African Studies and African Country Resources @ Pitt: Sierra Leone

In the aftermath of explosive civil wars in Africa during the 1990s and 2000s, the establishment of multi-party elections has often been heralded by the West as signaling the culmination of the conflict and the beginning of a period of democratic rule. However, the outcomes of these elections are very rarely uniform, with just as many countries returning to conflict as not. Here, David Harris uses the examples of Sierra Leone and Liberia to examine the nexus of international and domestic politics in these post-conflict elections.

The eleven-year civil war in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002 was incomprehensibly brutal—it is estimated that half of all female refugees were raped and many thousands were killed. While the publicity surrounding sexual violence helped to create a picture of women and girls as victims of the conflict, there has been little effort to understand female soldiers’ involvement in, and experience of, the conflict. Drawing from interviews with former female soldiers and local experts, Megan MacKenzie argues that post-conflict reconstruction is a highly gendered process, demonstrating that a recognition and understanding of the roles and experiences of female soldiers are central to both understanding the conflict and to crafting effective policy for the future.

Anti-slavery colonies - settlements for freed slaves that were intended to prevent the slave trade in West Africa - were established by both American and British societies. Although they occasionally attempted to work together in support of these settlements and their anti-slave trade goals, the societies were more frequently in conflict. Looking for the origin of this Anglo-American rivalry, this book applies a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia. It examines the foundations of these societies, their contribution to the development of 'Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity' as a practical approach to anti-slavery interventions in West Africa, and the points of conflict between them that fed rivalries in America and Britain.