A penetrating investigation of youth exclusion and development in war-affected Africa
Marc Sommers is an internationally recognized youth expert with research experience in over twenty war-affected countries. He has provided analysis and technical advice to policy institutes, donor and United Nations agencies, and NGOs. He also is the author of seven previous books, including Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Georgia), which received an Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize, Islands of Education: Schooling, Civil War, and the Southern Sudanese (1983–2004), and Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania, which received the Margaret Mead Award.
Marc Sommers's illuminating The Outcast Majority exposes the vast
divergence between the priorities of youth in war-affected African
countries and those of governments and the international
development community.--Brad Crofford "African Studies
Quarterly"
The book's greatest contribution lies in bringing together deep
ethnographic work on conflict-affected youth in Africa and
interviews with people in the aid world. Together, these details
and voices demonstrate the mismatch between policy imperatives and
the experiences and goals of young women and men across the African
continent. The Outcast Majority distills decades of work on these
issues and provides a clear call to action for the field.--Susan
Shepler "Journal on Education in Emergencies"
The central strength of The Outcast Majority lies in Sommers'
attention to the lives of youth who have built up a stock of
knowledge under conditions of great pressure and rapid change. He
draws from his extensive professional experience of talking to and
listening to youth. . . . Sommers hits the mark in identifying the
paradigms of order and control that appeal to people who have a lot
of reasons to hold marginalized youth in contempt. He is also right
to point to the emerging logic and practices of marginalized
people, which are not easily quantified but are critical indicators
of the revolution in social relationships that grows out of war and
dislocation. In global historical terms, the unfolding of such a
process in Africa is hardly exceptional, but it takes a book like
The Outcast Majority to begin to bring this new world into
focus.--William Reno "Current History"
Written in refreshingly lucid prose, The Outcast Majority vividly
portrays how people endure the traumas of war and its aftermath. .
. [Sommers] persuasively calls into question the emphasis on
technocratic solutions and on resilience that figure so prominently
in the international development literature and in the practice of
development agencies. The Outcast Majority is a powerful manifesto
for youth inclusion and for rethinking development doctrine and
practices from top to bottom. It is also a model of how
ethnographic research can tackle the largest and most meaningful
problems, report findings in accessible language and suggest
compelling policy alternatives.--Shalini Shankar "Northwestern
University"
Based on in-depth field interviews and qualitative research, The
Outcast Majority presents a rich, nuanced, and counter-intuitive
view of African young people scarred by conflict who have all too
often been left behind by the international development project.
The book's greatest strength is that Sommers lets young people tell
their own life stories.--Andrew S. Natsios, former USAID
Administrator professor, George H.W. Bush School of Government,
Texas A&M University
Deeply documented and fed by on-the-ground analysis, The Outcast
Majority is timely and urgent.--Mo Ibrahim, Founder and Chairman,
Mo Ibrahim Foundation
One of the most engaging, rich and important books in the growing
literature on African youth, The Outcast Majority is a must-read to
anyone concerned with the future of Africa and how it will affect
and be affected by globalization.--Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family
Professor of African Studies and History, Director of Columbia
University's Institute for African Studies, and coeditor of The
Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces
of Belonging
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