier and Saidi in Congo and Soleil-Parfait and the late Igor in CAR—and I have tried as much as possible to give voice to the concerns of “ordinary” Central Africans like Maman Josephine. I do hope that future research on the politics of roadblocks is able to delve more into the questions that Agbiboa raises, for they are incredibly important. Some of the glaring gaps that Agbiboa astutely identifies in my book are being addressed as we speak by much more able scholars, such as in the report by Godefroid Muzalia et al. (Roadblocks ‘at the rhythm of the country’, 2021) on the dense social fabric around roadblocks in South Kivu.

Second, it is exciting to hear that many of the dynamics I describe for Central Africa resonate in West Africa. But Agbiboa thinks I “could have drawn more contiguous examples and, perhaps, richer empirical and theoretical insights from cases in West Africa … Schouten sometimes appears too wedded to ‘long distanced’ examples offered by Western scholars like James Scott rather than closer examples from elsewhere in the Sahel-Saharan.” There is, of course, a limit to how much ground one can cover, and I believe the politics of mobility in Central Africa and the sophistication with which its inhabitants reflect on it to be rich enough for one book. Surely his reflection about “long-distanced” theories wasn’t to discourage using theories and examples from further away: after all, Agbiboa himself draws on a vast and eclectic range of “long-distanced” ideas in his book. The study of mobility should par excellence involve traveling concepts, however long-distance: our subjects and their goods, after all, travel just as far and widely, despite the many efforts to hinder or slow them down. Any conversations between Central Africa and the Sahel, I think, could start with the similarities and differences in how people forge power—political, economic, and symbolic—out of the capacity to locally disrupt such movements. I believe the roadblocks I have focused on sit on a continuum of tactics in this broader field of power, one that encompasses the intersections of pastoralism, highway banditry, and mobile warfare studied by Saïbou Issa, Christian Seignobos, and others. It goes to show that Sahelians are just as well versed in such politics as Central Africans, and that Agbiboa and I fortunately have many paths to travel to understand how mobility and armed mobilization interact.