Slavery in contemporary African wars?

It has been a leitmotif of African history that wars and jihads led to the seizure of slaves, especially amongst non-fighting women and children. Apparently this has not ended. Since the 1980s, conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, the DRC, South Sudan, Mali, and Northern Nigeria resulted in the abduction of women, girls, and boys, often accompanied by legitimizing ideologies developed by rebel armies and perpetrators. It is not only that slavery has not died out and continues to happen illegally, but also that there are social contexts today where it does not evoke moral horror and is seen as a legitimate institution. Groups such as Boko Haram and ISIS have recently been making public statements about the legitimacy of slavery according to their interpretation of Islamic Law. Allegedly Christian militant groups that adopted a religious justification for their actions condoned the sexual and conjugal enslavement of women, although they chose not to qualify their actions as slavery. Researchers have been debating whether these circumstances are best understood in terms of ‘sexual slavery’ or ‘forced marriage’. This paper discusses how these circumstances have been interpreted by lawyers, analysts, and different local groups including former abductees, their families and communities, and different categories of ‘perpetrators’. It asks what explains differences across interpretations, and whether these circumstances attest to the modernity of slavery or to something else.