Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies: Change and Continuity

ISBN-13: 9781349950126 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 342 str.

Jacqueline Knorr; William P. Murphy; Anne-Sophie Helger

Opis

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic). The emphasis on crises in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades. Contemporary crises and changes in the region provoke a challenge to accepted ways of understanding and imagining socio-political life in the region whether at the level of subnational and national communities, or international and regional structures of interest, such as refugees, weapon trafficking, cross-border military incursions, regional security, and transnational epidemics. This book explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented research on the region and re-evaluates them in the light of the contemporary structural dynamics of crises, changes and continuities."

Recenzje

"These essays constitute a body of knowledge that policy planners working in the Upper Guinea Coast region should know about and include in their work. The authors and editors do not specifically address, however, the challenges of actually transferring this knowledge and making sure it is integrated into the policy process." (Mary H. Moran, Anthropos, Vol. 114 (2), 2019)

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Deconstructing Tropes of Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea

Christian K. Højbjerg, Jacqueline Knörr, William P. Murphy

Part I: (Re-)Configuration of Identifications and Alliances

2. Poro Society, Migration and Political Incorporation on the Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone

Anaïs Ménard

3. Challenging the Classical Parameters of 'Doing Host-Refugee Politics': The Case of Casamance Refugees in The Gambia

Charlotte Ray 

4. Betterment versus Complicity: Struggling with Patron-Client Logica in Sierra Leone

Anne Menzel

5. Kinship Tropes as Critique of Patronage in Post-War Sierra Leone

William P. Murphy

Part II: Challenging Conventions of Explaining and Situating Violent Conflict

6. Grand Narratives of Crisis: Grand Narratives of Crisis: Customary Conflicts as a Factor in the Liberian Civil War and Implications for Policy

David Brown

7. Historicizing as a Legal Trope of Jeopardy in Asylum Narratives and Expert Testimonies of Gender-Based Violence

Benjamin Lawrance

8. Revisiting Tropes of Environmental and Social Change in Casamance, Senegal

Martin Evans

9. Casamance Secession: National Narratives of Marginalization and Integration

Markus Rudolf

Part III: (Re-)Contextualizing Postcolonial Statehood and National Belonging

10. Transcending Traditional Tropes: Autochthony as a Discourse of Conflict and Integration in Post-war Krio/Non-Krio Relations in Sierra Leone

Sylvanus Spencer

11. Ethnicity as Trope of Political Belonging and Conflict: Cape Verdean Identity and Agency in Guinea-Bissau

Christoph Kohl

12. Dynamics in the Host-Stranger Paradigm: The Broker Role of a Latecomer Association in Western Côte d’Ivoire

Katharina Heitz Tokpa

Part IV: (Re-)Conceptualizing Development and Intervention

13. Roads as Imaginary for Employing Idle Youth in the Post-Conflict Liberian State

Jairo Munive

14. Tropes, Networks and Higher Education in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Policy Formation at the University of Makeni

David O’Kane

15. Bulletproofing: Small Arms, International Law, and Spiritual Security in the Gambia

Niklas Hultin

O autorze

Christian K. Højbjerg was Associate Professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and for many years a member of the research group “Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. He published extensively on a range of subjects, including historical memory, ritual and social organization, conflict and emergent political orders, identity and difference, and the role of reflexivity in shaping both social change and theoretical change.

Jacqueline Knörr is Head of of the research group “Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Extraordinary Professor at the Martin Luther University in Halle/Saale, Germany. Her research and publications focus on issues of identity, integration, migration, diaspora, gender, creolization, (trans)nationalism and childhood. Her regional foci are West Africa and Indonesia.

William P. Murphy is Research Affiliate in the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, USA and research partner of the research group “Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. His early research focused on secrecy and socio-political hierarchy in Liberia, and on the language and strategies of chiefly political succession in Sierra Leone. His current research examines the language and organization of violence in civil war, using case material from Liberia and Sierra Leone.