Social death and violent life chances
This chapter discusses the mobilisation of urban youth in West Africa and analyses their engagement in conflict as social navigation. It proposes a view on youth, which sees the generational category as both a social process and position. The chapter illustrates how urban youth navigate the social ties and options that arise in situations of warfare in order to escape the social death that otherwise characterises their situation.
Author: Vigh, Henrik
RCT Author (No longer employed at RCT): Henrik Vigh
Source: Navigating youth, generating
adulthood: social becoming in an African context /
Catrine Christiansen, Mats Utas, Henrik E. Vigh (eds).
Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
Describing how youth is a time of stagnation and
truncation of social being for young
people in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates how war becomes a
terrain of possibility, rather than solely being a space of
death. The concept of social
navigation thus provides insights into the interplay between
objective structures and subjective agency. As an analytical optic
it enables us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes
fatalistic, and tactical ways in which youth struggle to expand the
horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil, and
diminishing resources, and allows us to see how conflict engagement
becomes a question of balancing social
death with violent life chances.