The Checkpoint State: Extortion, Discontents, and the Pursuit of Survival

IF 1.1 2区社会学 Q2 ANTHROPOLOGY

Public Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-18 DOI:10.1215/08992363-9435488

Daniel E. Agbiboa

引用次数: 1

Abstract

This essay is about everyday encounters with the checkpoint state in a locus of enduring counterinsurgency. Specifically, the essay examines how road-transport workers in northeast Nigeria experience and negotiate the omnipresent threat of the checkpoint state in their workaday world. Further, the essay underscores the spatial practices and social imaginaries through which the checkpoint state is constituted as simultaneously an apparatus of predation and as a space of negotiation. For mobile subjects in extremis, the threat of the checkpoint state is not episodic, but a feature of the landscape itself—a permanent, radical sense of immobility and insecurity. The daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the “war on terror” compels road-transport workers to participate in the corrupt, coercive, and humiliating system they denounce.

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检查站国家：勒索、不满和对生存的追求

这篇文章讲述的是在一个持续反叛乱的地方，与检查站国家的日常遭遇。具体而言，本文考察了尼日利亚东北部的道路运输工人如何在日常生活中体验和应对检查站状态无处不在的威胁。此外，本文强调了空间实践和社会想象，通过这些实践和想象，检查站状态被构成为一种捕食机制和一种谈判空间。对于处于极端情况下的流动主体来说，检查站状态的威胁不是偶发的，而是景观本身的一个特征——一种永久的、激进的静止感和不安全感。在“反恐战争”的阴影下，道路运输工人每天都在追求生存，这迫使他们参与他们所谴责的腐败、胁迫和羞辱的制度。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Public Culture Multiple-

CiteScore

2.10

自引率

6.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Public Culture is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year—in January, May, and September. It is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. A four-time CELJ award winner, Public Culture has been publishing field-defining ethnographies and analyses of the cultural politics of globalization for over thirty years. The journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks. Artists, activists, and scholars, both well-established and younger, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture.