Young People, Violence and Strategic Interventions in Sub-Saharan African Countries

The book adopts a clinical sociological paradigm to capture core themes focusing on the ways in which young people living in Sub-Saharan African countries engage vulnerabilities and contend with and counteract violence (sexual and gender-based – but also structural, political, socio-economic, intimate, and familial). The chapters of the book bring in data and case studies from a range of SSA countries, notably: Botswana, Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. While the findings and insights are diverse, a core set of themes predominate: they reveal that violence, embedded in everyday and mundane lived realities, is a complex issue and should be probed using intersectional tools of analysis. While moments of political and xenophobic violence are reflected upon, critical attention is firmly on young women and their grappling with SGBV. In recent years, with brisk growth in Internet access and social media and online engagements, cyberviolence has emerged as a new threat for young women and men. The COVID lens has magnified micro-struggles and long-standing structural problems showing how inequities and social and political disadvantages have created an infrastructure through which violence has been exacerbated.

The book focuses on masculinities constructed by colonial and apartheid histories, social and economic crises, racism, and state disregard, but with the message that marginality should not be reified nor the gendered practices of young men oversimplified. Generally, in all the chapters, contextual specificities and insightful case studies offer thoughts and arguments about how violence manifests, what interventionist strategies are compelling, and how young people’s proactive involvement in interventions could begin to address the problem of violence.