| 1. |
- Pemunta, Ngambouk Vitalis, 1973-
(författare)
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Human rights and socio-legal resistance against female genital cutting : an anthropological perspective
- 2011. - 1
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Human rights-based interventions against genital cutting practices (FGC) have increasingly emphasised the need for legislation against such practices with little attention to the consequences. Accordingly,the international community has compelled state parties by linking international development aid to good governance and human rights- the rights of women and children- through the elimination of genital surgeries and other gender-based discriminatory practices by adopting appropriate legislation that will deter practitioners. This ethnographic study explores diverse local reactions among FGC practicing Ejagham ethnicities in Southwest Cameroon. It highlights the dilemmas inherent in an anti-genital cutting legislation. Drawing from the experiences of African countries that adopted anti- FGC legislation, it demonstrates that the ''bifurcated power structure” in the postcolonial Context and therefore multiple overlapping authority systems- between the national government and traditional village authority system - and the state's lack of '”statehardness” are some of the dilemmas compromising the adoption and implementation of an anti-FGC legislation in Cameroon.
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| 2. |
- Pemunta, Ngambouk Vitalis, 1973-, et al.
(författare)
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War, social dislocation and the double appropriation of women’s human security in Sierra Leone
- 2011
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Ingår i: Journal of Human Security. - 1835-3800. ; 8:2, s. 105-124
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article combines the human security and the impoverishment, risk and reconstructionparadigms to document the threats to survival, development, and wellbeing evident bywidespread poverty, strained social cohesion, and other recurrent multiple threats to humansecurity in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Against this backdrop, the Bondo secret society whosecentral rite of initiation is female circumcision and which among other functions is the gatewayto leadership has achieved hegemonic status as a vote bank. The double appropriation of thegendered symbolic power and the social cohesion and mobilization skills of Bondo initiates bySoweis and politicians pose severe threats to women’s human and reproductive rights, and stallsdevelopment. The prevention of modifiable causes of insecurity, the strengthening of international norms, support of Sierra Leonean social resilience and institutions that protectindividuals from threats are required to improve human security.
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| 3. |
- Vitalis Pemunta, Ngambouk, 1973
(författare)
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Moving beyond the hierarchical knowledge/power nexus in anti-Female circumcision campaigns in Africa
- 2013
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Ingår i: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.. - New York : Nova Science Publishers. ; , s. 1-62
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- One controversial issue of unending emotional debate between Western and Non-Western societies pitting relativists against universalists is the ritual practice of female genital cutting (FGC). This debate mirrors larger issues of power about the social construction of reality and the positionality of actors, dichotomies between Western and Non-Western societies as well as a paradigmatic clash between modern/scientific knowledge and local knowledge systems and practices. This essay argues that there can be a synergy between modern and local knowledge systems in anti-FGC campaigns and not the outright rejection of the latter as “superstition” since both knowledge systems are not antithetical to each other. Based on ethnographic interviews from Cameroon and Sierra Leone, this chapter attempts an explanation of why decades of negative publicity which is the anchor of most anti-FGC activism, laws forbidding the practice and human rights activism has not been matched by any noticeable behavioural changes in attitudes and practices regarding this ritual practice. The chapter argues that the multi-dimensionality of ritual FGC as well as the entanglement of anti-FGC campaigns at both the global and local scales in unequal power relationships negatively affects these sensitization campaigns and has instead led to the hardening of identities and resistance at the local level. It suggests that to build effective dialogue and move the campaigns forward, interveners must adopt contextualism by “wearing native spectacles’’. They must think globally and act locally. In other words, they should set aside their Western cultural baggage on the normative …
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| 4. |
- Vitalis Pemunta, Ngambouk, 1973
(författare)
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The Challenges of Conservation and Large-scale Agricultural Development in an Era of Neoliberal Environmental Governance in Cameroon
- 2016
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Ingår i: Privatization: Policies, Developments and Challenges / [ed] Amelia Hansen, New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.. - New York : Nova Science Publishers. - 9781634847490 ; , s. 1-50
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The adoption of Western imposed neoliberal development policies by most African countries have been accompanied by unfettered effects. Through these policies, Western-based development institutions (World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) have subsequently come to have a lot of leverage on development policies and practices in the donor dependent countries of the Less Developed world including Cameroon. In Cameroon, one area of neoliberal governmentality in involves the management of the environment which is at crossroads with the establishment of largescale agricultural plantations by Western multinationals in the country. This paper explores how the American-based agro-industrial company Herakles Farm has thoroughly disregarded state and international laws and codes of conduct in the setting up of its contentious oil palm plantation that is largely located in between protected areas in the ever-green forest of Southwest Cameroon. Through its creation of uninhabited spaces via protected areas in the region, as well as by the ceding of land around these same protected areas for large-scale agricultural development, the state of Cameroon is involved in the reordering of man-nature relationship. The state´s action bespeaks of the chasm between conservation and large-scale agricultural development in an era of neoliberal environmental governance. The paper argues that the Herakle concession is a means by which the state is territorializing and controlling this unruly frontier space. It is also representative of a long trajectory of the marginalization of this space that has been discursively produced over and over and that allows for dispossession and accumulation in the name of development. The state´s creation of developmentalizable and governable spaces has wrought violence on local livelihoods in a region that has been consistently produced as a frontier space by both colonial and postcolonial powers.
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