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JANET ROITMAN, Fiscal Disobedience: an anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press (pb US$15.95, £12.950 -0 691 11870 1; hb US$59.50, £38.950 -0 691 11869 8). 2004, 216pp.
As liberalization, globalization and state incapacity shift regulatory initiative away from formal state structures, the issue of economic governance in contemporary Africa has become increasingly complex. What kind of regulatory systems obtain in a situation of burgeoning informal economies, collapsing states and increasingly globalized smuggling networks? Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of Africanist scholars have attempted to answer this question. Janet Roitman takes up the challenge in her recent book on emergent forms of economic regulation in a region of central Africa she calls the 'Chad Basin'. Using an idiosyncratic combination of ethnography and political philosophy, Roitman analyses the changing and increasingly fragmented pattern of regulatory authority issuing from the apparent disorder of contemporary African economies.
The book's point of departure is a campaign of civil disobedience that took place in Cameroon in the early 1990s, which is viewed as a 'productive moment' that exposes hidden regulatory processes operating beyond the framework of the state. These embedded forms of regulation are traced through an institutional history of the Chad Basin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where regulatory authority is said to have been shaped by violent forms of appropriation based on slaving, seizure, tribute and colonial conquest. Roitman argues that contemporary economic practices and networks, characterized by smuggling, banditry and extortion, do not represent a rejection of regulatory authority per se, but a resurgence of brutal logics of regulation embedded in central African society. Ethnographic research is used to document how popular livelihood struggles have contributed to the rise of military-commercial networks...