ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the uniqueness of Nguéli, a border post integrated as a neighborhood of Chad’s capital N’Djamena. Nguéli serves to read the pervasiveness of predation and dispossession practices as well as the importance of individual or group positionality for the exercise of such practices. First of all, the very notion of Frontier is problematized and read in the backdrop of the moral economy literature so to stress how the skewed extraction relationship between Center and Periphery can be also seen at work in this very peculiar border site. Here, extractive and dispossession practices take place either small scale, at the hand of men in uniform, or on a larger scale by powerful individuals close to the regime and positioned in key posts. The frontier emerges as a device and administrative boundary to exploit: depending on the users and their sociocultural and class belonging, it can be the source of power and of a resilient regime, or it can be the stage, instrument and reason behind forms of small-scale semi-licit predation.
