The War Machines: Young men and violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Abstract

Hoffman's ethnography and analysis of the organized machinery of violence in the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–2002) and in the second round of civil war in Liberia (1999–2003) exemplifies a contemporary shift in scholarly discourse on war and violence: namely, anthropologists have arrived on the intellectual scene with their ethnographic methods. Hoffman's ethnographic methods were mainly directed at two military groups: the civil defence militias of Sierra Leone that helped bring the civil war to an end in 2002 and the insurgency group called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), which helped drive President Charles Taylor from office in Liberia in 2003. What is especially notable about this work is the combination of sophisticated social theorizing with intrepid ethnographic fieldwork in a very dangerous world. Hoffman's book is one of the best examples of this new anthropological genre of studying war and violence with fieldwork methods that generate data about the lived experience of violence. Such methods and data help dislodge common assumptions about this violence – wild youth on a rampage, primordial ethnic hatred, et cetera.