ABSTRACT
This chapter departs from the analysis of situation of structural vulnerability or dependency to patronage networks, and therefore of forms of dispossession, to turn the attention on how the notion of ‘crisis’ is also mobilized by power-holders as a device to reinforce their grip over wealth circulation, from the bottom to the top of the transmission chain. Ethnolinguistic and sociocultural belongings are mobilized to cope and survive (and, at times, progress) by clients or subaltern actors, in combination with the extraction practices of power-holders and almost never in opposition to them. Such networks of accumulation present several constraints to whoever seeks to benefit from them from a subaltern position, and may lead to unexpected outcomes, such as the shadowy transactions which are rumored to be behind the 2015 N’Djamena bombings. At the bottom of the subaltern scale lies the dwellers of the mud-brick quarters of the border site of Nguéli. Here, in 2016, the notion of state of exception and the specter of terrorism and insecurity have been employed by rapacious local administrators to forcibly remove and displace thousands of working poor, thereby revealing another (and more recent) aspect of violent extraction practices: accumulation through violent displacement.
