Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers

During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), members of various rebel movements kidnapped thousands of girls and women, some of whom came to take an active part in the armed conflict alongside the rebels. In a stunning look at the life of women in...

Chris Coulter is a lecturer and researcher at Uppsala University and coauthor of Young Female Fighters in African Wars.

The book is an unsettling close-up of girls' and young women's everyday lives during and after the war. Coulter describes abduction, rape and all-pervasive violence in much greater detail than most anthropologists have dared to. She also scrutinizes the challenges that women face during demobilization, and the difficulties of reintegration and reconciliation.... Its disturbingly detailed ethnographic gaze on violence, its focus on the choiceless decisions that women (and many men) faced during the war, and on the ills of post-war reconciliation and reintegration, make it a highly recommendable book for any anthropologist who wants to learn about everyday reality in a war-torn society.

Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions, Harvard University:

Chris Coulter's painstaking and compassionate ethnography focuses on the diverse experiences of Sierra Leone women during a decade-long civil war. But by broadening her horizons to include prewar and postwar perspectives, Coulter provides a compelling account of the family tensions, moral quandaries, gender conflicts, economic hardships, and structural violence with which many African women have always had to contend, often with remarkable resilience and resourcefulness.

Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University:

Chris Coulter's Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers is a groundbreaking study of female ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Through one of the most sensitive ethnographies of conflict available, she explores young women's predicaments and strategies for living in a violent conflict, their renegotiation of gendered lives in postwar families and communities, and their responses to contradictions generated by international processes of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Her nuanced, gendered analysis provides a strongly compelling study of postwar intervention that forces us to rethink ideas about child and youth combatants.