BOOK AND VISUAL REVIEWS The War Machines:Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Danny Hoffman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Casey Golomski, University of Witwatersrand TheWar Machines is a highly sophisticated leftist analysis of militia groups and their interpellators in West Africa. The study aims to link an enduring regional conflict to global political economies by examining how young men are mobilized for labor and wartime violence. It is based on approximately 10 years of photojournalistic and ethnographic research on the Mano River War, a historical-geographical term for the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia from the mid-1980s to the 2000s. What is a “war machine”? Hoffman borrows this heuristic concept from continental political philoso- phers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986 [1980]), who use it to theorize the formation and movement of nomadic, nonstate sociopolitical entities throughout history. Some morphological acrobatics are needed to unpack the philosophers’ ambitious project in Hoffman’s introduction and expand it to link West Africa to contemporary global political economies. For Hoffman,West African militia groups are like nomadic sociopolitical entities, loosely or mul- tiply organized, that emerge in moments of revolution or other transformative upheavals. Unlike states and their technocratic territorial projects of borders and fixed points, war machines do more mobile geo- graphic work: they de-territorialize as they move across space. In the political-economic context of postcolonial state conflict, however, war machines are inevitably enveloped by the state and drawn up in service of globalized capitalist production. For Hoffman, West African militias as war machines are “an experimental technology . . . [producing] vio- lence, masculinity, political subjects and exploitative economic relations in novel configurations” (xvi). Hoffman focuses on the relation between work and wartime violence and asks, “Is it useful to think of violence today as a mode of work?” (xvi). Answering in the affirmative, he moves on to give an “official” chro- nology of the Mano River conflict and contextualize the war-machine concept. Staying sensitive to the nonlinear nature of informants’ war narratives and the historiography of conflict, Hoffman locates the war’s initial antistate offenses by Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh, and other leaders as part of enduring complex postcolonial dictatorial regimes. Regional oppositionist movements and global Cold War–era geopolitical players inform these regimes. Over the span of the conflict, the emergence of war machines, which are highly fissiparous given these shifting regional and global actors, is astonishingly complex. As oppositionists actively drew support across several West African national borders, so did states in reaction to maintain control. States and their regional and multilateral allies mobilized security forces as well as community-level civil defense groups to assist them, groups that sometimes derived their inspiration from existing social categories of male hunting cohorts, kamajoisia and tamaboros. State-conscripted militia groups were often specifically underdeveloped in per- sonnel and arms to stave off a potential internal unseating of power and, overall, the state “security force [was] best described as a network of semi- independent operators rather than a highly structured and centralized fighting force” (33). Some state militia groups brokered alliances with oppositionist move- ments, engendering an ambiguous group of men called sobel, soldier-rebel fighters. Multilateral inter- ventionists helped establish war crimes tribunals and supported some militia groups to oust oppressive power-mongers after nearly 20 years of conflict. Hoffman argues that “what drew young men to join the various factions continues to lead them to partici- pate in all manner of deployments, from labor at resource extraction to labor on the political campaign trail” (54); namely, participation in enduring social structures of patronage. The description of young men who participate in these structures of patronage – that is, the loosely collectivized war machines – as laborers and fighters is provocative. After the historical background, Hoffman introduces these men in the last three chapters of the book’s first part. His primary informants derive col- lective and militarized identity from an existing androcentric tableaux of aged and gendered person- hood, sociopolitical organization, and ritual practices. His main focus is on men who were initiated into occult knowledge and the use of protective medicinal charms of male hunting cohorts and Poro secret soci- eties to encourage fighting. Hunting cohorts and secret societies were less militarized than the social networks of patriarchal patron-client relationships that enabled their reemergence during the Mano River Volume 35, Number 1 © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. 45