Krijn Peters

‘Why we fight’: voices of youth combatants in Sierra Leone

Young people are the major participants in most wars. In the African civil wars of the last twenty years combatants have become increasingly youthful. Some forces are made up largely of young teenagers; combatants may sometimes be as young as 8 or 10, and girl fighters are increasingly common. The trend to more youthful combatants also reflects the discovery that children—their social support disrupted by war—make brave and loyal fighters; the company of comrades in arms becomes a family substitute. There are two main adult reactions. The first is to stigmatise youth combatants as evil (‘bandits’, ‘vermin’). The other (regularly espoused by agencies working with children) is to see young fighters as victims, as tools of undemocratic military regimes or brutally unscrupulous ‘warlords’. But many under-age combatants choose with their eyes open to fight, and defend their choice, sometimes proudly. Set against a background of destroyed families and failed educational systems, militia activity offers young people a chance to make their way in the world. The purpose of this article is to let young combatants explain themselves. The reader is left to decide whether they are the dupes and demons sometimes supposed.

Book Review: Re-Member. Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconciliation of War-Affected ChildrenDerluynI.MelsC.ParmentierS.VandenholeW. (Eds.)Re-Member. Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconciliation of War-Affected ChildrenCambridge, UK: Intersentia, 2012. 568 pp., £95.00 (paperback). ISBN 978-94-000-0027-8

whether a state abolishes the death penalty. The cost is cited repeatedly, but abolition efforts can turn on state-specific circumstances such as whether the relatives of murder victims mobilize to support or oppose the death penalty. It is noteworthy that although the majority of the public supports the death penalty, the passion seems to be on the side of abolitionists as they typically outnumber proponents when testimony is presented to lawmakers. A wealth of information is presented in this book, but some points are made in more detail than others. Despite nearly 60 pages of endnotes, there were times when additional explanations or citations would have been helpful. However, this book provides fascinating details about the forces supporting the abolition movement, and a convincing argument that the end of the death penalty in the United States is attainable.

Re-Member. Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconciliation of War-Affected Children

whether a state abolishes the death penalty. The cost is cited repeatedly, but abolition efforts can turn on state-specific circumstances such as whether the relatives of murder victims mobilize to support or oppose the death penalty. It is noteworthy that although the majority of the public supports the death penalty, the passion seems to be on the side of abolitionists as they typically outnumber proponents when testimony is presented to lawmakers. A wealth of information is presented in this book, but some points are made in more detail than others. Despite nearly 60 pages of endnotes, there were times when additional explanations or citations would have been helpful. However, this book provides fascinating details about the forces supporting the abolition movement, and a convincing argument that the end of the death penalty in the United States is attainable.

Insecure spaces: peacekeeping, power and performance in Haiti, Kosovo and Liberia

Abstract London, New York: Zed Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84277-886-9 Hb, 189 pages.

Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa (review)

process: these are probably the two best-informed chapters in the book. Other chapters, while providing synthetic analysis and interesting parallels among cities throughout the continent, are more problematic. In the first chapter, the author uses the notion of ‘Islamic city’ (pp. 24–33) carelessly, without mentioning that this notion was part of an orientalist vision of North Africa and the East, and has consequently been critiqued by many prominent scholars since at least the 1980s (Janet Abu-Lughod, André Raymond, Zenep Celik, to mention a few). How can Roger le Tourneau’s monograph on the Islamic city (1961) be used so extensively (pp. 26–7) without any reference to that debate? In Chapter 3, the typology of colonial cities seems irrelevant with its divisions into ‘superficially unchanged towns’, ‘towns with hybrid character’ and ‘new cities’. Differences between the first and the second types are not really explained: it seems difficult, for instance, to understand to what type Dakar or Ibadan belong. The expression colonial city is in itself contested, as it leads to inconclusive typologies which ‘tend to divide between the essentially African and the essentially colonial city’, as John Parker comments (Making the Town, 2000, p. xix). A rather important factual mistake should also be mentioned for those familiar with Senegalese history: the French did not destroy the medina in Dakar in 1915 (p. 76) but instead set it up in 1914 as a sanitary response to the plague. Strangely, there is also a long paragraph on the very small European town of Bone in Algeria, while in the following chapter the ‘white city’ in South Africa does not receive attention, the author preferring to look at the ‘emergence of a genuinely urban culture which might be said to form the basis of a common South African culture’ (p. 107). This choice is also questionable: have whites in South Africa not also participated in the historical shaping of a common South African culture? The chapter on the post-colonial city provides useful information for the last five decades (urban growth, government, informal sector, public facilities and so on) but does not address the way cities in Africa are perceived today, both locally and internationally. This chapter is missing references to landmark books (those of AbdouMaliq Simone, Jennifer Robinson and the Public Culture issue on Johannesburg edited by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall) and discussion that would help to categorize cities in Africa (global, non-global, cosmopolitan, ordinary?). Interestingly, while the author has largely demonstrated throughout the book the incredible diversity of historical experiences in Africa, he left the reader without a response to a central question: does the African city exist? Or is the African city still essentially the Islamic city of the past?