"A strikingly original account of a West African war-scape, here translated into memorable prose and sophisticated theory. As much a zone of labor and extraction as of war-making, this landscape of fluid and fungible identities forces us to think Sierra Leone and Liberia, Danny Hoffman provokes, as a laboratory of the future. This brilliant book will be widely read and debated."--Charles Piot, author of Nostalgia For the Future: West Africa After the Cold War

"In today's African worlds people have to constantly come up with new stories in order to access livelihood and opportunity; stories about how they are to be seen or slip under the radar, how to be part of a larger world. In this account of young men and women fighters in West Africa, Danny Hoffman demonstrates that armed conflict is an opportunity for the young to work. It is work that attempts to be contemporaneous with what is perceived as the ‘real global world', to go beyond the constrictions of state, culture, and society. Even if these attempts are eventually folded into becoming instruments of narrow agendas or the prevailing logics of capitalist administration and value, they remain striving to live in new ways. Hoffman, with great courage and hard work, has engaged the complexity of such conflict, making it count for something-the entanglement of brutality and hope."--AbdouMaliq Simone, author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities