The War Machines

Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Danny Hoffman, Neil L Whitehead, Jo Ellen Fair , Professor Leigh A Payne

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English

Duke University Press
16 September 2011

Mercenaries

Series: The Cultures and Practice of Violence

In The War Machines, Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor both on the battlefields and in the diamond mines, rubber plantations, and other unregulated industries of West Africa. Based on his ethnographic research with militia groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia during those countries' recent civil wars, Hoffman traces the path of young fighters who moved from grassroots community-defense organizations in Sierra Leone during the mid-1990s into a large pool of mercenary labor.

Hoffman argues that in contemporary West Africa, space, sociality, and life itself are organized around making young men available for all manner of dangerous work. Drawing on his ethnographic research over the past nine years, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, he maintains that the mobilization of West African men exemplifies a global trend in the outsourcing of warfare and security operations. A similar dynamic underlies the political economy of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a growing number of postcolonial spaces. An experienced photojournalist, Hoffman integrates more than fifty of his photographs of young West Africans into The War Machines.

By: Danny Hoffman
Edited by: Neil L Whitehead, Jo Ellen Fair, Professor Leigh A Payne
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Weight: 739g
ISBN: 9780822350590
ISBN 10: 0822350599
Series: The Cultures and Practice of Violence
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 16 September 2011
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction: War Machines 1 I. Histories 1. The Mano River War: A Chronology 27 2. Hunters, Lumpens, and War Boys: A Social History of the Kamajors 55 3. States of Conflict: A Social History of the Kamajors Continued 88 II. Building The Barracks 4. Big Men, Small Boys 127 5. The Barracks 162 6. The Hotel Kamajor 194 7. The Magic of War 224 Conclusion: A Laboratory of the Future 252 Notes 261 Bibliography 273 Index 289

Danny Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. As a photojournalist, he documented conflicts in southern Africa and the Balkans from 1994 to 1998.

Reviews for The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia

In today's African worlds people have to constantly come up with new stories in order to access livelihood and opportunity; stories about how they are to be seen or slip under the radar, how to be part of a larger world. In this account of young men and women fighters in West Africa, Danny Hoffman demonstrates that armed conflict is an opportunity for the young to work. It is work that attempts to be contemporaneous with what is perceived as the 'real global world', to go beyond the constrictions of state, culture, and society. Even if these attempts are eventually folded into becoming instruments of narrow agendas or the prevailing logics of capitalist administration and value, they remain striving to live in new ways. Hoffman, with great courage and hard work, has engaged the complexity of such conflict, making it count for something--the entanglement of brutality and hope. --AbdouMaliq Simone, author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities