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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Making hearts cool down: Recovery and informal justice practices among former rebel fighters, Sierra Leone
| Panel |
49. The politics of healing and justice in post-conflict societies: Global discourses and local realities
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| Paper ID | 400 |
| Author(s) |
Christensen, Maya Mynster
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | “We try to move on, to forgive and forget about what has been passed. If we don’t move, our hearts will never cool down and no justice will be done” (Patrick, former rebel fighter).
This paper explores the contradictions between dominant discourses and local practices of justice and self-healing, by focussing on how former rebel fighters in a Freetown ghetto employ informal justice mechanisms and attempt to heal themselves as part of a process of recovery and of establishing social order.
Former rebel fighters constitute today a stigmatized group of youths who got “lost” in the Disarmament Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) process and who presently battle to curve out a space for manoeuvre in the margins of a post-conflict society. Following long-term militia engagement and significant experiences of loss, their hearts have gone “warm”, and to cope with the stress and suffering “making their hearts cool down” is a central concern.
From the local, situated perspective of the former fighters struggling to overcome social marginalisation and political neglect, movement, in the sense of actively engaging in and acting upon the world, is a key factor in the process of making hearts cool down. Referring to a process of social recovery that stresses the importance of moving forward through bodily embedded practice, rather than by dwelling on past narratives, it is a common expression in the ghetto that “we don’t talk, we walk”. Based on six months of anthropological fieldwork the paper addresses this ‘strategy of movement’.
By shedding light on how movement is implicated in healing and justice practices in non-state institutions such as street committees and via informal community practices the paper further illuminates the dynamics of local technologies of memory and confronts western approaches to healing and justice promotion with a challenge. Global discourses of post conflict reconstruction and peace building featuring, for example, testimony and calls for reconciliation are implicitly problematized by analysis of the day to day struggles of former fighters to come to terms not with the past but with the present, even as they remain neglected by the state and by intervening agencies.
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