Utilizing narratives of seven different people-soldier, rebel, student, trader, evangelist, father, and politician-I Did it To Save My Lifeprovides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans ...survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival through the rubric of love, and by telling their stories and bringing memory into the present, create for themselves a powerful basis on which to reaffirm the rightness of their choices and orient themselves to a livable everyday. The book illuminates a social world based on love, a deep, compassionate relationship based on material exchange and nurturing, that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this social world, they call into question the government's own narrative that Makeni residents openly collaborated with the rebel RUF during its three-year occupation of the town. Residents argue instead that it was the government's disloyalty to its people, rather than rebel invasion and occupation, which destroyed the town and forced uneasy co-existence between civilians and militants.
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.
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.
Before the twenty-first century, there was little legal precedent for the prosecution of sexual violence as a war crime. Now, international tribunals have the potential to help make sense of ...political violence against both men and women; they have the power to uphold victims' claims and to convict the leaders and choreographers of systematic atrocity. However, by privileging certain accounts of violence over others, tribunals more often confirm outmoded gender norms, consigning women to permanent rape victim status. InSex and International Tribunals, Chiseche Salome Mibenge identifies the cultural assumptions behind the legal profession's claims to impartiality and universality. Focusing on the postwar tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Mibenge mines the transcripts of local and supranational criminal trials and truth and reconciliation commissions in order to identify and closely examine legal definitions of forced marriage, sexual enslavement, and the conscription of children that overlook the gendered experiences of armed conflict beyond the mass rape of women and girls. In many cases, a single rape conviction constitutes sufficient proof that gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into the prosecution of war crimes. Drawing on anthropological research in African conflicts, and feminist theory, Mibenge challenges legal narratives that reinscribe essentialized notions of gender in the conduct and resolution of violent conflict and uncovers the suppressed testimonies of men and women who are unwilling or unable to recite the legal scripts that would elevate them to the status of victimhood recognized by an international and humanitarian audience. At a moment when international intervention in conflicts is increasingly an option,Sex and International Tribunalspoints the way to a more nuanced and just response from courts.
How easy is it for rebel groups to purchase weapons and ammunition in the middle of a war? How quickly can commodities such as diamonds and cocoa be converted into cash to buy war supplies? And why ...does answering these questions matter for understanding civil wars? InWhat Rebels Want, Jennifer M. Hazen challenges the commonly held view that rebel groups can get what they want, when they want it, and when they most need it. Hazen's assessments of resource availability in the wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire lead to a better understanding of rebel group capacity and options for war and war termination.
Resources entail more than just cash; they include various other economic, military, and political goods, including natural resources, arms and ammunition, safe haven, and diplomatic support. However, rebel groups rarely enjoy continuous access to resources throughout a conflict. Understanding fluctuations in fortune is central to identifying the options available to rebel groups and the reasons why a rebel group chooses to pursue war or peace. The stronger the group's capacity, the more options it possesses with respect to fighting a war. The chances for successful negotiations and the implementation of a peace agreement increase as the options of the rebel group narrow. Sustainable negotiated solutions are most likely, Hazen finds, when a rebel group views negotiations not as one of the solutions for obtaining what it wants, but as the only solution.
Childhood Deployedexamines 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 apoliticalprocess 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 ones 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 thechild soldier Western human rights initiatives expect in order to most effectively gain access to the resources available for their social reintegration. The strategies dont always workin 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.
We contribute to the literature on corporate spin‐offs and university spin‐offs by exploring how different characteristics in the technological knowledge base at start‐up influence spin‐off ...performance. We investigate how the technological knowledge characteristics endowed at start‐up predict growth, taking into account whether the knowledge/technology is transferred from a corporation or university. We use a novel, hand‐collected dataset involving 48 corporate and 73 university spin‐offs, comprising the population of spin‐offs in Flanders during 1991–2002. We find corporate spin‐offs grow most if they start with a specific narrow‐focused technology sufficiently distinct from the technical knowledge base of the parent company and which is tacit. University spin‐offs benefit from a broad technology which is transferred to the spin‐off. Novelty of the technical knowledge does not play a role in corporate spin‐offs, but has a negative impact in university spin‐offs unless universities have an experienced technology transfer office to support the spin‐off.
We study the brutal 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences, postwar economic outcomes, local politics and collective action. ...Individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings, more likely to join local political and community groups, and more likely to vote. Tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results. More speculatively, the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in Sierra Leone and after several other recent African civil wars.
We estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians’ actions, and policy. We find that voters living in areas where, for exogenous reasons, the press covers their U.S. House ...representative less are less likely to recall their representative’s name and less able to describe and rate him or her. Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency‐oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line. Finally, federal spending is lower in areas with exogenously lower press coverage of congressmen.
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