The Right to Tax: Economic Citizenship in the Chad Basin

Roitman's paper explores the concept of ‘economic citizenship’ through an examination of practices in the cross-border territories of the Chad Basin. In doing so, Roitman demonstrates the simultaneous existence of regulated and unlicensed economic activities. Her exploration of the discourse surrounding these economic practices, and the civil disobedience of the Villes Mortes campaign, which brought regulated and unregulated traders together in a refusal to pay tax, reveals a concept of economic citizenship at work. Her analysis reveals the genealogies of citizenship in the Chad Basin, where notions of freedom were marked by the legacies of Islamic conquest as well as of French colonialism.