The Work of War: the Organization of Violence and Male Labor in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Abstract

The fighting that spread across the Mano River Union countries of West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea) from 1989 until 2003 were evidence for many observers that the region lay outside the global economy and marked a return to primitive tribal violence. In reality, the Mano River War was the most “postmodern” of conflicts. Ethnographic fieldwork among militia fighters on both sides of the border illustrates that a complex political economy of violent labor made work on the region’s battlefield part of a continuum that included mining diamonds and gold deep in the rainforest, tapping rubber on regional plantations and campaigning for local politicians in these countries’ major cities. Far from a reversion to some pre-modern state, the dynamics of assembling and deploying labor for the work of war suggest that this region was, and remains, a laboratory for the future of capitalism.