Name: Vigh, Henrik Home Country: Denmark Research Country: Guinea Bissau Project period: 2000-2003 Type: Ph.D. thesis Title Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea Bissau Abstract This dissertation seeks to shed novel light on the processes of youth mobilisation in West Africa through a perspective on ‘social navigation’. Based on 14 months of fieldwork with young men in the city of Bissau, Guinea Bissau, the analysis takes its point of departure in the realisation that the Aguentas, a youth militia who were mobilised into the civil war in Guinea Bissau from 1998-1999, engaged in warfare fighting for a social possibility rather than against an enemy. Their battle was, in other words, not so much against an Other as for a process of social becoming and improvement of their life chances. The point of departure in social possibilities and life chances leads to an illumination of the emergence of the Aguentas in relation to the general context of decline, conflict, and factional struggle that characterises the Guinean society. In the first part of the dissertation I thus seek to shed light on the common characteristics of the Guinean political process, on the specificities of the relationship between the opposed parties within the Guinean civil war, and on the specific praxis and understanding of the war as a Guerra di Hermonia, a brotherly war. The participation of young men in this brotherly war leads me to an investigation of the general socio-political positions and possibilities of Guinean youth. Through demonstrating that the generational position of youth has become a ‘social moratorium’, defined by a lack of ability to realise a normatively prescribed process of social becoming, I examined the relationship between warfare and social possibilities for youth in Guinea Bissau. The second part of the dissertation documents how my interlocutors seek to make the best of their lives despite the confinement of the social moratorium and a minimum of life chances. I illuminate the political space and possibilities that young Bissauian men are able to navigate and describe their conceptualisation of their actual mobilisation as, what in Creole is called, dubriagem. Through focussing on dubriagem I show how the Aguentas, by navigating terrains of war, seek to construct a path through a socio-political environment in constant disfiguration and reconfiguration. Dubriagem is the tactics and praxis of agents seeking to move along a plotted trajectory, not on a defined and demarcated stable ground, but in a moving and fluctuating socio-political environment. It is ‘social navigation’, that is, the complex political praxis of moving towards a goal while at the same time being moved by the social terrain. In the third part of the dissertation I show, that in plotting and actualising action we do not only navigate the immediate but also the imaginary. We act, thus, simultaneously in relation to current needs, opportunities, and obstacles as well as towards the anticipated ‘unfolding’ of the terrain and a defined telos. Our praxis is thus always related to our understanding of the movement of the waters that lie between where we are and where we wish to go. In other words, we act in relation to that which has been, which is, and which we anticipate will be, the latter of which I conceptualise as the social imaginary. I seek thereby to illuminate how my interlocutors see their lives as embedded in a terrain in which decline, conflict and turmoil constitute the experienced and anticipated characteristics of their everyday, and how this influences their choices and action. Focussing on social imaginaries the third part of the dissertation shows that in Bissau the retrospect, introspect, and extrospect merge to form a picture of dire prospects, and how destructive politics come to be seen as an essential trait of the Guinean subject, engrained simultaneously in the body of the Guinean subject and located in the world, through an identity formation which I have termed ‘geno-global’. Finally, in the last part of the dissertation, I seek to bring the different threads of the dissertation together to provide the necessary empirical and analytical foundation for illuminating the process of appeasement and social re-incorporation of the Aguentas into the Guinean society. I show how a mutual understanding of the hardness of life in Bissau and of the contextual character of decline and conflict has created a situational understanding of mobilisation and conflict engagement that greatly facilitates social reintegration and minimises hatred. Yet in conclusion I also highlight the darker aspects of this process. As situationalism comes to facilitate reconciliation by placing the emphasis on the situation that generates the act rather than the agent who performed it, it comes to constitute political violence as a social modality rather than a normative transgression. Involved research institution(s) Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Supervisor(s) Susan Reynolds Whyte, Institute of Anthropology Correspondence Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Frederiksholms Kanal 4 DK-1220 Copenhagen K Email: Henrik_Vigh