Love and Violence in Sierra Leone
Mediating Intimacy after Conflict

Unearths the complexity of love and violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone, driven by ethnographic exploration and local knowledge.

Luisa T. Schneider (Author)

9781009533034, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2025

283 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.56 kg

'A brave, intelligent and important book based on rare and intimate ethnographic data, which should attract a wide array of scholars with research interests in gendered social relations, sexuality and violence. It is an equally fascinating study of how people in their everyday navigate a realm of intricate legal plurality, from the very local to the global, and where no level is sovereign nor autonomous, but commonplace clashing and at times socially collapsing. This book is an intimate, violent, demanding, troubling, yet brilliant piece of scholarly work.' Mats Utas, co-editor of Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context

In the decades following the civil war that took place in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, new laws were passed to rebuild the state, and to prevent rape, teenage pregnancy and domestic violence. In this ethnography, Luisa T. Schneider explores the intricate semantic, empirical and socio-legal dynamics of love and violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone, challenging the oversimplification of these phenomena. Schneider underscores the limitations of imposing singular interpretations on love and violence, advocating for a nuanced, phenomenological approach that reveals how state and institutional attempts to regulate violence and loving relationships without considering local lived experience and meaning-making can yield negative consequences. By analysing how love and violence are historically constituted, experienced, and (re)produced across personal, social, legal, and political levels, this book critiques the construction of violence within gendered sexual relationships by development agencies, law makers and politicians, urging them to engage with local knowledge and experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Introduction
1. Access, Methodology and Ethics
2. The impact of violence on relationships
3. Loving and living relationships in Freetown today
4. The Spectrum of violence in relationships
5. The language of violence
6. Household and community mediations of violence
7. Invoking the State-when Adults report violence in their relationships to the Police
8. Minors before the Law-building futures, policing sex
9. Perpetrators? The consequence of the sexual offences Act for Young Men
Conclusion
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]