The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia by Danny Hoffman (review)

Events of the last two decades have done little to disrupt colonial-era images of Africa as a site of disorder and violent excess. Western imaginaries shaped by reports from Somalia, Rwanda, Darfur, and the collapsing states of West and Central Africa leave analysts little space, as Danny Hoffman notes, from which to construct more nuanced, complex, and sympathetic portraits of young men at war: “Whatever one might say or write in an effort to humanize young male militia fighters in Africa, the visual image of black male bodies with weapons carries a demonizing baggage that for many viewers may be inescapable” (p. xx). Bringing to this project his background as a photojournalist, Hoffman sets out to argue that rather than isolated pockets of primitivism, these conflicts are inextricably connected to global processes of labor recruitment and deployment. Situating his work within the theoretical framework of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987), Hoffman uses the idea of the “war machine” as a set of relations, practices, and modes of operating that emerges to contest the “interiorizing” practices of the modern state. Not always violent in its initial forms, the war machine consists of efforts in community self-defense, local resistance, and refusal to submit to state-sponsored processes of extraction and alienation. Sadly, these efforts are too often “captured and reterritorialized” (p. 16) and it is this process, which he observed closely in his travels with the kamajors (quasi-traditional hunters and community defenders) of Sierra Leone and the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) militia in Liberia, that Hoffman finds most compelling. Also inspired by Achille Mbembe’s idea of hyperproductivity in African urban spaces, Hoffman avoids reducing the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone either to primordial or patrimonial outbursts of unchanging “tradition” or to purely economic “resource curse” struggles—perspectives that have defined the literature for some time now. Rather, he globalizes events taking place in remote West African military outposts and urban squatter communities, linking them to neoliberal rationalities and economies of scale that also drive the “outsourcing” of security services in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The result is an understanding of violence itself as a product of human labor, rather than as a symptom of some other condition. He manages to make this argument without losing sight of the humanity and pathos of the young men caught up in this productive logic, whose bodies and futures are consumed by the processes he documents.

Using connections forged during his days as a journalist, Hoffman was able to carry out long-term ethnographic fieldwork with several different armed groups in the Mano River region and, more important, to follow them through the UN-led processes of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) that supposedly “ended” the wars. Even as his informants were “demobilized” (some with a significant package of cash payments and vouchers for educational and vocational training) in one place, many were shifting their attention to other conflicts in other countries, looking for new employers in need of their skills. Using their military and entrepreneurial training to slip through porous international borders, some veterans specialized in the recruitment and “packaging” of new “rebel groups” for hire. Others, not so fortunate, found themselves adrift in the aftermath of devastated postwar societies without the financial rewards and security they had expected. Hoffman’s detailed observations of young men and women trying to build adult lives in an abandoned hotel in Freetown or on the streets of Monrovia beautifully illustrate his arguments, following Marx, that late capitalism has reached the point of “real subsumption,” in which “there seem to be no relations not organized according to the exchange-value-producing regimen, when there is no outside to capital” (p. 107). Violence has become a commodity that circulates in common with diamonds, guns, and cash, “its value . . . translated into political subjectivity and masculine identity...