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2017 | Buch

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Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies

Change and Continuity

herausgegeben von: Christian K. Højbjerg, Jacqueline Knörr, William P. Murphy

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

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

Abstract

The editors, Højbjerg, Knörr, and Murphy, summarize and reevaluate key explanatory themes in the broad research program on Upper Guinea Coast ethnography and history in light of contemporary changes, crises, and continuities. Intense sociopolitical transformations in this West African region—for example, civil war, refugees, regional insecurity, postconflict nation-building, and transnational epidemics—challenge the standard research paradigms for understanding the region. The introduction explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented this research, such as “big man” patronage and patrimonialism, firstcomers and latecomers as tropes of historical precedence shaping contemporary migration and settlement patterns, secret society initiations as part of postwar social reconstruction, and the language of autochthony as shaping ethnic and national identities, citizenship, and creolization within and of the imagined nation-state.

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

(Re-)Configurations of Identifications and Alliances

Frontmatter

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

Abstract

Ménard investigates the transformations of the Poro secret society in a context of migration and the way these reflect and inform dynamics of social change. The chapter explores the resilience of Poro among Sherbros in Sierra Leone, in a region that has recently attracted a large population of migrants. Relations between Sherbros and migrants are grounded in the use of the host–stranger sociocultural idiom, which regulates social obligations between groups and implies the incorporation of migrants into local communities through Poro initiation. As migrants increasingly refuse initiation, the place of Poro in the political and cultural domains is being renegotiated. The chapter demonstrates that while the Poro society becomes progressively disconnected from local politics, it takes on renewed importance within the religious and cultural spheres.

Anaïs Ménard

Chapter 3. Challenging the Classical Parameters of “Doing Host–Refugee Politics”: The Case of Casamance Refugees in The Gambia

Abstract

Using Casamance refugees in The Gambia as a case study, Ray provides an interesting example of how host–refugee relations are better understood through the process of self-settlement. The chapter offers a compelling argument on how refugees challenge the traditional trajectories of “doing politics” by settling outside of refugee camps and formal settlements, and directly negotiating the terms of their settlement with host communities. The chapter draws attention to ambiguous international, national, and regional policies that misunderstand self-settlement, and how themes such as livelihood strategies, ethnicity, and shared cultural heritage not only facilitate cross-border movements and integration but also problematize the concept of a refugee.

Charlotte Ray

Chapter 4. Betterment Versus Complicity: Struggling with Patron–Client Logics in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Patron–client logics have long provided a crucial lens for the analysis and interpretation of sociopolitical imagination and agency in the Upper Guinea Coast and even in Sub-Sahara Africa in general. However, this lens also comes with limitations: as long as one expects patron–client relations, there is a good chance that one will (only) find relations that fit the patron–client picture. Menzel’s chapter explores a different perspective. Based on field research in southern Sierra Leone, she provides examples from interviews in which her informants not only voiced frustrations over a lack of “good” patronage but also hinted at more fundamental struggles. These examples indicate a contradiction between working toward individual/societal betterment and complicity in patron–client logics, which cement an undesirable status quo.

Anne Menzel

Chapter 5. Kinship Tropes as Critique of Patronage in Postwar Sierra Leone

Abstract

Murphy examines a key discursive strategy in postwar struggles of national reconstruction in Sierra Leone: namely, redefining and reframing the meaning of kinship tropes and norms of patronage politics. The kinship model of authority—for example, trope of leader as “father”—provides rhetorical means for criticizing “big man” patronage for not conforming to kinship norms of reciprocity and compassionate solicitude for the most vulnerable and needy. Patrons are accused, especially by socially vulnerable youth and women, of imposing harsh patriarchal power and filial servitude, which profits from clientelist dependency in a postwar political economy of widespread social and economic deprivation. This argument leads to broader theoretical questions concerning the structural tension in all crisis-ridden societies between clientelism and citizenship in nation-building.

William P. Murphy

Challenging Conventions of Explaining and Situating Violent Conflict

Frontmatter

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

Abstract

This chapter critically examines some interpretations of Liberia’s civil war and considers the implications for development policy. Brown is skeptical of the claim that the origins of the war lay substantially in internal conflicts within customary communities, reflecting a long-term agrarian crisis and tensions between generations and genders. Primary research does not support the view that restrictions on access to community land and marital partners were major influences on the conflict. The customary conflict thesis provides, moreover, a poor guide to future land policy. This needs to strengthen, not undermine, representation at the local level, acknowledging that the greatest threats to the welfare of the rural poor come not from internal contradictions within customary societies but from their interactions with international capital and the state.

David Brown

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

Abstract

Testimony submitted with asylum petitions is a vantage point for documenting and evaluating lived experiences in post-conflict societies. Asylum petitions are rich documentary archives tethered to discrete legal contexts, which shed light on analytical categories, constructed identities, and personal narratives of fear, trauma, and violence. Lawrance argues that expert testimony interpreting petitions pertaining to gender-based violence in the Upper Guinea region is structured by the trope of historicization, a rhetorical logic of categorization and persuasion emphasizing historicity. Emboldened by “historicizing” expert testimony, asylum-seekers move beyond the experiences causing flight and testify to future jeopardy. Lawrance shows how questions of future jeopardy shape narrative strategies, providing a window on the changing cultural and legal landscape of post-conflict societies in Upper Guinea.

Benjamin N. Lawrance

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

Abstract

Traditional tropes hold that reduced rainfall across the West African Sahel and savanna from the late 1960s onward caused migration from rural areas to cities or to better-watered lands further south. It is argued that this in turn caused major shifts in the rural economy, social transformation, disputes over land tenure and use between indigenous and immigrant populations, and violent conflict in places. Alternative analyses, while recognizing a role for environmental change in social processes, take a deeper historical perspective and offer a more diverse, nuanced view of causality. This debate is worth revisiting to help prevent flawed, sometimes fallacious tropes from informing development policy and practice. The chapter thus examines paddy rice cultivation in Casamance, southern Senegal, amid broader contemporary contestations about environmentally induced migration.

Martin Evans

Chapter 9. Casamance Secession: National Narratives of Marginalization and Integration

Abstract

The Casamance can “boast” the longest-lasting armed conflict in Africa. In the conflict, the national (Senegalese) identity competes against a regional secessionist identity (Casamançais) that has now challenged state and national unity for nearly three decades. The trope of marginalization and exclusion voiced by secessionists shows that the postcolonial Senegalese nation has not yet been consolidated by a consistent integrative narrative. What is fought over in the Casamance conflict is the integration of margins into a nation that seems to have been unable to fully integrate citizens. Analysis shows that conflict drivers are related more to the perception of marginalization—and the narratives that build upon them—than to political and economic facts of marginalization.

Markus Rudolf

(Re-)Contextualizing Postcolonial Statehood and National Belonging

Frontmatter

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

Abstract

Sierra Leone, a postwar country is now enjoying a fragile peace which it seeks to consolidate through a democratization program. Among the postwar challenges militating against the effective realization of this goal is the growth of autochthony discourses in Freetown and other parts of the country. It appears as if demographic changes brought about by the civil war and also the postwar democratization process have given rise to or intensified these discourses, which have a potential to disrupt the country’s hard-won peace. Spencer examines autochthony discourses in the postwar relations between the Krio and other ethnic groups in Freetown and its environs. He brings out not only the divisive potential of autochthony, which has often been the focus, but also the integrative potential.

Sylvanus Spencer

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

Abstract

Kohl offers a much-needed socio-anthropological analysis of the Cape Verdean community in Guinea-Bissau. Cape Verdeans have integrated to various degrees into Bissau-Guinean society but have been repeatedly, until recently, identified as a “cause of trouble” in the country’s brief history. From both late colonial and postcolonial perspectives, Kohl offers a more nuanced exploration of Cape Verdeans’ culture and identity, and their role in both the struggle for independence from Portugal and postcolonial nation- and state-building in Guinea-Bissau. “Ethnicity as Trope of Political Belonging and Conflict” demonstrates that the relationship between Cape Verdeans and the rest of the Bissau-Guinean population, as well as the former’s role in the country’s politics, has been far more complex than often assumed.

Christoph Kohl

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

Abstract

Heitz Tokpa analyzes current dynamics in the host–stranger paradigm in western Côte d’Ivoire. The strong influx of migrant workers and the gradual economic decline have changed the context of the host–stranger relationship. Even if the dyadic relationship between host and stranger lineage persists, associations have become an active element mediating the relationship. This case study focuses on the association of Burkinabe (L’Amicale des Burkinabés) and their Dan hosts in the region of Man. The association’s objectives are to represent the interests of Burkinabe citizens and to inform their nationals about their rights and duties in their host country. Heitz Tokpa argues that the association brings the “clients” together and assumes the role of a broker, thereby introducing a new dynamic into the host–stranger paradigm.

Katharina Heitz Tokpa

(Re-)Conceptualizing Development and Intervention

Frontmatter

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

Abstract

Emergency employment has become an established element in post-conflict interventions as a way to stabilize income generation for specific groups of conflict-affected individuals. The typical target groups are ex-combatants and “idle” youth. Munive addresses one of the central analytical problems of understanding postwar rebuilding in Liberia, namely the recuperation of national infrastructural systems that provide employment opportunities for “idle” youth. The major area for boosting employment was public works investments, for example, the rehabilitation of infrastructure such as schools, markets, and, more importantly, dilapidated roads. Employment through the reconstruction of road infrastructure produced new dynamics at the local level, territorializing the reach of the state and, most importantly, producing new hopes among Liberians.

Jairo Munive

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

Abstract

In this chapter, O’Kane describes the deployment of tropes in the creation of policy at Sierra Leone’s first private tertiary education institution, the University of Makeni (UNIMAK). The core mission of this university is to assist in development and peace-building in post-conflict Sierra Leone. UNIMAK is embedded in a set of networks (local, national, and global) through which human, social, and financial resources are accessed by the university. In the cultural work which this project involves, tropes of various kinds are deployed, even though some may be potentially in contradiction with others from competing paradigms (neoliberalism, social justice). The distinctive use of tropes in the UNIMAK project is a mirror of the broader, complex, and fraught social context in which that project exists.

David O’Kane

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

Abstract

Hultin uses international small arms control and its manifestation in the Gambia to describe how anthropologists have focused on the ways local contexts problematize or transcend putatively universal norms (like those found in humanitarian discourses, including small arms control). In the Gambia, spiritual security clashes with the norms and tropes of small arms control. But, at the same time, as this focus has a great deal of merit, it makes for another trope: the trope of incommensurability. This trope is an anthropological forte, but it risks neglecting the aspirational uses of international ideas to form new social identities. To address this point, the chapter develops the notion of the “procedural class” as a facet of the moral topography of contemporary Africa.

Niklas Hultin

Backmatter

Titel: Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies
herausgegeben von: Christian K. Højbjerg
Jacqueline Knörr
William P. Murphy
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-349-95013-3
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95012-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95013-3