Mats Utas
Project part of research program Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography, PI Dennis Rodgers, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020
This project is a follow-up to my previous work on gang-like groups in post-war Sierra Leone. In the aftermath of the Sierra Leonean civil war, groups of ex-combatants and other youths gathered in the city. Making do in the city without proper work and often with frail social ties was something close to an art form. Joint forms of informal organization were often pivotal for economic survival and protection. In many ways, this organization was gang-like. 20 years have passed since the end of the civil war. The young people I followed during two years in Freetown are today middle-aged men. In this follow-up study, I focus on the possibilities and problems of growing old in a gangland.
This research is part of a larger project headed by Dennis Rogers called Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography. The five-year project, which started in January 2019, has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 787935).
Since I started researching in the Pentagon area in central Freetown, the guys have kept pestering me about the issue of anonymity. “You want my story, not my name”, or “You want my story, not my face”, was something I heard repeatedly. They felt our research practice to be patronising. During my field visit in the spring of 2023, we once more discussed the issue, and the outcome was to start co-authoring. The article “The Story of Black Jesus: Rebel War, Thug Life and Growing Old in Freetown, Sierra Leone” is our first attempt. It will appear in Critical Criminology in Volume 33, issue 2, in June 2025.
For a long time, I resisted framing the post-war lives of the Pentagon Guys as “gang-like,” but at the same time, I continued to marvel at the resemblances found when reading gang literature. I first attempted to incorporate gangs into my material in the book Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World with the article “Playing the game”: gang-militia logics in war-torn Sierra Leone.

Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World edited by Jennifer M. Hazen and Dennis Rodgers (University of Minnesota Press 2014)
However, I continued to be hesitant about whether the frame was relevant. It was only at the very end of writing this second paper about the life of Black Jesus that I concluded that not only was it a vital perspective, but the case may also have some contributions to make to the study of gangs.