Making neoliberal subjects: ‘idle’ youth, precarity, and development intervention in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Since the end of the Sierra Leonean civil war, successive governments have designated youth as a priority area of policy intervention and proposed numerous programmes to deal with the so-called ‘idle’ youth problem in the country. This focus on youth as objects of policy concern partially owes to contemporary discourses about the relationships between youth and conflicts, and especially, the idea that the existence of a large youth population represents a threat to domestic and international security, and thus functions as part of a larger global governance mechanism that targets societies as part of a liberal interventionist and conflict containment strategy. This paper uses the Sierra Leonean example to stage a broader critique of these interventionist and conflict containment strategies and the ideological schemas that make them possible. It suggests that these programmes are circumscribed epistemically by evolutionist preconceptions that construct the targeted populations as objects of power to be reproduced as neoliberal cosmopolitan subjects as a way of transcending the purported threat they represent. However, that these policies are incapable of transforming the structures within which the so-called ‘idle’ youth problem is produced. Rather, they reproduce, in other guise, the very conditions of precarity that they aim to address.