Despite the centrality of mobility to the operations of both state and non-state armed groups as well as the survival strategies of civilians in conflict zones, issues of mobility and access have remained tangential to how we analyze contemporary armed insurgencies. The extant literature focuses rather exclusively on the "roots" of armed insurgencies while glossing over its "routes" and trajectories. Scholars thus miss the complex ways in which state and non-state actors, as well as local populations, interact with and navigate around infrastructures of mobility. Daniel E. Agbiboa foregrounds mobility in this book as a key arena where state and non-state actors jostle for ascendancy, reflecting the contested nature of power. Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency has three interconnected objectives: (1) to analyze the evolution and mutation of Boko Haram in light of how the sect interacts with mobility and mobile infrastructures; (2) to gauge the extent to which the governance of mobility has been a central factor in the war against Boko Haram since 2009; and (3) to assess the impact of Boko Haram's mobile warfare and the state's regulation of mobility on people whose livelihoods rest squarely on movement and access. By studying the armed insurgencies through the lens of mobility and access, new questions are generated, established themes are rethought, and fresh empirical sites are explored. Finally, the book's focus on Africa provides a long overdue corrective to extant literature on mobilities, which too rarely expand beyond cultures and canonical discussions of mobility in Western societies.

In Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency, Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world's deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state's "war on terror" mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided, anarchic, and dangerous. Instead, this book underscores the contradictions of mobility in conflict zones as simultaneously a resource and a burden. Intellectually rigorous yet clear, engaging, and accessible, Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency is a seminal contribution that lays bare the neglected linkages between conflict and mobility.

Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.