Sweet Battlefields: Youth and the Liberian Civil War (1997-2003)

Mats Utas

PhD dissertation project, department of cultural anthropology, Uppsala University (supervisors Bernhard Helander and Jan Ovesen)

This dissertation presents an ethnography of youth in Liberia and of how their lives became affected by a civil war which raged in the country between 1990 and 1997. The focus is on the experiences, motivations, and reflections of young combatants who fought for a variety of rebel factions. For these young people, the daily prospect of poverty, joblessness and marginalisation effectively blocked the paths to a normal adulthood; drawing them instead into a subculture of liminality, characterised by abjection, resentment and rootlessness. As opportunity came, their voluntary enlistment into one of the several rebel armies of the civil war therefore became an attractive option for many. Based upon one year of fieldwork during 1998, conducted among groups of ex-combatant youths in both the capital Monrovia and in a provincial town in the rural hinterland, I describe and analyse the young people’s own accounts of their involvement in the civil war; their complicity in atrocities, their coping strategies in the context of armed conflict, their position as ex-combatants in a post-war environment, and their outlook on their past, present and future.

This is the abstract for my PhD dissertation. It started very adventurously. My intention was to study Liberian refugees returning home after the Liberian civil war, but instead, I got stuck in some of the worst battles in the capital, Monrovia, in April 1996 and was evacuated by a US military helicopter. I changed the topic to understand the many young people who fought in the various rebel groups. I did fieldwork during the quite peaceful years of 1997 and 1998. First, I worked with a group of ex-combatants who lived in an abandoned factory in downtown Monrovia, and as things cleared up in the interior, I moved to the rural city of Ganta, where I worked with another cluster of former rebel soldiers.

At the time, I was particularly interested in how, despite being victims of circumstances, young people actively navigated the war landscape. Contrary to what the international world believed, all of the young soldiers I worked with had not been directly forced but chosen to join a rebel group. Thus, the very narrow window of choice in a war zone became a key topic. In addition to my thesis here are some of the publications that resulted from this work:

Victimcy and Social Navigation: From the Toolbox of Liberian Child Soldiers. In Child Soldiers: From Recruitment to Reintegration. Ed. Podder, S and Özerdem, A. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. pp. 213-230.

Malignant Organisms: continuities of state-run violence in rural Liberia. In Crisis of the state: war and social upheaval. Eds. Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, Berghahn Books, 2009. pp. 265-291.

Abject Heroes: Marginalised youth, modernity and violent pathways of the Liberian Civil War. In Years of Conflict: Adolescence, Political Violence and Displacement. Ed. Jason Hart, Refugee Studies Centre/Berghahn Books, 2008. pp. 111-138.

War, violence and videotapes: media and localized ideoscapes of the Liberian Civil War. In Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa. Ed. Preben Kaarsholm, James Currey. 2006. pp 161-180.

Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman’s Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone. In Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 78, no 2, 2005. pp 403-430.

Building a future? The reintegration and re-marginalisation of youth in Liberia. In No Peace, No War: an anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. Ed. Paul Richards, James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2005. pp. 137-154.

Agency of Victims: Young Women’s Survival Strategies in the Liberian Civil War. In Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth as Emerging Categories in Postcolonial Africa. Eds. Filip De Boeck & Alcinda Honwana, James Currey, 2005. pp. 53-80.

Fluid Research Fields: Studying Excombatant Youth in the Aftermath of the Liberian Civil War. In Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement. Eds. Jo Boyden & Joanna de Berry, Berghahn 2004. pp. 209-236.

I wasn’t aware of it as I started; I felt that youth as a topic to study was rather fresh, but I soon realised that it was a trend in Anthropology, particularly in relation to studying conflict. Paul Richards’ book Fighting for the Rainforest (1996) was especially influential. Together with Henrik Vigh and Catrine Christiansen, I contributed to the broader discussions with this book: Navigating youth – generating adulthood: social becoming in an African context, Nordic Africa Institute Publ. 2006. pp 1-272.