War Machines

In The War Machines, Danny Hoffman considers how young men in West Africa are made available for violent labour on battlefields and in diamond mines, rubber plantations, and other unregulated industries. Based on his ethnographic research with militia groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia during those countries' recent civil wars, Hoffman traces the path of young fighters who moved from innovative, grassroots community-defence organizations in Sierra Leone during the mid-1990s into a large pool of mercenary labour. Hoffman argues that in contemporary West Africa, space, sociality, and life itself are organized around making young men available for all manner of dangerous work. Drawing on his ethnographic research over the past nine years, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, he maintains that the mobilization of young West African men exemplifies a global trend in the outsourcing of warfare and "security operations." A similar dynamic underlies the political economy of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a growing number of postcolonial spaces. An experienced photojournalist, Hoffman integrates more than fifty photographs into The War Machines.