Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies

"Building on a decade of work by the research group 'Integration and Conflict along the Upper Guinea Coast' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, this book brings together a group of scholars deeply engaged with the lived politics of the region. The chapters problematize a range of common tropes about the politics of the Upper Guinea Coast, allowing us to understand political struggles in local terms, hence transcending conventional wisdom. Articulated through finely detailed examples we see how common binaries like stranger and host or patron and client are contested and remade in ongoing social practice. The work shows that anthropological insights need not be purely theoretical but can be put to use in understanding and addressing pressing issues such as conflict, migration, and health crises." (Susan Shepler, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University, USA)

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic).

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic). The emphasis on ‘crises’ in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades. Contemporary crises and changes in the region provoke a challenge to accepted ways of understanding and imagining socio-political life in the region – whether at the level of subnational and national communities, or international and regional structures of interest, such as refugees, weapon trafficking, cross-border military incursions, regional security, and transnational epidemics. This book explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented research on the region and re-evaluates them in the light of the contemporary structural dynamics of crises, changes and continuities.