In the decades following the civil war that took place in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, new laws were passed to rebuild the state, and to prevent rape, teenage pregnancy and domestic violence. In this ethnography, Luisa T. Schneider explores the intricate semantic, empirical and socio-legal dynamics of love and violence in post-conflict Sierra Leone, challenging the oversimplification of these phenomena. Schneider underscores the limitations of imposing singular interpretations on love and violence, advocating for a nuanced, phenomenological approach that reveals how state and institutional attempts to regulate violence and loving relationships without considering local lived experience and meaning-making can yield negative consequences. By analysing how love and violence are historically constituted, experienced, and (re)produced across personal, social, legal, and political levels, this book critiques the construction of violence within gendered sexual relationships by development agencies, law makers and politicians, urging them to engage with local knowledge and experience. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

‘In Luisa Schneider’s ground-breaking study of the dialectics and dilemmas of intimacy in postwar Sierra Leone, ‘love’ and ‘violence’ are shown to be semantically and socially ambiguous. Even when an ideal complementarity is posited between men and women, the interplay between subtle persuasion and brute force (in local parlance, ‘tongue’ versus ‘teeth’) is not only volatile and vexed but further exacerbated by the incommensurability of state laws, local customs, notions of human rights, and the diversity of individual experience.’

Michael Jackson - author of Life Within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want

‘In this insightful, deeply contextual, and sensitively crafted ethnography, Luisa Schneider documents the ambiguous effects of well-intentioned and globally celebrated interventions that aimed to curb specific types of gender-based violence but resulted in new forms of violence. Schneider exposes the tragic ironies of state-centered, western-sponsored interventions based on generic, context-free ideas far from the everyday languages and realities of the people for whom they should matter most. But more significantly Love and Violence reveals missing context through often poignant analysis of the place of acceptable and unacceptable violence in abrasive, entangled relations between men and women. Schneider is attentive to everyday dynamics, household and community cohesion, the enduring effects of the civil war, as well as the unintended consequences of specific acts of legislation. It is a must-read for development and human rights professionals as well as those with an interest in the constitutive role of violence in intimate relations.’

Andrew M. Jefferson - co-editor of Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia

‘A brave, intelligent and important book based on rare and intimate ethnographic data, which should attract a wide array of scholars with research interests in gendered social relations, sexuality and violence. It is an equally fascinating study of how people in their everyday navigate a realm of intricate legal plurality, from the very local to the global, and where no level is sovereign nor autonomous, but commonplace clashing and at times socially collapsing. This book is an intimate, violent, demanding, troubling, yet brilliant piece of scholarly work.’

Mats Utas - co-editor of Navigating Youth, Generating Adulthood: Social Becoming in an African Context