This dissertation examines how colonial histories converge with models for capitalist futures in Sierra Leone, framed by ongoing debates around the governance, accumulation and distribution of social goods. It explores how managerial logics of risk, human capital, resilience and corporate social responsibility informed the remaking of the state following a decade of civil war and military intervention. And it attends to the politics of reconstruction pursued in contexts of radical upheaval, examining material infrastructures and subjectivities as sites of transnationally mediated cultural transformation continuous with colonial memory and practice.
An ethnographic and historical study based on 18 months of field and archival research in the Western Area (or Freetown Peninsula) of Sierra Leone, the dissertation contributes to debates around care, agency and social value, as well as the fraught relationship between knowledge and expertise in contexts of political, spatial and economic experimentation. Developing an approach that denaturalizes calamity and foregrounds long-term structural violence, chapters trace the growing cognizance of the relation between ecological risk and speculative practices in land and real estate markets in the country, briefly hailed as “Africa’s fastest growing economy” between 2012-2015.
Examining the role of financial institutions, humanitarian agencies and contractors from the perspective of numerous stakeholders—including flood survivors and ex-combatants, builders and land brokers, urban planners and architects, World Bank officials and local conservationists—I demonstrate how reconstruction in Sierra Leone intensified dynamics of financialization under conditions of questionable sovereignty, reflecting entrenched hierarchies of rank within global labor and commodity markets and the long-term vulnerability of marginalized citizens to increasingly quotidian forms of harm.
The dissertation argues for a methodological shift that understands official demands for citizens to embody their “resilience” as an enduring anticipation of catastrophe, one that has developed in tandem with normative aspirations for the “good life” in Sierra Leone. In contrast with the universal claims of liberal community, democratization and material renewal that accompanied the end of war, I track how manual work involved in excavating the foundations for residential sites in the new suburbs of Freetown coincided with a broader panic around the rising value, obscure origins, and growing scarcity of property, examining moral accounting around the relationship between prosperity and the uneven distribution of social injury.
By situating ethnographic material on building, work and wealth alongside debates on global inequality, disaster capitalism, race and the poetics of history, I demonstrate the variety of social factors that sustain the violent futurity of growth. More pointedly, I argue that Sierra Leone reveals a shrinking zone of accountability for the human costs of development “by any means necessary,” as disasters increasingly reflect the retreat of the state in its capacity to protect or preserve human life. Ultimately, the dissertation underscores the contradictions of liberal governance in the wake of empire, new imperial relations in the face of old, and the seemingly premature claim of freedom therein.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/8fb6-8185 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Davies, Nile |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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