Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the implications of dominant development discourses that depict poverty as a threat to security. Using the case study of Sierra Leone's recent crises, it looks at the logic of securitization and its contestation by those at its receiving end.

Paper long abstract:

In the past two decades Sierra Leone has experienced two significant shocks to its political and social fabric: a ten year civil war and an unprecedented Ebola epidemic. Sierra Leone has become emblematic of the increasing depiction of underdevelopment as a security concern. In the aftermath of the civil war, employment for socio-economically excluded youth came to be seen as imperative to quell a perceived threat that they posed to peace, following a conflict that saw youths' prominence in all combating factions. Ten years later, the same demographic became the target of a militarized Ebola response, whose heavy-handed surveillance was a permanent feature in poor communities where thousands of Ebola cases were recorded. The bodies of poor youth have thus been imprinted with the potential of danger at each stage of the country's crisis cycle and as such development strategies have explicitly focused on their containment. This paper analyses the emergence and implications of such discourses—showing how through the use of notions of "security", and "containment" a narrative is weaved around what an "ideal" citizen looks like in consonance with neoliberal visions of development. The paper then explores how those at the receiving ends of these discourses, whose bodies are posited to be "dangerous" and their modes of social political existence non-normative, resist these narratives both discursively and physically. Based on long-term ethnographic work in Sierra Leone, the paper focuses on three mechanisms used by marginal youth: rumours and cynicism; appropriation of hegemonic discourses; and physical confrontations.