Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my personal experience of violence, seizure, and terror at checkpoints in war afflicted areas within the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, I examine how these checkpoints work importantly as locally embedded sites of an authoritarian necropolis: a repressive and deadly state.

Paper long abstract:

This talk discusses militarised checkpoints in Cameroon’s Anglopnone war-torn areas as violent spaces of precarious life and abandonment. I suggest that abandonment is the negation of responsibility, that measure of power that demands consideration for moral and legal standards of duty and care. As such, abandonment should be recognised as an important notion in discussions of state power and the responsibility over life in Africa. Drawing on my personal experience of violence, seizure, and terror at checkpoints in war afflicted areas within the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon, I examine how these checkpoints work importantly as locally embedded sites of an authoritarian necropolis: a repressive and deadly state. Under such conditions, what are the conditions of everyday life? In addressing this question, I argue that abandonment is a deadly expression of state disengagement from the protection and enhancement of ordinary life in Africa. In Cameroon, this state of abandonment has not only proceeded through a variety of institutionally recognizable forms of divestment and disengagement from care over life but also especially through myriad processes of decentralization and re-investment in multiple orders of power with the freedom to extract, to seize, and even to appropriate and confiscate lives without legible channels of responsibility which, like accountability, would demand an ethical or morality commitment.