Navigating frontier economies for survival in rural Sierra Leone

Abstract

This ethnography examines how young men in rural Sierra Leone sustain livelihoods in volatile "frontier economies" shaped by extractive capitalism, fragmented governance, and refracting regimes of value. Based on multi-sited ethnography, it conceptualizes survival as navigation: a form of moral agency through which actors continuously recalibrate their engagements across subsistence, market, and social obligations. These engagements unfold under conditions of structural volatility, where opportunities emerge and collapse in rapid succession. Navigation enables survival but rarely produces stability; instead, it often reproduces the very fragmentation and uncertainty it seeks to overcome. By theorizing frontier economies as constitutive of capitalist expansion rather than margins, the dissertation contributes to debates in economic anthropology and development theory on agency, value, and the limits of intervention.