War, Women and Post-conflict Empowerment: Lessons from Sierra Leone

Abstract

War, Women and Post-conflict Empowerment: Lessons from Sierra Leone, edited by Josephine Beoku-Betts and Fredline A. M’Cormack-Hale uses an African Feminist theory to explicate how issues such as class, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and heteronormativity intersect and are shaped by women in the African context, specifically in the war and post war contexts. The book offers conceptual frameworks embedded in “African centred gendered analysis” which privileges African lived realities and localised understandings of empowerment and development over dominant Western neoliberal conceptual frameworks. It does this by showcasing various womanhood and motherhood strategies used by women in Sierra Leone to end the 11-year Civil War (1991–2002). Equally so, the book divulges various ways women’s mass mobilisation has contributed to post-war Sierra Leone which saw the passage of landmark laws that protect women from patriarchal violations that predate the 11-year Civil War.