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 War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone written by Krijn Peters and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the incomplete understanding of the conflict in Sierra Leone by focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of protagonists.
Download or read book The Social Ecology of Resilience written by Michael Ungar and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-10-08 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two decades after Michael Rutter (1987) published his summary of protective processes associated with resilience, researchers continue to report definitional ambiguity in how to define and operationalize positive development under adversity. The problem has been partially the result of a dominant view of resilience as something individuals have, rather than as a process that families, schools,communities and governments facilitate. Because resilience is related to the presence of social risk factors, there is a need for an ecological interpretation of the construct that acknowledges the importance of people’s interactions with their environments. The Social Ecology of Resilience provides evidence for this ecological understanding of resilience in ways that help to resolve both definition and measurement problems.
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 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 Navigating Terrains of War written by Henrik Vigh and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil and diminishing resources.
Download or read book Child Soldiers written by Myriam S. Denov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the experiences of child soldiers in Sierra Leone during and after war and examines the implications of their participation.
Download or read book Re examining Voluntarism written by Krijn Peters and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the most important reasons, according to Sierra Leonean youth ex-combatants, leading to their decisions to join the army or rebel forces.
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 Vanguard or Vandals written by Jon Abbink and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a range of original studies on one of the major challenges in Africa today: the controversial role of youth in politics, conflict and rebellious movements. The issue is not only the drafting of child soldiers into insurgent armies or predatory militias, as in Somalia, Sierra Leone or Congo, but, more generally, that of the problematic insertion of large numbers of young people in the socio-economic and political order of post-colonial Africa. Even educated youths are being confronted with a lack of opportunities, blocked social mobility, and despair about the future. African youth, while forming a numerical majority, largely feel excluded from power, are socio-economically marginalized, thwarted in their ambitions, and have little access to representative positions or political power.
Download or read book The Politics of Work in a Post conflict State written by Luisa Enria and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No description available.
Download or read book Children Affected by Armed Conflict written by Myriam Denov and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Societal turbulence, state collapse, religious and ethnic conflict, poverty, hunger, and social exclusion all underlie children's involvement in armed conflict. Drawing from empirical studies in eleven conflict-ridden countries, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Colombia, Uganda, Palestine, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and South Sudan, Children Affected by Armed Conflict crosses cultures and contexts to capture a range of perspectives on the realities of armed conflict and its aftermath for children. Children Affected by Armed Conflict upends traditional views by emphasizing the experience of girls as well as boys, the unique social and contextual backgrounds of war-affected children, and the resilience and agency such children often display. Including children who are victims of, participants in, and witnesses to armed conflict in their analyses, the contributors to this volume highlight innovative methodologies that directly involve war-affected children in the research process. This validates the perspectives of children and ensures more effective outcomes in postwar reintegration and recovery. Deficits-based models do not account for the realities many war-affected children face. The alternative approaches presented in this edited collection—which acknowledge the realities of both trauma and resilience—aim to generate more effective policies and intervention strategies in the face of a growing global public health crisis.
Download or read book Youth and the State in Guinea Meandering Lives written by Michelle Engeler and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By combining an ethnographic study of youth with an analysis of the local state in the making, this research monograph introduces the perspective of »meandering lives« to grasp being young and growing up in the Guéckédou borderland, a remote space approximately 700 kilometers southeast of Conakry, Guinea's capital. This history-sensitive perspective represents a fruitful lens to not only depict youth but to also draw a nuanced picture of the functioning of the state in Guinea.
Download or read book Why Young People Fight in Africa s Civil Wars The Case of the Sierra Leone Civil War written by Emmanuel Twum Mensah and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Politics - Region: Africa, grade: 66, Oxford University, language: English, abstract: This essay focuses on both local and individual context to combine the arguments on the patrimonial state crisis leading to socio-economic marginalisation of young people, and Vigh’s (2006) concept of social navigation to understand why young people fight in Africa’s civil wars. Using the Sierra Leone civil war as a case study, this essay argues that the pre-war socio-economic crisis suffered by young people as a result of the failures of the patrimonial state to honour its promises to young people remains a significant factor in influencing young people’s decision to fight in civil wars. The essay further argues that once a civil war begins, other young people are drawn to fight because of their quest to navigate the murky environment of war as active agents bent on improving their life chances for survival by taking advantage of the economic and social opportunities that come with wielding a gun as a combatant.
Download or read book Childhood Deployed written by Susan Shepler and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Childhood Deployed examines the reintegration of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Based on eighteen months of participant-observer ethnographic fieldwork and ten years of follow-up research, the book argues that there is a fundamental disconnect between the Western idea of the child soldier and the individual lived experiences of the child soldiers of Sierra Leone. Susan Shepler contends that the reintegration of former child soldiers is a political process having to do with changing notions of childhood as one of the central structures of society. For most Westerners the tragedy of the idea of “child soldier” centers around perceptions of lost and violated innocence. In contrast, Shepler finds that for most Sierra Leoneans, the problem is not lost innocence but the horror of being separated from one’s family and the resulting generational break in youth education. Further, Shepler argues that Sierra Leonean former child soldiers find themselves forced to strategically perform (or refuse to perform) as the“child soldier” Western human rights initiatives expect in order to most effectively gain access to the resources available for their social reintegration. The strategies don’t always work—in some cases, Shepler finds, Western human rights initiatives do more harm than good. While this volume focuses on the well-known case of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, it speaks to the larger concerns of childhood studies with a detailed ethnography of people struggling over the situated meaning of the categories of childhood.It offers an example of the cultural politics of childhood in action, in which the very definition of childhood is at stake and an important site of political contestation.
Download or read book Child Soldiers From Recruitment to Reintegration written by Alpaslan Özerdem and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the complex and under-researched relationship between recruitment experiences and reintegration outcomes for child soldiers. It looks at time spent in the group, issues of cohesion, identification, affiliation, membership and the post demobilization experience of return, and resettlement.
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: Sierra Leone came to world attention in the 1990s when a catastrophic civil war linked to the diamond trade was reported globally. This fleeting and particular interest, however, obscured two crucial processes in this small West African state. On the one hand, while the civil war was momentous, brutal and affected all Sierra Leoneans, it was also just one element in the long and faltering attempt to build a nation and state given the country's immensely problematic pre-colonial and British colonial legacies. On the other, the aftermath of the war precipitated a huge international effort to construct a 'liberal peace', with mixed results, and thus made Sierra Leone a laboratory for post-Cold War interventions. Sierra Leone examines 225 years of its history and fifty years of independence, placing state- society relations at the centre of an original and revealing investigation of those who have tried to rule or change Sierra Leone and its inhabitants and the responses engendered. It interweaves the historical narrative with sketches of politicians, anecdotes, the landscape and environment and key turning-points, alongside theoretical and other comparisons with the rest of Africa. It is a new contribution to the debate for those who already know Sierra Leone and a solid point of entry for those who wish to know.
