Download or read book War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone written by Krijn Peters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The armed conflict in Sierra Leone and the extreme violence of the main rebel faction - the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) - have challenged scholars and members of the international community to come up with explanations. Up to this point, though, conclusions about the nature of the war are mainly drawn from accounts of civilian victims and commentators who had access to only one side of the war. The present study addresses this currently incomplete understanding of the conflict by focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of protagonists, paying special attention to the hitherto neglected, and often underage, cadres of the RUF. The data presented challenges the widely canvassed notion of the Sierra Leone conflict as a war motivated by 'greed, not grievance'. Rather, it points to a rural crisis expressed in terms of unresolved tensions between landowners and marginalized rural youth, further reinforced and triggered by a collapsing patrimonial state.

Download or read book A Dirty War in West Africa written by Lansana Gberie and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1991, this West African nation has been brought to its knees by a series of coups, violent conflicts, and finally, outright war. The war has ended today, but it is clear that things are hardly settled. Focusing on the group spearheading the violence, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), journalist Lansana Gberie exposes the corruption and appalling use of rape and mutilation as tactics to overthrow the former government. Gberie looks closely at the rise of the RUF and its ruthless leader, Foday Sankoh, as he seeks to understand the personalities and parties involved in the war.

Download or read book How de Body written by Teun Voeten and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1998, acclaimed photojournalist Teun Voeten headed to Sierra Leone for what he thought would be a standard assignment on the child soldiers there. But the cease-fire ended just as he arrived, and the clash between the military junta and the West African peace-keeping troops forced him to hide in the bush from rebels who were intent on killing him. How de Body? ("how are you?" in Sierra Leone's Creole English) is a dramatic account of the conflict that has been raging in the country for nearly a decade-and how Voeten nearly became a casualty of it. Accessible and conversational, it's a look into the dangerous diamond trade that fuels the conflict, the legacy of war practices such as forced amputations, the tragic use of child soldiers, and more. The book is also a tribute to the people who never make the headlines: Eddy Smith, a BBC correspondent who eventually helps Voeten escape; Alfred Kanu, a school principal who risks his life to keep his students and teachers going amidst the bullets and raids; and Padre Victor, who runs a safe haven for ex-child soldiers; among others. Featuring Voeten's stunning black-and-white photos from his multiple trips to the conflict area, How de Body? is a crucial testament to a relatively unknown tragedy.

Download or read book A Long Way Gone written by Ishmael Beah and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-02-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.” This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Download or read book The War Machines written by Danny Hoffman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic research among militias in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor on battlefields and in dangerous unregulated industries.

Download or read book Out of War written by Mariane C. Ferme and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-08-10 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of War draws on Mariane C. Ferme’s three decades of ethnographic engagements to examine the physical and psychological aftereffects of the harms of Sierra Leone's civil war. Ferme analyzes the relationship between violence, trauma, and the political imagination, focusing on “war times”—the different qualities of temporality arising from war. She considers the persistence of precolonial and colonial figures of sovereignty re-elaborated in the context of war, and the circulation of rumors and neologisms that freeze in time collective anxieties linked to particular phases of the conflict (or “chronotopes”). Beyond the expected traumas of war, Ferme explores the breaks in the intergenerational transmission of farming and hunting techniques, and the lethal effects of remembering experienced traumas and forgetting local knowledge. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, this ethnography traces strategies of survival and material dwelling, and the juridical creation of new figures of victimhood, where colonial and postcolonial legacies are reinscribed in neoliberal projects of decentralization and individuation.

Download or read book Between Democracy and Terror written by Ibrahim Abdullah and published by Unisa Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most authoritative study of the Sierra Leone civil war to emanate from Africa, or indeed any publications' programme on Africa. It explores the genesis of the crisis, the contradictory roles of different internal and external actors, civil society and the media; the regional intervention force and the demise of the second republic. It analyses the numerous peace initiatives designed to end a war, which continued nonetheless to defy and outlast them; and asks why the war became so prolonged. The study articulates how internal actors trod the multiple and conflicting pathways to power. It considers how non-conventional actors were able to inaugurate and sustain an insurgency that called forth the largest concentration of UN peacekeepers the world has ever seen.

Download or read book Free Slaves Freetown and the Sierra Leonean Civil War written by Joseph Kaifala and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a historical narrative covering various periods in Sierra Leone’s history from the fifteenth century to the end of its civil war in 2002. It entails the history of Sierra Leone from its days as a slave harbor through to its founding as a home for free slaves, and toward its political independence and civil war. In 1462, the country was discovered by a Portuguese explorer, Pedro de Sintra, who named it Serra Lyoa (Lion Mountains). Sierra Leone later became a lucrative hub for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. At the end of slavery in England, Freetown was selected as a home for the Black Poor, free slaves in England after the Somerset ruling. The Black Poor were joined by the Nova Scotians, American slaves who supported or fought with the British during the American Revolution. The Maroons, rebellious slaves from Jamaica, arrived in 1800. The Recaptives, freed in enforcement of British antislavery laws, were also taken to Freetown. Freetown became a British colony in 1808 and Sierra Leone obtained political independence from Britain in 1961. The development of the country was derailed by the death of its first Prime Minister, Sir Milton Margai, and thirty years after independence the country collapsed into a brutal civil war.

Download or read book When the State Fails written by Tunde Zack-Williams and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compared with Kosovo and Iraq, the recent Western intervention in Sierra Leone has been largely forgotten. When the State Fails rectifies this, providing a comprehensive and critical analysis of the intervention. The civil war in Sierra Leone began in 1991 and was declared officially over in 2002 after UK, UN, and regional African military intervention. Some claimed it as a case of successful humanitarian intervention. The authors in this collection provide an informed analysis of the impact of the intervention on democracy, development, and society in Sierra Leone. The authors take a particularly critical view of the imposition of neo-liberalism after the conflict. As NATO intervention in Libya shows the continued use of external force in internal conflicts, When the State Fails is a timely book for all students and scholars interested in Africa and the question of "humanitarian intervention."

Download or read book Sierra Leone written by David John Harris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new political history of the former British colony in West Africa, best known for its diamonds and recent violent civil war, this covers 225 years of history and fills a gap in African studies.

Download or read book Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers written by Chris Coulter and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), members of various rebel movements kidnapped thousands of girls and women, some of whom came to take an active part in the armed conflict alongside the rebels. In a stunning look at the life of women in wartime, Chris Coulter draws on interviews with more than a hundred women to bring us inside the rebel camps in Sierra Leone.When these girls and women returned to their home villages after the cessation of hostilities, their families and peers viewed them with skepticism and fear, while humanitarian organizations saw them primarily as victims. Neither view was particularly helpful in helping them resume normal lives after the war. Offering lessons for policymakers, practitioners, and activists, Coulter shows how prevailing notions of gender, both in home communities and among NGO workers, led, for instance, to women who had taken part in armed conflict being bypassed in the demilitarization and demobilization processes carried out by the international community in the wake of the war. Many of these women found it extremely difficult to return to their families, and, without institutional support, some were forced to turn to prostitution to eke out a living.Coulter weaves several themes through the work, including the nature of gender roles in war, livelihood options in war and peace, and how war and postwar experiences affect social and kinship relations.

Download or read book Conflict Collusion in Sierra Leone written by David Keen and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United Nations' presence in Sierra Leone has made that country a subject of international attention to an unprecedented degree. Once identified as a source of `the New Barbarism', it has also become a proving ground for Western interventions in the war against terrorism. The conventional diplomatic approach to Sierra Leone's civil war is that it has been a contest between two clearly defined sides. Keen demonstrates this is not the case: the various armed groups were fractured throughout the 1990s, often colluded with one another, and had little interest in bringing the war to an end. This book is not only a comprehensive description and novel interpretation of events in Sierra Leone, it represents a new and innovative approach to the study of war and Third World development and politics generally.

Download or read book Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone written by Megan H. MacKenzie and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven-year civil war in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002 was incomprehensibly brutal—it is estimated that half of all female refugees were raped and many thousands were killed. While the publicity surrounding sexual violence helped to create a general picture of women and girls as victims of the conflict, there has been little effort to understand female soldiers’ involvement in, and experience of, the conflict. Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone draws on interviews with 75 former female soldiers and over 20 local experts, providing a rare perspective on both the civil war and post-conflict development efforts in the country. Megan MacKenzie argues that post-conflict reconstruction is a highly gendered process, demonstrating that a clear recognition and understanding of the roles and experiences of female soldiers are central to both understanding the conflict and to crafting effective policy for the future.

Download or read book Testimony written by Shanee Stepakoff and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-14 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IBPA Benjamin Franklin AwardTM gold winner, poetry category Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.

Download or read book In Sierra Leone written by Michael Jackson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of its brutal civil war, the distinguished anthropologist, poet, and novelist Michael Jackson returned to the country where he had intermittently lived and worked as an ethnographer since 1969. While his initial concern was to help his old friend Sewa Bockarie (S. B.) Marah—a prominent figure in Sierra Leonean politics—write his autobiography, Jackson’s experiences during his stay led him to create a more complex work: In Sierra Leone, a beautifully rendered mosaic integrating S. B.’s moving stories with personal reflections, ethnographic digressions, and meditations on history and violence. Though the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.) ostensibly fought its war (1991–2002) against corrupt government, the people of Sierra Leone were its victims. By the time the war was over, more than fifty thousand were dead, thousands more had been maimed, and over one million were displaced. Jackson relates the stories of political leaders and ordinary people trying to salvage their lives and livelihoods in the aftermath of cataclysmic violence. Combining these with his own knowledge of African folklore, history, and politics and with S. B.’s bittersweet memories—of his family’s rich heritage, his imprisonment as a political detainee, and his position in several of Sierra Leone’s post-independence governments—Jackson has created a work of elegiac, literary, and philosophical power.

Download or read book I Did It to Save My Life written by Catherine E. Bolten and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ethnographically rich, these accounts come to life in beautiful prose. These are inspiring and at times heartbreaking stories of how people living in such difficult and dangerous circumstances find ways to survive, love and take care of each other. This will be a valuable contribution as well as a welcome counter to the more popular images of warzones as places of total immorality.”—Catherine Besteman, author of Transforming Cape Town

Download or read book Blair s Successful War written by Dr Andrew M Dorman and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Dorman introduces Sierra Leone as Blair's second great military adventure after Kosovo and the first he undertook on his own. It is tied to Blair's 1999 Chicago speech on the 'Doctrine of the International Community', his move towards humanitarianism and the impact of the Kosovo experience. The book links this move with the rise of cosmopolitan militaries and the increasing involvement of Western forces in humanitarian operations and their impact on the international system. Furthermore, it places it within the context of defence transformation and the emerging Western expeditionary capabilities, in particular the European Union's new battle group concept and developments in concepts such as Network Centric Warfare and Networked Enabled Capability. Examining the whole campaign and considering the impact on the Blair Government, this book will prove to be a key reader on the topic.