Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies

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

• 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.

“These essays constitute a body of knowledge that policy planners working in the Upper Guinea Coast region should know about and include in their work. The authors and editors do not specifically address, however, the challenges of actually transferring this knowledge and making sure it is integrated into the policy process.” (Mary H. Moran,Anthropos, Vol. 114 (2), 2019)