Mobilizing Young Combatants in the Mano River Region

project summary

The project investigates the mobilisation of male youth into violent networks and institutions across the borders of the conflict-ridden Mano River region of West Africa. By exploring the interplay between combatants, their recruiters and humanitarian interventions the project will generate insight into the cyclic demobilisation and remobilisation in a context of peace building. The project illuminates how combatants mobilise/are mobilised not only into militia groups but also into politics, police forces, private security firms, and military institutions cross-cutting ideological boundaries and enclosed political spaces. A major assumption of the proposal is that the weaknesses of interventionist efforts to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate combatants can be traced to a failure to recognise the organisational forms under which combatants are mobilised; i.e. the link between informal patrimonial networks and violent organisation. In the Mano River region, youth is experienced as a confining position characterised by lack of mobility and lack of prospects for social becoming. Therefore young people depend on patrimonial networks to enhance their life chances - in peacetime as well as in wartime. Rather than being replaced during war, patrimonial networks simply become militarised. Against this argument, the project explores the social becoming of youth through violent mobilisation.