Out of War

Violence, Trauma, and the Political Imagination in Sierra Leone

Bibliographic Data

ID2699326
AuthorsMariane C Ferme (corresponding author)
Year2018
Pages336
Publication date2018-08-10
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueOut of War (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/california/9780520294370.001.0001
OpenAlexW4242374441
Open LibraryOL28637927M
ISBN9780520294370
GOOGLE_BOOK_IDBk9jDwAAQBAJ
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991-2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel ("soldier by day, rebel by night"), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more "monumental" presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People's Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955

Crimes against humanity · Ethnography · Ethnology · International law · Liminality · Political science · Sierra leone · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · War crime · African history and culture studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Law · Political Conflict and Governance · Africa · Psychological aspects · War