This study aims to collapse the often gendered opposition of agency and victimhood that typically characterizes the analysis of women's coping strategies in war zones. The term victimcy is proposed to describe the agency of self-staging as victim of war and explore how it is deployed as one tactic—amongst others—in one young Liberian woman's "social navigation" of war zones. Victimcy is thus revealed as a form of self-representation by which a certain form of tactic agency is effectively exercised under the trying, uncertain, and disempowering circumstances that confront actors in warscapes. However the story of Bintu also reveals the complexity of women's strategies, roles, and options as they confront conflicting challenges and opportunities in war zones. While in some circumstances women may take humanitarian aid, in others they may also take up arms. An ethnography of social tactics thus counters reductionist portrayals of women in war zones as merely the passive victims of conflict.

The 2007 general elections in Sierra Leone marked a decisive moment in the country's postwar recovery. In this article we show how political parties strategically remobilized ex-combatants into 'security squads' in order both to protect themselves and to mobilize votes. We look at the tactical and strategic motives behind ex-combatants' choice to join the political campaigning and the alternatives (such as 'watermelon politics'), and we also examine the deep distrust between politicians and ex-combatants. Focusing on politics as the domestication of violence, we shed light on the continuation of prewar and wartime mobilization of youth into politics and demonstrate how electoral moments can legitimize violence. In hindsight, the 2007 elections strengthened the democratic process in Sierra Leone, but this article shows on what fragile ground this success was built. 'Wartime' is not so different from 'political time'. 1 So-so politricks in their heads. .. but when will we rise? 2

The West Side Boys were one of several military actors in the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991–2002). A splinter group of the army, the WSB emerged as a key player in 1999–2000. In most Western media accounts, the WSB appeared as nothing more than renegade, anarchistic bandits, devoid of any trace of long-term goals. By contrast, this article aims to explain how the WSB used well-devised military techniques in the field; how their history and military training within the Sierra Leone army shaped their notion of themselves and their view of what they were trying to accomplish; and, finally, how military commanders and politicians employed the WSB as a tactical instrument in a larger map of military and political strategies. It is in the politics of a military economy that this article is grounded.

This volume invites comparisons across the African continent by presenting case studies from a variety of countries, settings and institutions with one factor in common: armed conflict. 1 The chapters that follow refer to sociopolitical or economic networks along a continuum from formal and open to informal and at times even illicit. 2 It has been argued that networks will rise to prominence where formal states, or other sovereign entities, are fractured, weak or barely present (Reno 1998). Informal networks of political or economic character are present in any society, whether in Africa, Europe, North America or elsewhere. The politics of intimacy, or 'the culture of intimacy', as Herzfeld (1997) would have it, is part of the everyday life of nation-states where every institution is governed by onstage and offstage politics (Shryock 2004;Goffman 1959). It is the inner workings of politics and the ever-present backrooms to the official storefronts of political and economic ventures which are central in this volume. A second theme running through the book concerns the role of Big Men, informal political and/or economic actors situated in social space. 3 Big Men will be treated here as nodes in networks, combining efforts in projects of joint action. Joint action may be economic or political, and could for instance be a war effort.The combination of Big Men and networks is not an African phenomenon, but rather a very human enterprise. Works concerned with African neo-patrimonialism, clientelism and patron-client systems are many, but I intend in this introduction to approach from a somewhat different angle by fusing classic network studies with Big Men/Great Men research originating from Melanesia (e.g. Sahlins 1963;Godelier 1986;Godelier and Strathern 1991). The term is, furthermore, used emically; for instance, in Sierra Leone people constantly refer to Big Men and their ways of acting, systematically relating to who is, and who is not, a Big Man in all social settings.Early in For the City Yet to Come (2004b), AbdouMaliq Simone notes that when working with NGOs in urban Africa, he was always bewildered that staff seldom appeared to be doing what they were hired to do; instead, the work that was in fact achieved was described as being done somewhere else. In his quest for locating this 'somewhere else', Simone notes that by engaging with these organizations 'over an extended period of time, it became clear that there were other, more provisional and ephemeral, forms of … collective activity that association members also participated in and that seemingly had a greater impact on their life' (ibid.: 24). This is what Chabal and Daloz, although from slightly different vantage points and reaching somewhat different conclusions, talk about as Africa Works (1999). But in zones of conflict and war, where everything is in flux, the inner workings of 'order' are even more intricate. War in Africa does not imply the collapse of everything, a venturing into total anarchy. Alternative forms of control and management establ...

The contribution and situation of research brokers problematically tend to be shrouded in silence in most research texts. In this article we probe into the particular ethical and methodological challenges that we may encounter when working with brokers in conflict settings, drawing upon existing literature and contributions of this special issue. Reposing on post-colonial perspectives, we problematize both the increasing securitization of conflict research with its one-sided focus on researcher safety and the notion of researcher responsibility. Moreover, we argue that the inequalities marking researcher-broker relations are often particularly glaring in conflict settings, thus increasing the risk for exploitation.