Mats Utas
Sida/Sarec – Swedish international development agency’s department for research cooperation 2004-2007
The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (2007-11)
The marginalisation of large segments of urban citizens is one of the most significant threats to social stability and long-term development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the exclusion of youth is troubling. In my dissertation (2003), I argued that the grim predicaments of young Liberians during the 1980s led to a momentous voluntary enlistment of youth into various rebel armies in the 1990s and thus were instrumental to the invigoration of the civil war. Researchers studying the Sierra Leonean Civil War have reasoned in similar veins. However, The assertion of a youth crisis is based on limited systematic research. Thus, this project intends to study the everyday lives of marginalised youth comprising the very categories that took up arms during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Material for the study will mainly be collected through qualitative fieldwork in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, but also in extended urban zones of alluvial diamond mining areas and plantations. The project will draw comparisons with research elsewhere in contemporary Africa and historical accounts.
The fieldwork is scheduled to last two years, giving me enough time to engage with the various components and groups of people. I will be involved in manifold activities at the Department of Sociology at Fourah Bay College in Freetown. This “embeddedness” in local research and teaching further accounts for the quality of the final product.
This was how I presented my postdoc project. When most scholars would take their fresh PhD diplomas and go to posh universities in the global north, I chose another direction. I took my wife and two small children to Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, which was furthermore just out of war. It turned out to be a brilliant choice. It was two of the best years of my life. At Fourah Bay College, I supervised master students, and I found a great hangout in downtown Freetown where I came almost daily and stayed both day and night-time.
This fieldwork not only gave me tremendous personal insights but also an enormous amount of ethnographic material. In addition to the first postdoc funding from the Sarec, I was generously awarded an academic establishing grant from The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, giving me ample time to continue focusing on this material. In hindsight, I can see how impatient I was at the time Personally, the years after were tumultuous. I was in a poisonous marriage, and if I felt stuck there, I, quite the contrary, used my work life to move: I travelled as much as I could, attended conferences, gave lectures, etc. Too quickly, I also moved on to new projects, so I haven’t published the gist of this material, which is a real shame, especially as the Pentagon Guys I worked with spent so much time and shared so generously with me. It’s the book I never wrote! But here are some publications from this project:
West Side Boys: military navigation in the Sierra Leone civil war. In Journal of Modern African Studies vol. 46, no. 3, 2008. pp. 487-511.
Mercenaries of Democracy: The ‘politrix’ of remobilized combatants in the Sierra Leone 2007 General Elections. In African Affairs vol. 107, no. 429, 2008. pp. 515-539.
“Playing the game”: gang-militia logics in war-torn Sierra Leone. In Global Gangs: Street violence across the world. Eds. Hazen, J.M. and Rodgers, D. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014 Pp. 171-192
“The system bang me right here”: ostacoli e opportunità fra le strade di Freetown e oltre. In Antropologia, vol 2, No. 1, 2015. Pp 41-60.
The Gift of Violence: Ex-Militias and Ambiguous Debt Relations during Post-War Elections in Sierra Leone. In African conflict and peacebuilding review. 2016 6(2): 23-47.
Radicalized youth: oppositional poses and positions In African Insurgents: navigating an evolving landscape. Eds. Böås, Morten and Kevin Dunn. Boulder/London: Lynne Rienner. 2017. Pp 23-42.
Through this project, I more directly entered the field of urban studies, especially discussions of urban poverty. This led me to publish two special issues, first with the human geographer Ilda Lourenco Lindell and subsequently with my former PhD student and anthropology colleague Jesper Bjarnesen.
Networked City life in Urban Forum, vol. 23, Issue 4. 2012
And see introduction:
Networked City Life in Africa: Introduction. In Urban Forum vol. 23, Issue 4, 2012 Pp. 409–414
Urban Kinship, special issue. in Africa, Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 8, Issue S1. 2018
And see introduction:
Urban kinship: the micro-politics of proximity and relatedness in African cities In Africa – Journal of the International African Institute, 2018: 88(S1). Pp 1-11.