Programme de bourses "Jeunes Chercheurs"

Youthful Dreams - State Making at the Margins of Guinea

The aim of this doctoral research project is to provide a better understanding of the nexus between youth and state making in Guinée Forestière, a marginal and understudied region of the West African state Guinea.

Youth is an important social category to understand contemporary transformations on the African continent. The recent conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire have often been interpreted as youth crises or generational conflicts. However, youth has rarely been related to the state and, more particularly, processes of state making and state formation. This holds particularly true for Guinea, whose political dynamics have been strongly influenced by the past civil wars in neighboring Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire. In the framework of this doctoral research project, I intend to elaborate a more refined understanding of the political roles played by youth in Guinée Forestière. For this purpose, I will produce an ethnography of both youth organizations and local state institutions as they are manifest in this particular region of Guinea. Both youth and the state are conceptualized as social actors that express and reproduce material realities and symbolic imaginaries in their daily lives. Of particular interest are the social processes by which youth involves in state making and/or fulfills key state roles.

The proposed research will be carried out in the prefecture of Guéckédou, situated in the wider border region of Sierra Leone and Liberia. The expected results will make a contribution to the scholarly literature on youth and state building in Africa and produce an in-depth ethnography of youth aspirations and their role in state making in a largely under-researched region of West Africa. The results will also provide key insights to local and international development and peacebuilding actors active in Guinea and neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia as youth and governance represent major areas of recent and future aid intervention. The research will be carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

Contacts

Switzerland:
Michelle Engeler
Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Basel
Münsterplatz 19
4051 Basel
E-Mail: michelleengeler@gmx.ch

Guinea:
Fondation Paix et Réconciliation (FPR)
Fidel Saramana Kamano
Guéckédou, Guinée
E-Mail: delkampo224@hotmail.com

Main road in Guéckédou, Januar 2008