The Garrison-Entrepôt

Abstract This text examines the meanings and material effects of the garrison-entrepot in the Lake Chad Basin. As an historical institution, the garrison-entrepot is a site where practices and significations which are both military and commercial are concretized. It takes part in the history of conquest and violent modes of violent accumulation (slaving, razzia, raiding) known to the region. Today, the normalization of violence associated with certain manners of accumulations is manifest. Furthermore, the political economy of the Chad Basin is such that the garrison-entrepot has become a site of redistribution and fiscal authority. It contributes to the intensification and expansion of regional commercial circuits which are the bases for the exercice of regulatory authority (rents, prestations, charges) and the control of labor (guards, couriers, smugglers, intermediares). The later maintain ambiguous relationships to the physical frontiers of the nation-state as will as those of national regulation. Doubtless, the garrison-entrepot is a historical form of power that completes with the nation-state. But the fiscal relationships that emerge out of this phenomenon of the frontier are essential to the quest for new forms of economic power in the region; they are often exploited and even encouraged by extant regimes. Indeed, this counter-fiscality is atthe heartof the redefinition of "economic citizenship" in the region today.