Chris Coulter's Bush Wives and Girls Soldiers makes an important contribution to understanding how civilian populations, especially those associated with rebel forces, experience armed conflict and how they find themselves positioned in postwar periods. Coulter provides one of the most nuanced ethnographic accounts of women's lives and experiences inside rebel camps that exists to date. In doing so, she takes us further than any other scholar writing on Sierra Leone in peeling back the many layers of power, powerlessness, violence, vulnerability, fear, and strategies for survival that played out among women inside the rebel movement and after the war.

Coulter's central argument is that in order to understand the war and postwar experiences of women formerly abducted by rebel forces in Sierra Leone, we must understand the interweaving of local notions and practices of morality, gender, age, status, and kinship relations with the larger social dynamics of the 1991–2002 war. In trying to understand these women's experiences—rather than becoming swept up in debating the causes of the war, recounting the horrors, or documenting and analyzing large-scale international postwar planning and programs—the author directs our attention and intellectual curiosity to the relationships in which these young women were immersed throughout the war and in the postwar period. She demonstrates how those relationships—with rebel abductors and abusers, family members, neighbors and communities, and humanitarian agencies—were both positioned and contested within the hierarchy of gender and generational relations that characterized Sierra Leonean society.

The book begins with a devastating but all-too-common (Coulter tells us) story, of a young women who was abducted into the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and endured harrowing experiences, from narrowly surviving the war to rejection and abuse upon her return to her family and community. The narrative serves as a gripping prelude to the heart of the book, and in the chapters that follow Coulter reveals how centuries of economic, political, educational, and personal marginalization and uncertainty among Sierra Leoneans, particularly younger males, set the stage for a decade of brutal warfare. She then turns to the ambiguous position that many of the young women associated (mostly by force) with the RUF now occupy in the postwar period, arguing that only by considering the gendered nature of the society, with particular attention paid to morality and sexuality, can one begin to understand why these young women continue, against their will, to be marked and shaped by the war.

It is most interesting that Coulter employs a framework commonly adopted by other researchers, scholars, and humanitarian actors engaged with armed groups and fighting forces in order to grasp what has happened to these young women. Her account thus focuses on a number of elements: entry into the rebel group; experiences within that group, with a focus on roles, violence, and violations; exit from the RUF; and reception upon return and livelihood strategies at present. In employing this framework, Coulter goes well beyond what most other scholars on these topics have accomplished to date.

Important among Coulter's contributions is her attention to the silences among her key informants. She helps us understand when silence may be about deliberate choice, healing, and survival, and when it expresses pains that go far, far beyond what words could convey. She also raises important questions about why some wartime violations—such as cutting off of hands or disemboweling pregnant women to identify the sex of fetuses—were widely recounted (though few admitted to actually seeing such horrors), while other crimes—particularly sexual mutilations of women—though widespread and often witnessed, were rarely recounted. She shows how women formerly with the rebels have learned to narrate their stories to humanitarian actors, often through a variety of silences, omissions, and deadening of their language and emotion. She pays careful attention to the stories that unfold in her own interviews, the work of her Sierra Leonean research assistant, the narratives presented to humanitarian agencies, those running the Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programs, and the proceedings of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court) and the Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Refreshingly, her work moves well beyond trying to reconstruct women's war narratives as something that can be taken and presented at face value. Instead, she further develops our understanding of the distinction between narratives of “experience and experience as expressed” in light of the present (p. 19). In doing so, she is less worried about reconstructing the stories of her informants and more focused on the understanding that comes from her informants' re-presentation, reinterpretation and resequencing of their experiences.

Throughout the book, Coulter pays careful attention to the social and cultural situation within Sierra Leone during and after the war, and thereby skillfully engages some of the main debates centered around understanding armed conflict and violence through gendered and feminist perspectives. She challenges the notion that war is always a masculinizing endeavor, recalling how rebel boys and young men would engage in transvestite dressing using the dresses and hair extensions of women, at which times they carried out some of the most gruesome forms of violence. Drawing from the literature on rape in war, her painful and detailed discussion of the forms of sexual abuse and rape makes clear that the humanitarian discourse of these young women as “sex slaves” or “forced wives” fails to engage with the ways in which these young women experienced violence, sought to shield themselves from it, and tried to mitigate it. Furthermore, such terms obscure how these women survived, maneuvered, or tried to plan and live their lives. The author correctly posits that rape and sexual violence are socially constructed experiences, and that the intensity of the trauma will depend in part on the response of the society. For women victims in Sierra Leone, “war rapes thus etched everything from medical conditions to social stigma on their bodies,” and this resulted in “factors beyond their control that delineated their possibilities to act” (p. 134).

Coulter also draws on feminist analyses of the use of pornography in wartime rapes to make sense of the fact that her informants were subjected to sex acts that they, as rural females, had never known existed—even though the known distribution of pornography was largely isolated to the capital during the time of the war. Moreover, in her damning overview of the gender-blind DDR programs, she adds a further nuance to our understanding of why some women chose not to try and enter the programs, again showing that such programs require a deeper understanding of the local moral order. She details evidence of much confusion among civilians—and especially those formerly associated with the rebels—regarding the mandates of the DDR, the Special Court, and the TRC. And she shows how misguided were those internationals who believed that “testifying about violence and humiliation, talking about what happened to them during the war, would be cathartic and healing for people” (p. 179).

This is a sobering account of the effects of violence on a society wracked by civil war and especially on the women of such war-torn societies, who are still a long way from any redress for their suffering.