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Periodical issue Periodical issue Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Special issue: Everyday life in postwar Sierra Leone
Editors:Shepler, Susan
Ibrahim, Aisha Fofana
Year:2011
Periodical:Africa Today (ISSN 1527-1978)
Volume:58
Issue:2
Pages:165
Language:English
Geographic term:Sierra Leone
Subjects:civil society
people with disabilities
food
taxis
veterans
youth
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/toc/at.58.2.html
Abstract:The essays in this special issue describe the creativity of Sierra Leoneans in the aftermath of the civil war of 1991-2002, focusing on changes at the level of people's lived experiences. At the same time they acknowledge that postwar interventions by international groups have had an important impact on everyday life. In 'The check is not in the mail: how local civil-society organizations cope with funding volatility in postconflict Sierra Leone', Vandy Kanyako explores the survival of Sierra Leone's civil society organizations (CSOs) after postwar funding flows disappeared. Maria Berghs and Myriam Dos Santos-Zingale explore how Sierra Leoneans have remade global neoliberal development discourses around disability suitable for their own needs, providing four snapshots of the everyday lives of disabled people in postconflict Sierra Leone. In 'The real and symbolic importance of food in war: hunger pains and big men's bellies in Sierra Leone', Susan Shepler discusses the role of food in narrations of wartime trauma. The next articles are about youth, livelihoods, and identity. Michael Bürge, in 'Riding the narrow tracks of moral life: commercial motorbike riders in Makeni, Sierra Leone', examines the social and moral landscape of commercial bike riders (okadamen), elucidating the contexts in which bike riders, often seen as ex-combatants and stigmatized as violent and unethical, live as social in-betweens. Bike riding becomes a channel through which they navigate to negotiate their social position. In a related essay, 'Between ex-combatization and opportunities for peace: the double-edged policies of motorcycle-taxi driving in urban postwar Sierra Leone', Anne Menzel draws attention to the creativity of youths, especially industrious and ambitious ex-combatants, who faced the challenges of a postwar situation and the opportunities it provided to transform themselves into wage-earning members of society through commercial bike-riding. It is this restless youth, with the potential to resort to violence, that Krijn Peters writes about in 'The crisis of youth in postwar Sierra Leone: problem solved?' He argues that youths in urban and rural communities continue to be marginalized and exploited and that they partly blame their elders for their present problems. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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