Christian Kordt Højbjerg

Introduction: deconstructing tropes of politics and policies in Upper Guinea Coast societies

The editors, Hojbjerg, Knorr, and Murphy, summarize and reevaluate key explanatory themes in the broad research program on Upper Guinea Coast ethnography and history in light of contemporary changes, crises, and continuities. Intense sociopolitical transformations in this West African region—for example, civil war, refugees, regional insecurity, postconflict nation-building, and transnational epidemics—challenge the standard research paradigms for understanding the region. The introduction explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented this research, such as “big man” patronage and patrimonialism, firstcomers and latecomers as tropes of historical precedence shaping contemporary migration and settlement patterns, secret society initiations as part of postwar social reconstruction, and the language of autochthony as shaping ethnic and national identities, citizenship, and creolization within and of the imagined nation-state.