Twenty Years Later: Rethinking the Sierra Leonean Civil War and Beyond

Abstract

Twenty Years Later:Rethinking the Sierra Leonean Civil War and Beyond Ismail Rashid and Zubairu Wai In March 1991, war broke out in the West African state of Sierra Leone, and it quickly became one of the seemingly intractable African conflicts in the immediate post-Cold War era. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which initiated the war, claimed that it was a quest for national liberation, democratic empowerment, and the construction of an egalitarian socioeconomic order (Abdullah 1997; 2004; Gberie 2005; Richards 1996; Wai 2012). For over a decade, the violence that the RUF unleashed gripped the country as contending armed groups multiplied and power oscillated between different civilian and military regimes. Thousands of Sierra Leoneans were maimed or killed, and millions more were displaced. For those who lived through it, many moments and aspects of the war seemed incoherent, anarchic, and illogical. Yet, it also presented moments and opportunities for political renewal and the reconfiguration of a Sierra Leonean state caught in the contradictions of its postcolonial existence. The war did not generate these contradictions, it merely magnified them. In a decade when different parts of Africa experienced mass violence, the long and complicated Sierra Leonean civil war captured global attention by the mid- to late 1990s. In mainstream discourses and dominant interpretations, Sierra Leone (and Liberia), along with Somalia and Rwanda, became the quintessential example of state failure in Africa, a situation characterized by social disorder and anomic violence and precipitated by patrimonialism, pervasive corruption, and governmental incompetence. In the impoverished and degraded [End Page 1] environmental landscapes of failed states and impotent governments, as the narratives go, warlords and criminal youth gangs engage in internecine battles over access to dwindling resources (see Kaplan 1994). In Blood Diamonds, Greg Campbell writes of Sierra Leone as "a writhing hive of killers, villains and wretched victims" (2002, 32). The Sierra Leonean civil war (1991–2002) became an archetypical example of what came to be known as "new wars"—a new kind of intrastate and regionalized violence in the post-Cold War era characterized by the increasing overlap between economic and political motives, terrorism and crime, and ethnic (tribal) and religious identities (see Kaldor 2001; Münkler 2004). These new wars were thought to be less about ideology and politics and more about economics with greedy warlords such as Foday Sankoh and Charles Taylor manipulating violence and disorder as mechanisms for profit making. These interpretations came to be crucial in international policy formulations as Sierra Leone became a significant site for the articulation and application of different conflict management approaches, global governance mechanisms, and liberal peacebuilding strategies (Denny 2011; Duffield 2001; Fanthorpe 2005; Rashid 2018; Wai 2011; 2021). However, in reconstructing the landscape of the war and the contestations that characterized its interpretations, Ismail Rashid suggests in this issue that from inception to conclusion, the Sierra Leonean civil war did not unfold in a linear manner. It was also characterized by perplexing contradictions and considerable misinformation, confusing tales of deceptions and betrayal, and collective misrepresentations and conflicting narratives (see also Wai 2012). In other words, what Rashid calls "contentious reconstructions" in scholarly interpretations, media representations, and policy formulations, which defined interpretations of the war from inception to end, should caution against hasty judgments and premature closure of the debates about the war. Instead, it should invite us to revisit the questions it raises, to consider anew the issue of political violence in Sierra Leone and its interpretation through a reengagement with the war, its prehistory, and aftermath. A fundamental question that came to define, and in fact continues to shroud understanding of, the Sierra Leonean civil war is the nature of the violence unleashed by the RUF in 1991. Why did a "revolutionary" project for a radical democratic and egalitarian social order become so destructive and violent toward the very people on whose behalf it claimed to be fighting? It is crucial that we understand this disconnect between the RUF "revolutionaries," their "objectives," and the confusing contradictions at the heart of the conflict. Given what we now know or have learned about the war, what insights can be derived from the [End Page 2] Sierra Leonean conflict beyond the senseless anarchy...