1. Introduction: Deconstructing Tropes of Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea -- Part I (Re-)Configuration of Identifications and Alliances -- 2. Poro Society, Migration and Political Incorporation on the Freetown Peninsula, Sierra Leone -- 3. Challenging the Classical Parameters of 'Doing Host-Refugee Politics': The Case of Casamance Refugees in The Gambia -- 4. Betterment versus Complicity: Struggling with Patron-Client Logica in Sierra Leone -- 5. Kinship Tropes as Critique of Patronage in Post-War Sierra Leone -- Part II Challenging Conventions of Explaining and Situating Violent Conflict -- 6. Grand Narratives of Crisis: Grand Narratives of Crisis: Customary Conflicts as a Factor in the Liberian Civil War and Implications for Policy -- 7. Historicizing as a Legal Trope of Jeopardy in Asylum Narratives and Expert Testimonies of Gender-Based Violence -- 8. Revisiting Tropes of Environmental and Social Change in Casamance, Senegal -- 9. Casamance Secession: National Narratives of Marginalization and Integration -- Part III (Re-)Contextualizing Postcolonial Statehood and National Belonging -- 10. Transcending Traditional Tropes: Autochthony as a Discourse of Conflict and Integration in Post-war Krio/Non-Krio Relations in Sierra Leone -- 11. Ethnicity as Trope of Political Belonging and Conflict: Cape Verdean Identity and Agency in Guinea-Bissau -- 12. Dynamics in the Host-Stranger Paradigm: The Broker Role of a Latecomer Association in Western Côte d’Ivoire -- Part IV (Re-)Conceptualizing Development and Intervention -- 13. Roads as Imaginary for Employing Idle Youth in the Post-Conflict Liberian State -- 14. Tropes, Networks and Higher Education in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Policy Formation at the University of Makeni -- 15. Bulletproofing: Small Arms, International Law, and Spiritual Security in the Gambia.

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic). The emphasis on ‘crises’ in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades. Contemporary crises and changes in the region provoke a challenge to accepted ways of understanding and imagining socio-political life in the region – whether at the level of subnational and national communities, or international and regional structures of interest, such as refugees, weapon trafficking, cross-border military incursions, regional security, and transnational epidemics. This book explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented research on the region and re-evaluates them in the light of the contemporary structural dynamics of crises, changes and continuities.

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