The growing literature on gender, violence and conflict in Africa has largely focused on the impact of sexual violence on women's lives. Many studies have considered the political economy of war in Africa and the impact of globalisation on conflict that has resulted in the so-called ‘new wars’ that have predominated in Africa over the past 30 years. These new wars are characterised by intense ‘transnational connections’, low intensity warfare, new forms of violence that ‘blur the boundaries between war and peace and between political and criminal violence’, and ‘new economic configurations’ that both combine ‘legitimate and criminal commerce’ and cause the conflict to continue (pp. 12–13). In this ground-breaking book, Meredeth Turshen undertakes an expansive analysis that brings gender to bear on Marxist analyses of labour, production and reproduction in the extractive mining economies of Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. Drawing primarily on secondary sources, she shows the ways in which economic violence, including direct violence such as forced labour, and structural violence like poverty, racism and sexism, creates the conditions for and intersects with the ‘new forms of violence [that] have emerged with globalization’ (p. 13).
The author injects a feminist, intersectional analysis into the macro-analytic frameworks of political economy and considers the ways in which gender and conflict have been defining features of African political economies since Europeans brought merchant slavery to the continent. In Chapter 1, Turshen brings together the theoretical literature on the nature of violence, its various forms, especially direct violence versus indirect or structural violence, and challenges the assumption that sexual violence is a fixed feature of all conflicts. Adopting a historical perspective in Chapter 2, she examines the violent integration of sub-Saharan African political economies into global markets via European domination and exploitation, first via the trans-Atlantic slave trade and then through colonialism. In this recounting of processes well known to scholars of Africa, she adds a gender analysis that examines the ways that women and their productive and reproductive labour were integral to ‘the colonial project of resource removal and labour extraction’ (p. viii).
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 comprise the heart of the book where Turshen compares the mining economies of Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Tanzania to examine the impact of conflict on the relationships between gender, violence and political economy. Tanzania serves as a negative case where there has not been war. Chapter 3 considers the violence of production while Chapter 4 focuses on biological and social reproduction. In Chapter 3 Turshen documents the ways in which ‘violence economies depend for their existence on a very long human supply chain that crosses national borders and circles the globe’ (p. 92). By injecting gender into this analysis she concludes that Africa's new wars are characterised by ‘modern primitive accumulation’ whereby civilians are dispossessed of their labour power and forced into labour arrangements that are worsened ‘by armed conflict, enabled by neoliberalism, enmeshed in international criminal networks, abetted by legitimate corporations, and condoned by complicit governments’ (p. 92). Chapter 4 challenges the focus on interpersonal violence in the literature on violence against women by considering the violence of social reproduction. Turshen shows the ways in which European colonialism introduced and normalised European assumptions about the gendered division of labour and relegated African women's customary rights and productive capabilities to invisible and unremunerated domains subsumed under social reproduction. Together Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate that studies should consider production and reproduction holistically as they inextricably interrelated. Furthermore, the relegation of women to the reproductive sphere in the theoretical literature on political economy hides their deep involvement in production.
In Chapter 5 Turshen examines the articulation of production and social reproduction in armed conflict and identifies the many ways that ‘conflict seems to exaggerate and intensify women's and men's experiences in production and reproduction’ (p. 150). She asserts that during conflict violence conditions production and social reproduction and creates a shadow economy that simultaneously is necessary for survival, prolongs conflict, and entrenches transnational criminal networks that become very difficult, if not impossible, to dismantle. In the aftermath of armed conflict, ‘neoliberals set up shop’ and once again separate ‘economies (post-war recovery) from politics (the work of reconciliation and accountability)’ which leads to the domination and normalisation of ‘market-oriented moral order [that] privileges the private over the public and the individual over the collective’ (p. 151). In the conclusion (Chapter 6), Turshen undertakes a gendered analysis of social movements and their historical efforts to redress ongoing conflict and ‘persistent violence in the public and private spheres in Africa’ (p. 159).
The book is vital reading for scholars with an interest in political economy, gender studies, peace and conflict studies, and Africa. It will serve well in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in African studies, development studies, gender, and peace and conflict studies.
