Fundamentación de la necesidad de su implementación

While I have identified continuities in the ordering (or disordering) power of violence between the domestic and political domains at the level of ideological representation (see chapters two and four), I suggest that longer term fieldwork is required to understand the empirical continuities, and the precise ways in which the militarisation of Sierra Leonean society during the war has had ongoing effects on gender roles, intimate relations and the sexualisation of the social contract, particularly in urban areas.

At a general level, by describing the gender relations and various forms of women’s agency – that to some extent inform the patrimonial and gerontocratic motif of the ‘weak but dangerous woman’ (see chapter 2) – evident in prewar, rural life, we can speculate on some of the shifts that seem to be occurring in postwar, urban Freetown (cf. Shaw 2002: 196-200). Ferme’s (2001: 88-109) case studies about the fragility of intimate and marital relations between men and women in prewar Kpauawala highlight male anxieties about women’s mobility. Divorce in these cases was primarily expressed in terms of anxieties about women leaving men, and indeed Ferme shows that women did make strategic decisions to leave or stay with their husbands, although their possible courses of action were highly limited compared to men. In George Brook, by contrast, men are not dependent on the labouring bodies of women on the farm, and the social mobility that ideologically continues (for instance through initiation practices) to construct women as ‘weak but dangerous’ seemed less

79 present. As argued in chapters two and three, wartime and postwar international interventions in Sierra Leone, such as the arming of the CDF, and the victim-perpetrator binary that underscored DDR, have shifted ideas of military power towards a more masculine idiom (see Coulter 2009; Ferme and Hoffman 2004; Leach 2000; and Schroven 2006). While the military realm has thus become increasingly masculinised, the masculine realm has simultaneously become increasingly militarised. This second process is also equally evident in both wartime and postwar processes. Shaw (2002: 196-200) for instance, discusses the wartime militarisation of the state and the subsequent valorisation of male soldiers in the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) and ECOMOG.

Meanwhile, Hoffman (2011) argues that with men’s decreasing capacity to cultivate dependents (a project for which they are interdependent on women’s and other young men’s productive and reproductive labour) in a patrimonial system, male participation as subjects in the West African warscape increasingly depends on their bodily capacity for violence (ibid: 109). Violence is not only a tool or a strategy, rather it is a commodity “interchangeable with diamonds and cash, its value translated into political subjectivity and masculine identity” (ibid: 108). Hoffman shows how the emergence of a regional war and extraction economy in West Africa has created a mobile set of

masculine subjectivities, contrasting with Ferme (2001: 144) and Shaw’s (2002: 162-163 and 194-

195) discussions of women’s greater social mobility (associated with both their marginality and subordinate agency) vis-a-vis men.

Thus we see that wartime and post-war international interventions in Sierra Leone have introduced a set of liberal discourses and practices associated with victimised femininities and militarised masculinities. While I argue that women do not necessarily see themselves as victims in relation to their domestic troubles, the shift towards more militarised and masculinised idioms in the political and economic domains would certainly have an effect on gender relations. Through detailed empirical data we might be able to understand exactly how such shifts are related to the seemingly increased circumscription of women’s social mobility in poorer urban neighbourhoods such as George Brook.

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