Youthful Dreams

Abstract
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.

Keywords: Guinea, Guinée Forestière, West Africa
Youth, State, Statehood, Authority, Conflict, Political Participation, Power, Violence, Everyday Life

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Till Förster

Short CV

• PhD student, Social Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland, since August 2009
• Research and Teaching Assistant, PhD Student, Division of Political Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland, 2007-2009
• Employee at Museum der Kulturen, Basel, Switzerland 2006-2007
• Student Research Assistant at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland 2005-2007
• MA in Social Anthropology, History and Physical Geography, University of Basel, Switzerland, 2006

Research Groups, memberships

• Research Group Political Transformations, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel
• Société Suisse d'Etudes Africaines/Schweizerische Afrika Gesellschaft (SSEA/SAG)
• Société Suisse d'Ethnologie/Schweizerische Ethnologische Gesellschaft (SSE/SEG)

Publications

• 2011, (conference paper), "Public service, generations and the socialist past in a Guinean town. Inside and beyond the Maison des Jeunes. ECAS 4, Uppsala: 1-21.                                                                   
• 2011, (review article), "Child soldiers. Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front." African Affairs 110(440): 515-516.
• 2010, (with Benedikt Korf & Tobias Hagmann), "The geography of warscape." Third World Quarterly 31(3): 385-399.
• 2009, "Bilder von Staat." Tsantsa 14: 158-171.
• 2009, (review article), "Making nations, creating strangers. States and citizenship in Africa. Review." African Affairs 108(431): 321-322.
• 2008, "Guinea in 2008: The unfinished revolution." Politique Africaine 112: 87-98.
• 2007, (mit Benedikt Korf), "Geographien der Gewalt." Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie 51(3-4): 221-237.
• 2005, (Lizenziatsarbeit, unveröffentlicht) „Ethnologie und Krieg. Kritische Auseinandersetzung mit ethnologischen Beiträgen zum Phänomen Krieg in Sierra Leone, Liberia und der Côte d'Ivoire“. Basel, Universität Basel: 105.