Details

1. Introduction: Deconstructing Tropes of Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea .- Part I (Re-)Configuration of Identifications and Alliances .- 2. Poro Society, Migration and Political Incorporation on the Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone .- 3. Challenging the Classical Parameters of 'Doing Host-Refugee Politics': The Case of Casamance Refugees in The Gambia .- 4. Betterment versus Complicity: Struggling with Patron-Client Logica in Sierra Leone .- 5. Kinship Tropes as Critique of Patronage in Post-War Sierra Leone.- 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 .- 7. Historicizing as a Legal Trope of Jeopardy in Asylum Narratives and Expert Testimonies of Gender-Based Violence .- 8. Revisiting Tropes of Environmental and Social Change in Casamance, Senegal .- 9. Casamance Secession: National Narrativesof Marginalization and Integration.- 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 .- 11. Ethnicity as Trope of Political Belonging and Conflict: Cape Verdean Identity and Agency in Guinea-Bissau .- 12. Dynamics in the Host-Stranger Paradigm: The Broker Role of a Latecomer Association in Western Côte d’Ivoire.- Part IV (Re-)Conceptualizing Development and Intervention .- 13. Roads as Imaginary for Employing Idle Youth in the Post-Conflict Liberian State .- 14. Tropes, Networks and Higher Education in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Policy Formation at the University of Makeni .- 15. Bulletproofing: Small Arms, International Law, and Spiritual Security in the Gambia.

<p><b>Christian K. Højbjerg</b> 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.</p><p><b>Jacqueline Knörr&nbsp;</b>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.<br></p><p><b>William P. Murphy</b>&nbsp;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&nbsp;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.</p><div><br></div>

Places postcolonial statehood and national belonging into the context of refugee migration and civil war, and challenges conventions of explaining violent conflict Examines development and international intervention in the Guinea region Includes case studies which illustrate the changes in social and political landscape of Sierra Leone, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Liberia and the Gambia over the last three decades

<p>“Building on a decade of work by the research group ‘Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, this book brings together a group of scholars deeply engaged with the lived politics of the region.&nbsp; The chapters problematize a range of common tropes about the politics of the Upper Guinea Coast, allowing us to understand political struggles in local terms, hence transcending conventional wisdom. Articulated through finely detailed examples we see how common binaries like stranger and host or patron and client are contested and remade in ongoing social practice.&nbsp; The work shows that anthropological insights need not be purely theoretical but can be put to use in understanding and addressing pressing issues such as conflict, migration, and health crises.“ (Susan Shepler, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University, USA)</p>