Rethinking War and Violence in Sierra Leone: The RUF and the Nature and Condition of Insurgency Violence

ABSTRACT: One of the most perplexing contradictions of the Sierra Leonean civil war was the disconnect between an insurgency movement that defined its project as an emancipatory program of national liberation and the large-scale violence, destructions, and brutalities it inflicted on the rural poor and other marginalized groups in the name of that project. A question that has thus continued to plague the war is why a movement that claimed to be fighting on behalf of the poor and marginalized also ended up committing horrific atrocities against the very people on whose behalf it claimed to be fighting. What explains this radical disconnect between the pronouncements of the insurgents and their actions? In this article, I return to the Sierra Leonean civil war to grapple with this question about the nature and condition of violence in that war. I suggest that violence in the Sierra Leonean civil war, and more specifically, the behavior and conduct of the RUF and other combatants during the war, cannot be explained by recourse to fabulous ideas about the psychobiological characteristics innate to certain groups or societies that predispose them to violence, but to complex sociohistorical processes and structures that define everyday power and social relations. Ultimately, it was these sociohistorical structures and the way they manifest and structure power and social relations in Sierra Leone, as well as the failure of the RUF and its leadership to establish conditions of insurgency action capable of transcending, rather than amplifying, this violence embedded in the postcolonial Sierra Leonean state that determined the nature of violence during the war.