Peer Schouten is correct in his observation that the main argument of my book, Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency, is that “immobilization is the main form of violence deployed by the state.” However, that violent resource is not just the monopoly of “the state” but is also deployed by a phalanx of actors beyond the state, ranging from armed opposition groups (e.g., Boko Haram), to subversive workers (e.g., achaba [commercial motorcycle] drivers), to pro-government militias (e.g., the Civilian Joint Task Force). In fact, one of my primary aims was to show how forms of existential immobility—produced and maintained by state corruption, repression, and neglect—made it possible for Boko Haram to mobilize the multitude of immobilized and dispossessed for its jihadist “counter-conduct.” Absent critical attention to the “contradictory, layered, and entangled politics of mobility” that Schouten points to, especially its imbrication with mobilization and statecraft, the story of insurgency and counterinsurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region would be incomplete, nay, vacuous.

Schouten’s perceptive review of my book demonstrates his astute capacity to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar—a hallmark of his own thoroughgoing treatment of mobility in Roadblock Politics—by, first accurately underscoring the double consciousness of my book: “[W]hile Agbiboa purports to use the new mobilities paradigm to shed new light on the nature of insurgency, I believe his biggest contribution is actually the opposite: using fine-grained knowledge of the Boko Haram insurgency to speak back to the new mobilities paradigm, challenging its penchant for abstract theorizing by speaking back to it from the messy empirical contexts of complex emergencies.” Indeed, by using the case of Boko Haram to underscore “the constitutive role of mobility in armed insurgency” (p. 17), a key motivating factor for me was to reconfigure the margins of the “new mobilities paradigm,” which takes Euro-America as the default site of research and interest (p. ix), and “rarely expand[s] beyond cultures and canonical discussions of mobility in Western societies” (p. 9). This habit reproduces entrenched imaginaries of non-Western mobilities as residual entities that offer nothing of value to the study of world historical movements or of the human condition writ large. So, Schouten is pinpoint in his observation that the new mobilities paradigm “can learn from the insights that emerge from Agbiboa’s study of the politics of vernacular mobilities at the periphery.”

Second, Schouten is apt in his note that the very frictions of mobility in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region constitute a vital site and form of livelihood for a range of actors dwelling in mobility, reinforcing my argument that mobility is at once resourceful and burdensome, agential and limiting (p. 36). Schouten should know. His own book is a remarkable testament to how the tensions inherent to the road complex in Central Africa open a lucrative if contested space for a mélange of publics (from soldiers to rebels to brokers), scales (from local to transnational, main roads to bush paths), and realms (from visible to invisible, spectacular to spectral), each leveraging its unique positionality “to manufacture profit” and to carve spheres of influence, action, and meaning out of connections and associated frictions.

To the extent that Schouten and I are both ultimately concerned about the embeddedness of mobility, power, and political economy in mycorrhizal relations that constitutes the grounds for collaborative survival (see Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, 2004, p. 138), we come from mutual worlds, even while sensitive to positions of difference. Through this intersubjective awareness, it is my hope that future studies of insurgency and counterinsurgency in Africa and beyond can allow themselves to be contaminated by the calculated and chance encounters in Roadblock Politics and Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency; and perhaps more importantly, to grasp the power of mobility to mean and to be more than.