Mats Utas

List of Publications

The Informal Realities of Peacebuilding - Military Networks and Former Mid-Level Commanders in Post-War Liberia

Between Big Man Politics and Democratisation: Local Perceptions and Individual Agency in Processes of Electoral Violence

Urban imaginaries and socio-economic exclusion
Together with Onyanta Adama, Andrew Byerley and Ilda Lindell (Associate Researcher).

Youth and marginality in urban Sierra Leone
2007-2012

Young women in African Wars
2007-2012

Informal Security Structures in the Mano River Region: Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone
2007-2010, co-ordinated by Mats Utas (co-organized with Magnus Jörgel, FHS)

Mats Utas is Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology and leader for the Conflict, Security and Democratic Transformation cluster at the Nordic Africa Institute. He has worked as a lecturer in social and cultural anthropology at University of Liberia and Stockholm University, and as senior lecturer in sociology at Fourah Bay College (University of Sierra Leone). Utas has written extensively on child and youth combatants, politics and economy of informality, contested sovereignties, media, refugees and gender in conflict and war zones. He has also researched street life, informality, and alternative forms of organization in urban centers. Utas has conducted fieldwork in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast and on Somalia. He is the editor of African conflicts and informal power: Big Men and Networks (Zed Books, March 2012), the co-editor (with Henrik Vigh and Catrine Christiansen) of  Navigating youth - generating adulthood: social becoming in an African context (the Nordic Africa Institute 2006) as well as of numerous articles in journals and edited books. He is currently researching three interrelated subjects: urban poverty and street life; former mid-level commanders and their roles as brokers in postwars; and election related violence. All three projects have a focus on West Africa.