This paper by David Mansfield examines how control over Afghanistan’s roadblocks and border crossings shaped the political economy of the Afghan Republic and contributed to its collapse in 2021. It shows how the country’s extensive trade routes became sources of revenue and patronage for government officials, provincial powerholders and the Taliban, with control over strategic points along major highways often more important than control over territory. Drawing on more than 1,200 interviews, high-resolution satellite imagery and geospatial data, the paper maps trade flows and estimates the revenues generated at key roadblocks. It challenges the emphasis on drugs and minerals in accounts of Taliban financing, showing that taxation of everyday goods transported along Afghanistan’s main roads generated substantial revenues.

This paper by Joshua Craze and Ferenc Dávid Markó examines the role of checkpoints in South Sudan’s political economy, challenging the view that they are simply obstacles to trade, humanitarian access and state reform. It argues that checkpoints are a central form of state authority in a country where government salaries and public services are limited, oil revenues have declined and humanitarian funding is increasingly uncertain. The paper shows that rather than representing state failure, checkpoints reflect the longstanding predatory character of state power in South Sudan, with communities themselves sometimes adopting similar systems to resist elite extraction. 

This paper is the 16th in a working paper series on Roadblocks and Revenues, a collaboration between the Danish Institute for International Studies, the International Centre for Tax and Development and the Centre on Armed Groups.

Centre on Armed Groups: 2026 Summer Reading List. We asked our team and experts what they've been reading, watching, and listening to. This year's list ranges from ancient Greek mercenaries to Arctic geopolitics.

Dr Inna Rudolf outlines the contestations surrounding debates on the PMF’s integration with Iraq’s formal state apparatus, including factional differences, ideological roots, and transnational alliances.

Yemen’s war is also fought through roads. This paper shows how checkpoints along the Abyan–Aden–Lahej–al-Dhale’a–Dhamar corridor have become tools for extracting money, sorting people and goods, and enforcing rival claims to authority. It contrasts fragmented checkpoint rule in government/STC areas with the more centralised Houthi system, while showing that both make movement costly and politically controlled.

This discussion paper examines how the international order that once contained armed conflict is fracturing across multiple, simultaneous dimensions. Drawing on cases spanning Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, the Sahel, and Ukraine, the paper argues that these compounding failures have given armed groups and de facto authorities far greater freedom and resources than most analysts anticipated.

The paper identifies four cross-cutting dynamics reshaping this landscape: the breakdown of the classic patron-proxy model into fragmented, multi-patron brokerage networks; the growing economic and infrastructural power of armed groups, who now govern revenue streams, trade routes, and services independent of external backers; the retreat of international norm enforcement in favour of local, informal bargaining; and the weaponisation of misinformation to derail negotiations and access agreements. On this basis, the paper calls for a fundamental shift in how donors and practitioners approach engagement.

What kind of authority is built at a desert checkpoint? This paper examines how control over movement around Kufrah, in southeastern Libya near the borders with Sudan and Chad, turns checkpoints into institutions of rule, where armed actors tax passage, define legitimate trade, exclude rivals, and shape the logistics of regional war.

Al-Shabaab has spent a decade building a coherent public case against humanitarian aid. This narrative is grounded in Islamic theology, sharpened by genuine grievances about corruption and exclusion, and extended into a story of foreign domination stretching back centuries. Drawing on a database of over 50,000 Al-Shabaab media sources produced between 2016 and 2026, this report reconstructs that narrative on its own terms: not to endorse it, but to understand it well enough to engage with the populations living under it.

How do checkpoints shape online scam economies? This paper examines how control over border crossings, roadblocks, and gateways sustains scam centres in Myanmar’s borderlands and shapes the uneven effects of anti-scam enforcement.

This research report explores the perceptions, motives, and practices of non-state armed groups and de facto authorities regarding children’s access to essential services across four case-studies: Mali, Myanmar, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Yemen.