Hybridization, Intervention and Authority: Security Beyond Conflict in Sierra Leone 9781315102054, 9781138104778

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
The discourse of state-building
Hybridization and its productive effects
Hybridization as transformation
Simultaneity of authority and the subject
Chapters of the book
Notes
2. The rise and fall of security sector reform in development
War-shattered states, SSR and market democracies
Merging security and development with justice and security programming
Securitization of development or developmentalization of security?
The US, SSR and the effects of 9/11
Amalgamating security and development in the UK and the emergence of SSR
Sierra Leone’s role in shaping SSR
International debates on military expenditure
How institutional turf wars shaped SSR
SSR moves, meets and morphs
Separating state and non-state and the multi-layered approach
Conclusion
Notes
3. Collapse, chaos and resurrection
Sierra Leone’s failure: underdeveloped and chaotic
The disappointment of patrimonial promises
External and internal factors leading to collapse
From patrimonial failure to violent conflict
Sierra Leone and the UK
The chaos of state collapse
The order of chaos
Stabilization through purification
Norman, Sankoh and Johnny Paul
Operation Palliser
SSR as state-building: embedding hybrid reproduction
Conclusion
Notes
4. Hybridization and the authority of chiefs
The emergence of chiefs
The chiefdom and the expression of hybridization
Post-colonial Sierra Leone
The legal existence of today’s chiefs
Hybridity, origin and owning authority in Peyima
Challenging the chief and the origin of Peyima
The death of a boy, the lack of diamonds and the dark world
The constitution of hybridization
Conflict, caretaker chiefs and the return of the old guard
Conclusion
Notes
5. The interplay of police reform and hybridization
A decade of state-building through police reform
Approaching the justice and security field holistically
Chiefs and state-building
The simultaneous processes of separation and positive accommodation
The politics of hybridization
Conclusion
Notes
6. The chiefs of community policing
Origins: Local Policing Partnership Boards
Policing, community and chiefs
Urban LPPBs and their potentially transformative effects
Altruism, business and politics
Organizational structures of the LPPB and their role in order-making
The death of a boy: its criminal implications
A case of theft, and the reproductive effects of the LPPB
Conclusion
Notes
7. Secrets, strangers and order-making
The Poro and the localization of power
Producing authority in concrete physical space
The Temnes and the ubiquitous threat of the Poro
Boundaries, violence and land disputes
Taylor’s search for authority
The Poro and the Kondehs’ loss of land
Non-Kono members of the Poro society
When the police and the Poro interact
The criminal act of forced initiation and its aftermath
The Poro and police reform
Conclusion
Notes
8. Hybridization in a case of diamond theft
Unfolding a case of diamond theft
Two miners and a stone
Involvement of the paramount chief
The necessity of hybridization
The paramount chief as gatekeeper: ritualizing chiefly power
Visualizing hybridity: from Kamara to Motema
The aftermath
The rule of hybridization through the interlocking of authority
The diamond dealer
Conclusion
Notes
9. Conclusion
Opening up the conundrum: hybridization
Paramount and lesser chiefs
Hybridization, chiefs and the implications for SSR
References
Index

Citation preview

“This sophisticated, perceptive and challenging account provides important insights into the hybrid nature of authority and order in Africa. Albrecht's first-hand research on local chiefs and police officers reminds us of what to expect when external resources are injected into state spaces. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the realities of security sector reform.” –Alice Hills, Durham University, UK “Peter Albrecht has over the past ten years or so developed hybridization into a highly important concept. In this book he connects urban and rural political landscapes, northern state making processes with local chiefs, and history with the contemporary in postwar Sierra Leone. Not only does he make sense of a complex case, but simultaneously he elegantly criticizes and develops theories and concepts of contemporary political science, IR and development studies. That is quite a feat.” –Mats Utas, Uppsala University, Sweden “Thanks to Peter Albrecht for sharing with us his profound insights from Sierra Leone and from his many years of fruitful, academic and practical engagement with security sector reform. Focusing on the role of chiefs as a key to understanding the outcomes of SSR, Albrecht’s well-crafted analysis pushes forward the understanding of hybridization in peace and conflict studies.” –Finn Stepputat, Danish Institute for International Studies, Denmark “This is a very innovative and important book based on more than a decade of detailed empirical research. It details how well-meaning international programmes and advisers failed to fully understand the nature of local politics in Sierra Leone and the nature of power. This book comprehensively analyses the nature of power at the level of the Chiefdom and how the politics of the local affected the implementation of security and policing reforms and access to justice for people in Sierra Leone. Incorporating extensive research at international, national and local levels with significant experience on the ground, this book is an excellent guide to the complexity of relationships between international security programming and local outcomes.” –Paul Jackson, University of Birmingham, UK “This book explores the interface between the local and security reformers. It demonstrates how external security packages shaped and were shaped by Sierra Leone’s chiefs. As Albrecht emphatically shows, interventions into little understood complex social systems have unintended consequences. New resources produce another melding of customary and state authority in the perpetual

process of hybridization. Let would-be reformers learn that the local cannot be ignored or fully captured.” –Bruce Baker, Coventry University, UK “Applying hybridization as an analytical lens, this book provides useful empirical insights into the provision of peace, security and justice in Sierra Leone. A welcome addition to understanding postwar Sierra Leone and a resource for policymakers and students alike.” –Kwesi Aning, The Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, Accra, Ghana

Hybridization, Intervention and Authority

This book explains how security is organized from the local to the national level in post-war Sierra Leone, and how external actors attempted to shape the field through security sector reform. Security sector reform became an important and deeply political instrument to establish peace in Sierra Leone as war drew to an end in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through historical and ethnographic perspectives, the book explores how practices of security sector reform have both shaped and been shaped by practices and discourses of security provision from the national to the local level in post-war Sierra Leone. It critiques how the notion of hybridity has been applied in peace and security studies and cultural studies, and thereby provides an innovative perspective on IR, and the study of interventions. The book is the first to take the debate on security in Sierra Leone beyond a focus on conflict and peacebuilding, to explore everyday policing and order-making in rural areas of the country. Based on fieldwork between 2005 and 2018, it includes 200+ interviews with key players in Sierra Leone from the National Security Coordinator and Inspector-General of Police in Freetown to traditional leaders and miners in Peyima, a small town on the border with Guinea. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security, anthropology, African politics and IR in general. Peter Albrecht is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). His main focus is on the role of local actors in order-making, specifically in Sierra Leone and Somalia, and national-level security sector reform. He has co-authored a number of books, including Reconstructing Security after Conflict: Security Sector Reform in Sierra Leone (2011) and Securing Sierra Leone, 1997–2013: Defence, Diplomacy and Development in Action (2014) and co-edited Policing and the Politics of Order-Making (Routledge, 2015). He has published several articles in the Journal of Modern African Studies, the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, the African Studies Review, Ethnos, Cooperation and Conflict, and others.

Routledge Private Security Studies Series Editors: Anna Leander Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Elke Krahmann University of Kiel, Germany Hybridization, Intervention and Authority Security Beyond Conflict in Sierra Leone Peter Albrecht Private Security and Identity Politics Ethical Hero Warrior, Professional Managers and New Humanitarians Jutta Joachim and Andrea Schneiker Private Military and Security Companies as Legitimate Governors From Barricades to Boardrooms Berenike Prem For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Private-Security-Studies/book-series/RPSS

Hybridization, Intervention and Authority Security Beyond Conflict in Sierra Leone

Peter Albrecht

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Peter Albrecht The right of Peter Albrecht to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Albrecht, Peter, 1976- author. Title: Hybridization, intervention and authority : security beyond conflict in sierra leone / Peter Albrecht. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge private security studies Identifiers: LCCN 2019013171 (print) | LCCN 2019014157 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315102054 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138104778 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Security sector--Sierra Leone. | Sierra Leone--Politics and government--1961Classification: LCC JZ5584.S54 (ebook) | LCC JZ5584.S54 A63 2019 (print) | DDC 966.4045--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013171 ISBN: 978-1-138-10477-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10205-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

1

Introduction

1

2

The rise and fall of security sector reform in development

23

3

Collapse, chaos and resurrection

45

4

Hybridization and the authority of chiefs

70

5

The interplay of police reform and hybridization

92

6

The chiefs of community policing

114

7

Secrets, strangers and order-making

136

8

Hybridization in a case of diamond theft

158

9

Conclusion

178

References Index

186 203

Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of work in Sierra Leone, working as a researcher, adviser and consultant – often a mix of the three. It is safe to say that if any place has shaped my outlook on the world – apart from my native Denmark – it is Sierra Leone. Not only did I meet countless interesting people during my time there, but the place also fundamentally shaped me professionally. I need to thank a long list of people who either talked to me or supported me, at length or in passing, while I was producing this book. Some became close friends – others were simply kind enough to share their views with me. Many provided comments and suggestions on draft chapters and recommendations of literature that expanded my knowledge of a number of issues regarding security, chiefs and life in Sierra Leone. Thank you to Anna Leander, Lars Buur, Paul Jackson, Rita Abrahamsen, Will Reno, Bruce Baker, Elke Krahmann, Maya Mynster Christensen, Christian Lund, Mats Utas, Henrik Vigh, Susan Michael, Mikkel Runge Olsen, Carina Meyn, Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen, Leila Stockmarr, Njeri Nielsen, Christine Nissen, Maja Touzari Greenwood – and everyone in the Peace, Risk and Violence department at the Danish Institute for International Studies, especially Helene Maria Kyed, Finn Stepputat, Johannes Lang and Robin Schott. Thanks also to Lars Engberg-Petersen, Esbern Friis-Hansen, Louise Riis Andersen, Bent Hansen and Nanna Hvidt. Thank you to Anna Rebecca Solovej, Nellie Vase, Johanne Kloster Kirk and Jelle Nederstiegt for helping in the different ways you did (and for being young and free). And thank you to Anna Pia Hudtloff and Robert Parkin for helping me let go of the manuscript – and to Andrew Humphrys and Bethany Lund Yates at Routledge. The book is the product of meeting a wide range people in Sierra Leone. In Peyima, a small town in Eastern Kono, I would like to thank Jimmy Sahr and his family for their hospitality, Fasalie Marrah, Patrick Tongu, Sahr Lebby, Ibrahim “Kalilu” Koroma, Taylor Kondeh and Sayoh Jalloh for sharing parts of their lives with me. Very few days have gone by where these people that I first met in 2008 did not cross my mind, especially Kalilu and Taylor. Others in Sierra Leone and the UK who in one way or the other helped me understand Sierra Leone and security sector reform better include: Kellie

Acknowledgments

ix

Conteh, Kadi Fakondo, Aldo Gaeta, Garth Glentworth, Barry le Grys, Rosalind Hanson-Alp, Anthony Howlett-Bolton, Al-Hassan Kondeh, Mustapha Kambeh, Christopher Rampe, James Vincent, Alfred Nelson-Williams, Mark White, Robert Ashington-Pickett, Keith Biddle, Andrew Cordery, Emmanuel Gaima, Adrian Horn, Brima Acha Kamara, Mariama Konneh, Adele McGookin, Simon Mills, Peter Penfold, David Richards, Paul Richards, Brima Sesay, Clare Short, Aubrey Wade, Bremen Donovan, Elizabeth Turay, Thomas Lahai, Sophy Thomas, Mark “Joe” Edkins, Ade Gibson and Francis Alieu Munu. Thank you Mom, Dad, Erik. Parts of the book draw more or less heavily on previous publications. I thank Taylor & Francis as well as Cambridge University Press for allowing me to use this work in the publication: 2018, “Hybridisation in a Case of Diamond Theft in Rural Sierra Leone.” Ethnos 83:3, 567–586. 2017, “Separation and Positive Accommodation: Police Reform in Sierra Leone.” Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal 2:4, 557–575. 2017, “The Hybrid Authority of Sierra Leone’s Chiefs.” African Studies Review 60:3, 159–180. 2016, “Secrets, Strangers and Order-Making in Rural Sierra Leone.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 34:4, 519–537.

1

Introduction

In July 2005, I went to Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city, for the first time. As an intern at the Kofi Annan Centre in Accra, Ghana, I was sent there to research the implications of security sector reform (SSR), a range of projects funded primarily by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) (see Albrecht 2005). Shortly after my arrival, a number of expat advisers, mostly from the UK, shared their perspectives on statebuilding and SSR with me. First, they said, as a state Sierra Leone had collapsed into a decade-long conflict; security was therefore a precondition for long-term development to stand a chance. Second, SSR, which involved rebuilding the armed forces and police, a Ministry of Defense, an Office of National Security and a Central Intelligence and Security Unit, had been an internationally recognized success. It had been a cornerstone of stabilizing Sierra Leone and building peace. Third, even though it had become somewhat of a truism in the mid-2000s to note that non-state actors oversee 80–90 percent of everyday justice and security in Sierra Leone, it was still the state that had to be rebuilt.1 This book takes as its point of departure the insights of these advisers. It explores the shape of SSR and its productive effects in shaping security arrangements in post-war Sierra Leone. In doing so, it provides a long-term historical and ethnographically rooted analysis of the country’s paramount and lesser chiefs. These local leaders defy unequivocal categorizations of state and non-state. When SSR gathered steam in Sierra Leone in the early 2000s, they became the primary interlocutors of SSR locally. As with any actor with political authority, the positions of the chiefs continuously evolve, but they have had an enduring role in the making and maintenance of order that ultimately revolves around their ability to control resource distribution. SSR, and police reform specifically, were shaped by these dynamics. SSR in Sierra Leone represented a vision of resurrecting a collapsed state by establishing a set of centrally governed intelligence, military and police institutions that would be managed from Freetown and be accountable to the public. In my investigation of the design and implementation of SSR, a number of questions became central to my work. How did this international and Freetown-driven vision of security fit with local practices of order-making

2

Introduction

in Sierra Leone? How and by whom is order enforced, especially when the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) is not the immediate, possible or even desired security provider? Answering these questions sheds light on how the resources, practices and discourses that were packaged as SSR – for example, in relation to the police – ended up having productive effects beyond the ministries, departments and agencies of the state in Freetown. The set of activities that came to be known as SSR in the late 1990s were initiated in response to Sierra Leone’s civil war. The conflict began in 1991 with attacks by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) on Bormalu, a village in the eastern part of the country, and ended officially eleven years later, in 2002. It contributed in large part to the breakdown of the patrimonial networked governed space that Sierra Leone had evolved into since gaining independence from the UK in 1961. In other words, Sierra Leone’s bureaucratic collapse is not the story of an “effective” and “legitimate” state that fell apart progressively. It is the story of an administration constituted both locally and nationally by a range of competing and overlapping logics of order and forms of power related to sets of centrally governed institutions, locally sourced figures of authority, and colonial as well as liberal-democratic principles of governance. International resources are predominantly, and sometimes exclusively, directed toward recognizable and identifiable state institutions. This was also the case in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. However, the empirical reality is that interventions occur in the context of ongoing hybridization that encompasses simultaneously intersecting and competing international, national, and local structures of authority and sets of rules that are framed by human rights principles, legislation passed in parliament, party political agendas, locally bound initiation into secret societies, and locally and nationally oriented autochthony (Albrecht and Moe 2015). In short, as a relentless process hybridization generates a political order that is different from the sum of the sources of authority that comprise it. Sierra Leone’s traditional leaders, its paramount and lesser chiefs, are at the center of these historical processes – indeed, they embody them. As often distorted yet recognizable fragments of SSR discourse, practice and resources found their way to the local level – for instance, in institutional expressions of community policing – it was inevitable that they would merge into this historical process of hybridization embodied by the chiefs. These fragments became part of hybridization, giving shape to its trajectory, but were also fundamentally shaped by it. Chiefs and the authority they embody were of little or only marginal concern in the late 1990s, when international efforts led by the UK to make and consolidate peace in Sierra Leone became synonymous with SSR as statebuilding (Albrecht and Jackson 2009, 2014a, 2014b). They were part of an undergrowth of actors that did not fit easily into the vision of administration initially put forward by the UK, and by extension the Sierra Leone government. The primary focus of UK support was to contain and ultimately

Introduction

3

overhaul the armed forces, which had staged two coups in 1992 and 1997, and to put it under the civilian control of a Ministry of Defense. If there was one overarching incentive for Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, Sierra Leone’s president in the late 1990s, to fully embrace what was offered under the SSR banner, it was to contain and pacify the armed forces (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:23). Initial support from the UK also helped to establish national security coordination and intelligence organizations that were non-existent in the late 1990s and to re-establish the SLP (Albrecht and Jackson 2009; Jackson and Albrecht 2011). While pacifying the armed forces was crucial to Kabbah in the late 1990s, the insistence on police primacy was considered the key to re-establishing an authoritative center of government in the shape of a functioning set of state institutions. At the time, the SLP, at least where it was present toward the end of the war, acted in isolation from anything resembling centralized control and command structures and had been targeted as symbols of state abuse and corruption by the RUF. Also, even before conflict erupted in Sierra Leone, the police had lost the trust of the population and, along with the country’s intelligence organizations, had become a repressive arm of the head of state, Siaka Probyn Stevens (1969–1986), and his successor, Joseph Saidu Momoh (1986–1992). In the late 1990s there was an understanding among international partners and leading figures in State House, the president’s office in the center of Freetown, that basic and inclusive – i.e., democratic – security for the population would have to be established in a way that was both recognizable and considered legitimate. During this period, different attempts were brokered by the UK to end the conflict in Sierra Leone (Ucko 2016), including efforts to resurrect the collapsed but still internationally recognized state. Security was not only seen as a prerequisite for this process to begin, it was considered its very foundation. Thus SSR, an inclusive, rather nebulous and expansive label for establishing a Ministry of Defense, and intelligence capacity, and a police force, became integral to stabilizing both Sierra Leone and the peacebuilding process that followed. DfID’s – and the UK government’s – preoccupation with supporting Sierra Leone in the late 1990s was evidently not aimed at re-establishing a “centralised dictatorship” (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:5). In fact, the country’s post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004:1) concluded unequivocally that Sierra Leone’s pre-war leadership had exhibited “bad governance, endemic corruption and the denial of human rights [that] created the deplorable conditions that made … conflict inevitable.” However, there was an intrinsic development logic to how SSR was approached in Sierra Leone that went far beyond ending violence and had a genuinely transformative propulsion inherent in it (Sedra 2010). This process involved institutional change across a range of sectors that reflected security as a “multidimensional condition” in which “hard” security programs to build the capacity of the security forces and “soft” security initiatives to entrench the rule of law and foster democratic principles of good governance

4

Introduction

were to be addressed at the same time (Hendrickson 2009:5, 7; Sedra 2006:330). The aim of making the security forces more effective in their operational capacity was only important – or legitimate – inasmuch as it would lead to greater accountability on the part of the state-sanctioned security apparatus. Of much greater importance, especially to how SSR was perceived in international policy circles in the late 1990s to mid-2000s, was to strengthen the governability and democratic control of security institutions through ministerial, parliamentary and civil-society oversight. The fact that the war in Sierra Leone was conceptualized largely “through a state failure lens” meant that the SSR transformation “focused overwhelmingly on reform of state security and justice providers” (Denney 2014b:12). The core argument of this book is that in the context of Sierra Leone SSR fed into and became part of ongoing historical and political processes of hybridization that ultimately shape the distribution of resources, and thus access to and control of them as well. To understand the productive effects of SSR, we must grasp the logic of how this process unfolded. In short, and perhaps not very surprisingly, SSR did not establish the centrally governed state that, it was thought, would reach across the territory of Sierra Leone, as was the stated goal of both external and national-level supporters of the process. Based on long-term fieldwork I conducted in Sierra Leone in both Freetown and Kono District, the book provides empirical evidence showing why this was never a possibility. It does so by focusing on the role of the country’s paramount and lesser chiefs in shaping those elements of SSR, such as community policing, which, through consecutive acts of appropriation, translation and application, had productive effects at the local level in the context of everyday order-making. The book demonstrates that there is one primary reason why the effects of SSR on local order-making were misrecognized by those international organizations, advisers and consultants who defined its point of departure. These well-meaning and informed international advisers misread the strength and durability of traditional local order-making processes in Sierra Leone. They disregarded the productivity of Sierra Leone’s paramount and lesser chiefs and their authority to appropriate, interpret, translate and shape resources, discourses and practices that came with the SSR initiatives, and police reform efforts in particular, that spanned almost twenty years in Sierra Leone. Chiefs occupy a central position in establishing and consolidating order because they stand at the center of hybridization and embody processes of it that in turn are constituted by a wide range of registers of authority. Locally, chiefs draw on sacred and other customary powers that revolve around kinship, autochthon status and secret society membership (Hardin 1993; Fanthorpe 1998, 2001, 2005). Legally, Sierra Leone’s 149 chiefdoms, which in 2017 were re-divided into 190 chiefdoms, are linked to the central government, for instance, being recognized in the 1991 Constitution. Paramount and lesser chiefs do not merely navigate among these registers or choose between them, as if they were external to them. They internalize and

Introduction

5

embody a historically foundational hybridized order because invariably their authority always already emanates simultaneously from both centrally governed institutions and the micro-histories of settlement in a particular locality. To explore the experience of external support to Sierra Leone’s security sector and the processes of appropriation and translation that shaped – and were shaped by – this support, the book draws on and develops the concept of hybridity. Using the notion of hybridization rather than hybridity emphasizes that the basis of the analysis is a process with no set beginning or end: it is ongoing and relentless. It is this process whereby resources, practices and discourses that constitute elements and fragments of SSR have been integrated that the book explores. Certainly, the productive effect of SSR, or elements of it, will remain unintelligible without a fundamental understanding of hybridization as a theoretical lever and historical process. It follows from this that it distorts the analysis if the analytical point of departure is the encounter between a particular set of liberal state/international interveners and local actors/orders during an intervention. Focusing on one specific intervention suggests that this particular intervention is especially well-suited to exploring how hybrid orders are produced, which in turn negates the notion of permanently evolving processes of hybridization and the element of change that is inherent in them (see Albrecht 2018c; Young 1995:25). This book is preoccupied with such hybridization processes, which are explored in the context of the comprehensive and largely externally enabled SSR process in Sierra Leone, both intensively in the late 1990s and 2000s, but also in the decade that followed. The strength of the concept of hybridization is accentuated if the analysis is historically grounded because that makes it explicit that continuous processes of hybridization inevitably shape external resources as they are channeled into a particular context via several, often incohesive and always somewhat uncoordinated, interventions. In short, in any post-conflict setting, there are many differently motivated interventions – sometimes by the same government, as we shall see in the case of the UK in Sierra Leone – with many more or less comprehensive and violent effects (see Albrecht 2018b). Honing in on and isolating one particular encounter or one program for the sake of analytical clarity has the potential to distort the analysis because it leads to the assumption that that particular encounter is somehow more significant, more substantial and more transformative than another. It also suggests that an international intervention (in the singular) and the long-term evolution and configuration of power within a particular geographical space have the potential to somehow be equal in their productive effects. The goal of the remainder of this introduction is to make the case for hybridization as an analytical approach in order to understand how SSR as a state-building effort was translated into practice at the local level in Sierra Leone. This approach suggests that, in order to understand the simultaneous processes of heterogenization (separation) and homogenization (positive accommodation) that are inherent in processes of hybridization as they unfold

6

Introduction

in practice, the subject and how the individual assembles and projects authority must take center stage. Insisting on the simultaneity of separation and positive accommodation is important because it meets Baker’s (2013:298) critique of the concept that it is simply defined as “all the middle ground that exists between the purely state-run and the purely autonomous non-state.” While, for instance, insisting on separating state and non-state as pure categories implies monochronicity and binarity, the notion of positive accommodation leads to an inability to disentangle analytically the multiplicity of discourses and practices that constitute social life. The analytical effect of positive accommodation is that the power and politics that are part of any process of hybridization are not factored into the analysis. The differences and tensions between the registers of authority that ultimately give shape to processes of hybridization – their histories and the symbols and practices that they represent – are consequently erased. It is in the subject’s historically configured strategies and practices that we clearly see how processes of hybridization occur that both condition and (unpredictably) render incremental transformation, and therefore change, a possibility. In the context of Sierra Leone and SSR, a person is not simply a police officer or a member of the local community policing group who represents the state directly or by proxy, nor a traditional leader who belongs to a non-state – or traditional – realm. Different types of authority come into play at different moments in different situations and give shape to how subjective authority is in fact the product of ever-evolving historically embedded processes of hybridization. In the remainder of this introduction, I outline in greater detail the view of fragile and failing states from which SSR emerged. I then elaborate how the notion of hybridization supports an understanding of local order-making practices, as well as of the effects that SSR has had on these practices. The introduction concludes by presenting the sets of data used in writing the book and its chapters.

The discourse of state-building An extensive body of literature identifies states as fragile according to whether a central government exists that can enforce order, rather than according to the often-decentered conglomerate of individual and institutional actors whereby order is enacted empirically (Fukuyama 2004; Ghani and Lockhart 2008; Paris 1997). One consequence is that the inseparable is separated, as Hurrell (2015:19) explains, between “a consolidated peaceful liberal core” and “failed states and ungoverned spaces” at the margins (cf. Latour 1999). This separation depicts order according to a normative concept of the ideal and predictable liberal-democratic state, instead of the considerably more composite reality that prevails empirically in many so-called fragile or failed political entities (Bøås and Jennings 2005).2

Introduction

7

In basic terms, SSR as a policy response and a set of practices centers on transforming “failed” or “collapsed” states (chaos) into “effective” and “legitimate” political entities (order) that can consolidate public authority and concentrate power. Rita Abrahamsen (2016:281) explains that as an instrument SSR aims to create “a legal-rational Weberian state” with “democratic police, military and justice sectors” through “training, education and resource transfers.” Thus, SSR emanates from a “process of restoring (or building) the functionality of state institutions” (United Nations and World Bank 2007:22). The fact that SSR originated in policy-making explains in part why debates on the term have largely focused on the field of policy and the general inability of multilateral and bilateral donors to establish security and justice institutions that are considered effective and legitimate (Podder 2013; Schroeder et al. 2013). Comparatively little attention has been paid to querying the epistemological basis of SSR, apart from the well-known mantra of security being a precondition for development (see Sedra 2010; Denney 2011; Egnell and Haldén 2009; Krogstad 2012). However, what is clear is that at the core of SSR is the imaginary of an effective and legitimate state that establishes a coherent system of regulation, accountability and democratic governance across a given territory (Abrahamsen 2016; Andersen 2011; Hänggi 2004:10). Predictability and visibility or identification of a center of power are vital in this regard. This is not least the case to external observers, that is, those governments and international organizations that consider fragility or collapse to be a threat to regional and global stability and therefore to their own. Inherent in the view of authority that SSR expounds is the conceptualization of a political entity, a bordered power container that is referred to as the state, which stands above society and at the same time encompasses, controls and regulates it (Ferguson and Gupta 2002:982–983). This concept of authority projects a rather artificial split or separation between society (culture) and state (administration) around which the discourse and practical implications of policy-making are structured and that much of the existing literature on “failed” and “fragile” states references (Helman and Ratner 1993; Fukuyama 2004; Rotberg 2004; Englebert and Tull 2008; Ghani and Lockhart 2008; Goldstone 2008; Call 2008:1499). Certainly it is a separation (fetish) that denies the realities of much of the world that is populated by fragile states or to paraphrase Homi Bhabha (1994:83), “the capacities of selfgovernment, independence, Western modes of civility.” It encompasses a particular kind of power to define correct administration and a blindness to its alterity. In turn, this particular model of concentrated power, politics and administrative control rests on an explicit need to monopolize the instruments of violence, ideally within a “liberal democratic polity and a market-oriented economy” (Paris 1997:56). By extension, creating or reforming the political institutions that comprise the security sector, however they may be configured in practice, strikes at the heart of the imaginary of a modern state (Egnell and

8

Introduction

Haldén 2009:35). Indeed, it strikes at the very core of state sovereignty. Thus, in one of the most influential articulations of what constitutes a state, Max Weber explains that a “political organization with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a ‘state’ in so far as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order” (Weber 1978:54). Moreover, Weber emphasizes, the use of force by any other type of organization is only considered legitimate if it is permitted or prescribed by the state. The “monopoly of the legitimate use of force” is often narrowly put forward as the foundation of Weber’s notion of the modern state. It was established through bargaining, co-optation, legitimation, and sheer coercion that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe was a matter of violently expropriating competition from rivals embodied by nobilities and the church, among others (see Merkl 1977:464; Tilly 1995; Schulze 1998; Clapham 2000:6–7). Only then did the political setting of legal institutions and appointed rulers gradually come under the control of the public. Yet, although the monopoly of violence is an essential component of the state, it is how it is upheld that is important, which requires a wide range of factors to be put in place for a transition to occur from ungoverned space to a peaceful liberal core. Legal order, bureaucracy and compulsory jurisdiction over a territory are among its equally essential characteristics (Weber 1947:252). Indeed, Weber notes, the “actual power” of the modern state is “necessarily and unavoidably in the hands of the bureaucracy, since it is exercised through the daily routines of administration” (Weber, cited in Scaff 1973:134). In other words, bureaucratic methods are designed to dominate, albeit in a way that is consistent with the widely held values that Weber refers to as legitimation. Together, these features of the state emerged only gradually in Western Europe to a large extent through taxing regimes for war from the eighteenth century onward (Barkey and Parikh 1991:527; Tilly 1985:181). As this book illustrates, in Sierra Leone the separation of local middlemen – traditional leaders – and colonial institutions and the gradual bureaucratization of state management were not topics for consideration either during or after the colonial era (Albrecht 2017a). Both colonial and postcolonial states have relied at a minimum cost on local intermediaries and alliances with local chieftainship institutions to ensure a manageable level of stability in the territories and populations that were directly or indirectly under their control. The aim was never to establish elaborate bureaucratic checks and balances. On the contrary, under the colonial policy of indirect rule chiefs were empowered to collect taxes, dispense the law and maintain order. In this context, chiefs often maintained police forces and prisons and oversaw the provision of public goods like roads by ensuring the resources and manpower necessary to build them (Acemog˘ lu et al. 2014). As such, the state in Sierra Leone is best understood as a historically constituted order of connections and mutual influences between colonial and post-colonial agents and local leaders. Certainly, the absence of separation

Introduction

9

between chiefs and government institutions has extended into post-colonial Sierra Leone and is the key to understanding why chiefs have maintained the level of authority they have in rural Sierra Leone. This is the configuration and distribution of power and authority on which the Sierra Leonean state rests; to change how order-making practices are configured means engaging in this system of administration. The notion of bureaucratic organization embedded in SSR is, in short, incompatible with Sierra Leone’s historical trajectory because the former projects a particular understanding of effective and legitimate administration that gives little institutional space to the role of actors like paramount and lesser chiefs. External actors such as the UK government, which were deeply involved in defining, shaping and implementing SSR, deliberately but unwittingly sought to erase Sierra Leone’s history to the extent that the practices and institutional constellations that were produced by it would not stand in the way of realizing their vision of a new, more effective and legitimate state. They did so by viewing the state as falling apart and by issuing particular constellations of discourse, practice and resources that at a minimum would remedy this collapse and ideally establish institutions with a semblance to the liberal-democratic systems of which they were a reflection. Officially, and to an extent also personally, DfID and the advisers they hired believed in the transformative power of what they were doing and in their ability to build democratically accountable institutions. Indeed, the aftermath of war was considered by many to be the promise of a new beginning for Sierra Leone.

Hybridization and its productive effects The concept of hybridity and its use in peace and security studies has played a profound role in a growing body of work criticizing the fragile/failed state discourse. Specifically, it has created an analytical space from which to challenge the binaries through which the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state modes of political ordering in the global South and dismantled binary articulations of international order (center) and disorder (periphery) (see Campbell et al. 2011; Hunt 2017). Hybridity has furthered the debate on understanding the political orders in conflict and post-conflict settings in their own right, rather than judging them as a failure of government by externally defined standards derived from the ideal type of a liberaldemocratic state. It has enabled explorations of formative and existing modes of order and political community in these settings (Boege et al. 2008, 2009; Brown 2007; Moe 2011). Because of its empirical point of departure, much of the analysis of hybridity in peace and security studies has focused conceptually and empirically on the encounter between international and local practices, norms and institutions, and the order that emerges from that encounter, which is dubbed “hybrid political orders” (Richmond and Franks 2008; Boege et al. 2008; Richmond 2006, 2010, 2011; Visoka 2013; Millar 2014b; Colona and Jaffe

10

Introduction

2016). Roger Mac Ginty (2010:392), for instance, suggests that a model of “hybrid peace” is produced in the encounter between (exogenous) liberal peace agents and (endogenous) local actors that contest one another, cooperate and coalesce. This results in “a whirr of hybridity” and constitutes a “process through which hybridization is perpetuated” (Mac Ginty 2010:404). Therefore, the debate in peace and security studies also advances a “local turn” in international relations more broadly. It is an argument for bringing ethnographic methodologies and empirical thickness into the center of research on interventions by insisting on foregrounding local perspectives in the analysis (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Hughes et al. 2015; SchwartzShea and Yanow 2012; Stepputat and Larsen 2015). On the one hand, this has given rise to a somewhat romanticized and deeply normative notion of local non-state orders as projecting inherently positive models of governance (reflecting early ethnographic accounts that depoliticize the often stark realities of social life (Radcliffe-Brown 2013; Redfield 1956; Murdock 1957; Sharp 1958)). In some cases, it has even led to eerily Western-centric reifications of the local as a defense against the ostensibly hegemonic order of the liberal state (Richmond 2011; Jackson and Albrecht 2018). On the other hand, and of particular significance to this book’s focus, the local turn emphasizes a need to contextualize endogenous meanings and relations in the study of global policy regimes and their practical implications for interventions. It articulates peacebuilding as inherently political processes of contestation ultimately over the definition of meaning, distribution of resources, and authority, rather than as sets of technologies that are employed, or can be employed, to overcome conflict and institutional fragility (Albrecht and Moe 2015). Underlying this recent application of hybridity in peace and security studies is a comprehensive body of literature in cultural and post-colonial studies, led by Bhabha (1994) and James Clifford (1994, 2000), that explores hybridity as a process of restless and uneasy mixing and of the permutations that occur in cultural exchanges (Hutnyk 2005:83; Pieterse 2001). Hybridity captures agency and institutions as dynamic processes that continuously produce and assert authority, while stressing that they are in a constant process of alteration. It is a term that denotes the in-between, what Bhabha (1994) refers to as the “third space,” a mode that is characterized by ambivalence, if not always conflict, between separate entities. The hybrid is in constant movement between spaces – a constant process of hybridization – passing through, between, and encompassing categories that are themselves without origin or arrival, that is, are never fully delivered. The hybridizing moment becomes the concatenation, or at the very least communication, across assumed incommensurable polarities that partly merge but never fully disappear into one another. Hybridization is not a process of dissolution or an indistinguishable grey mass, but a never-ending simultaneous process of homogenization (positive accommodation) and heterogenization (separation). It is also in these simultaneous processes that the potential for transformations lies, albeit transformations that are partial, are based on compromise, and that shape

Introduction

11

both the intervener and those who are the direct, indirect and often collateral targets of the intervention. This book suggests that processes of hybridization occur at the very center of how power, privilege and authority are constructed through continuously evolving processes of transformation. As such, hybridization is neither an “interface” (Werbner 2001:81) nor a “liminal” occurrence (Shoshana 2011:154) nor a “contact” point (Hutnyk 2005:79). This narrowing of the scope of hybridization would imply that hybridization is a somewhat superficial phenomenon that emerges in the meeting between pure – or at a minimum unproblematized – definable entities in a “moment of cultural exchange” (Hutnyk 2005:80). Instead hybridization should be seen as a dynamic and permanently evolving process of social change (Young 1995), however incremental and measured it might appear to be at any given time. Through these processes, individuals and groups position themselves to pursue resources and the sources of authority that are available to them. It is these continuous processes of transformation that the resources, discourses and practices feed into. It is the strength of the concept that it captures and accentuates an element of dynamism as sequences of innumerable unresolved moments of hybridization. However, the analytical validity of hybridity needs further elaboration. In peace and security studies, this is precisely because of the concept’s point of departure in a critique of fragile/failed state discourse, rather than an attempt to explain the production of authority in the long term as a process that continuously evolves and changes. By suggesting that the perpetuation of hybridization is particularly intense and pervasive in the encounter between the liberal state/international interveners and local orders/actors, the concept is in danger of reproducing the very dichotomies that it seeks to overcome. This becomes even more evident when it is argued rather instrumentally that hybrid peace is something that is (potentially) built in that encounter (see Millar 2014a:502, 2014b:25).3 Indeed, the mere suggestion that hybrid orders can be engineered reflects a fundamental weakness of how the concept has been co-opted in peace and security studies because it assumes a predictable and somehow more appropriate and context-sensitive outcome from interventions, when in fact unpredictability is one of the defining features of the concept of hybridization. Furthermore, starting the analysis and thereby applying the concept at the point of intervention leads to an ahistorical analysis that mutes preceding processes of hybridization, even when it is mentioned in passing, often as a caveat, that all social orders are “tainted with the ‘original sin’ of hybridity” (Mac Ginty 2010:398). This book questions peacebuilding – in this case SSR in Sierra Leone – as an unusual and unique encounter. Doing so reduces the international and local to singular and coherent units that meet and merge, rather than numerous more or less coherently assembled sets of discourse and practice that produce varying effects across institutions and individuals.

12

Introduction

To redress this distortion of how the concept of hybridity has often been used, I argue that hybridization should be seen as a general and long-term historical process of producing and transforming the configuration of authority in which peoples, ideas and norms mix to shape the exercise of power and distribution of resources (see Laffey and Nadarajah 2012; Mac Ginty 2011). Emphasizing the historicity of hybridity – that is, as hybridization – allows the analysis to make it explicit that international and local actors, practices and discourses are always in the making. In other words, processes of hybridization simultaneously accommodate multiple sources of authority and identity. Moreover, if hybridization is indeed accepted as a general process, rather than as an outcome of interventions in so-called fragile or failed states, the exact way in which they play themselves out can only be fully comprehended through an empirically grounded analysis (Berg and Howell 2017; see Visoka 2017). A deeper historical awareness is required of how actors, practices and discourses are configured in order to establish political order. Assuming that hybridization in any unequivocal sense is the product of a singular encounter – even for the sake of argument or of analytical clarity – presupposes that any given multitude of encounters, whether assembled under the label of “colonial rule” or “international intervention,” somehow occurs in or between entities that have separate origins, strong boundaries and firm borders. Against this parochialism of a compartmentalized world divided into “international” and “local,” which arguably exhibits a fetishism of boundaries, as a point of departure it should be assumed that political and cultural orders produce their own endogenous forms of transgression and that critical reflexivity is inherent in them. However, even though hybridization is “as old as history,” as Jan Pieterse (2001:222) puts it, it is also clear that “the pace of mixing accelerates and its scope widens in the wake of major structural changes.” This means that resources, practices and discourse are suddenly and abruptly channeled or translated into particular locations and mixed with already existing processes of hybridization, shape them, and are shaped by them. The permanence of the process leads to and reinforces the friction that is both unpredictable and productive of an awkward, unequal, unstable and creative quality of interconnection across difference (cf. Tsing 2004:4), where new institutional and social configurations are manifested. Friction and the concomitant potential for instability that makes possible and accelerates processes of hybridization are not only a consequence of external impact, they are ongoing, internal and integral to social relations because they reflect assembled meanings and signs, spatial memories, and lived experience. Why is this point of departure important in the context of SSR and how it sometimes produces unpredictable and always mediated effects? Because hybridization captures conceptually the relentless quality of transformation that is inherent to human interaction.

Introduction

13

Hybridization as transformation To understand the transformative potential of hybridization, Bhabha’s (1994) insights may help us capture how change/transformation occurs with the introduction of particular practices, discourses and resources. According to Bhabha (1994:119), who developed his thinking in the specific context of colonial authority, hybridization emphasizes an ongoing process of negotiation that is produced by a “doubling up of the sign,” that is, a “splitting” that is “less than one and double.” This means that, while some symbols or meanings of authority are maintained (but not totally, i.e., less than one) as a basic premise of the encounter, they are also redefined through an alienating strategy of doubling or repetition. The same object or practice placed in a different context acquires quite new meanings while echoing old embodied and discursive meanings. In this respect, hybridization is relentless and partially unconscious, while also being disturbing and interruptive. This renders authority ambivalent and uncertain as the precondition for defining and enacting order. Authority, however it may be expressed and in whatever context it may be manifested, is as always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference. Yet how is authority strengthened, transformed or created by the never-ending introduction of new or alternative practices, discourses and resources? This ambivalence is captured in its deconstructed configuration by Bhabha’s notion of the “third space,” a moment or place of untranslatability (non-dialectical), that is, the limit point where a thing turns into its alterity. The argument here is that accurate translatability or undistorted transferability are obvious misnomers because the intentionality of words or of an action is partially or wholly lost in the translation or transference. It will never be able to produce a representation that is arrested or fixated and that thereby exhausts the meaning of the original, because it would require a non-exposure not only to time but also to political power and interests. Indeed, it is the necessary iterability of a practice or discourse that has the potential for transformation and the time lag between repetitions which, in the process of translation, enables the production of “new and hybrid agencies and articulations” (Bhabha 1992:457). Time, or more specifically the “disjunctive repetition” or interstices created by the time lag between repetitions, is where separation and positive accommodation occur simultaneously and make change possible. Inherent in peacebuilding-cum-SSR, as in colonial administrations, are unsuccessful attempts to suppress heterogeneity sufficiently in the name of modernity and civilization (peace and stability). In the colonial encounter, indeed in any encounter, no one is simply subjected to a particular set – or particular sets – of practice and discourse. (Yet the idea put forth by several scholars, such as Mamdani (1996), is that chiefly authority, for instance, is the deliberate product of colonial policies and practices.) Everyone involved in the encounter is transformed through the

14

Introduction

negotiation that occurs, an exchange that may be collaborative and dialogical as well as profoundly antagonistic, conflictual, even incommensurable. Within this space of negotiation – a process of hybridization – the subaltern not only has a voice but fundamentally shapes, and thus unsettles, subverts or simply integrates with what are presumed to be (relatively) hegemonic power structures. Doubling instantiates but also diminishes the presence of authority, as well as articulating it with other knowledges and practices that subvert the dominant discourse, reproduce it, and produce (or create the space for) new forms of knowledge and practice. In the dynamics of the encounter, the identity of the subject is situated less in the polarity of the native, minority discourse or the dominant, colonial discourse, as in the “cutting edge of translation and negotiation” (Bhabha 1994:38) where new subject positions may be formed. Such (new) subject positions enter an endless sequence of subject positions that over time, in the longue durée, will constitute significant, indeed seismic, change in the relationship between people and the world, which in turn constitutes fundamental aspects of social life. However, the movement from one subject position to the next – or consecutive movements that occur within a short period of time – will usually never constitute more than a diminutive dislocation. In order to identify how the resources, discourses and practices of SSR have shaped local articulations of security, the analytical point of departure must be an understanding of how paramount and lesser chiefs have emerged over the long term and their importance in the struggles over, and distribution of, political power, resources and territorial control. The analysis shows that, through historically embedded processes of hybridization, the lines of separation between chiefs, politics and the administration never existed in the first place. The transition in 1961 from a colony to an independent state was an elite affair in Sierra Leone, but the new rulers took an uncommon approach in their treatment of traditional leaders, who were considered by other post-colonial governments to be “repressive collaborators of the colonial masters” (Buur and Kyed 2007; see also Englebert 2002; Oomen 2005). An analytical awareness of these dynamics is central to understanding the meaning and effects that externally driven SSR in Sierra Leone might have. Practically and analytically, it makes a difference if the basis of authority is hybridized through historically embedded configurations around tradition and kinship, an operational decision-making center of government, or foreign interventions. For example, it matters whether legislation or autochthon status in a particular locality are discursively applied to legitimize the practical pursuit of the resources that are channeled into a particular context. It matters how those resources are eventually distributed because they are subjected to intense struggle and therefore should also be emphasized in the analysis. However, those very resources and their origins do not constitute separate entities that reflect a clear distinction between state and society. For instance, legal references and identity are often articulated simultaneously – that is,

Introduction

15

conflated – thus reflecting the fact that authority always already emanates from multiple domains at the same time (Albrecht and Moe 2015). The analysis of hybridization thus dictates a delicate balancing act between ongoing processes of positive accommodation and separation. On the one hand, there is a tendency to assume separation (heterogenization), which invokes clear-cut divisions that speak of states, chiefs and the international in the context of interventions as if they have separate and distinct existences. On the other hand, there is a danger of overemphasizing the homogenizing effects of positive accommodation, thereby not detailing what the process entails in practice.4 This runs the risk of erasing the differences and tensions between the elements that constitute hybridization, their histories, and the symbols and practices that represent them. Categories are homogenized and complex contexts and milieus are oversimplified (Millar 2014b), while the local and the international are essentialized (Peterson 2012). The point here is that separation and positive accommodation are both integral to processes of hybridization: while sources of authority are always already interconnected, they also have distinguishable, if not distinct, origins. This is the reason why it is analytically possible to speak of the positive accommodation that occurs in processes of hybridization, while at the same time separating out and disentangling the multitude of elements that comprise it (Albrecht and Moe 2015).

Simultaneity of authority and the subject The value of hybridization as an analytical concept lies in its facilitation of a move beyond dichotomies separating entities that meet and merge, and in its deconstruction and exposure of the transformative quality inherent in any encounter. The notion of hybridization furthers our understanding of the coming into being of political orders that are different from the sum of the sources of authority that comprise them, resulting in new configurations of practice and discourse that undergird claims to resources. The full potential of this perspective is compromised if the analytical point of departure is the interstices and contestations between state-based and liberal practices, local customs, and everyday life, that is, the intervention encounter. To further elaborate on the contribution of a concept like hybridization, it is helpful to make a shift in the analysis from an ontology of entities and “forms of order” to a focus on enactments of order and authority by the subject. The state and tradition never simply are but are continuously enacted and re-enacted. It is in this continuous process of confirmation that hybridization and its innate potential for transformation transpires, an inevitable outcome of social interaction in which numerous sources of authority are drawn in and upon simultaneously in never entirely similar ways. The remainder of this section explores further the notion of a simultaneity of discourse and practice and emphasizes the subject as the main vehicle of

16

Introduction

hybridization because an individual draws on several always already slightly reconfigured constellations of authority. The concept of simultaneity of discourse and practice that captures how separation and positive accommodation is an embodied subjective experience draws inspiration from Mae Henderson’s work in the field of feminist literary criticism.5 In her work, simultaneity of discourse signifies a mode of reading perspectives of race and gender and how they relate to one another and structure black women writers’ discourses. She uses the term “other(s)” to denote race and gender, and how they are inter-related, thus moving away from a reductive paradigm. In this process, a relationship of difference and positive accommodation emerges that is informed by the exposure of heterogeneous dimensions of the self. The notion of simultaneity of discourse (and practice) articulates how black women writers identify with particular markers of identity and authority at the same time as dialogically asserting their agency by entering into contestatorial dialogue with a hegemonic dominant. This engagement with multiple markers of identity and authority activates the recognition of mutually implicated historical trajectories, a necessary condition for changing social relations. Henderson discusses how black women writers enter simultaneously into discourses of connection and affinity with the reader, as well as difference and contestation. They enter into a discourse of sameness and connection – positive accommodation – as well as difference and contestation – separation – “with black men as blacks, with white women as women, and with black women as black women,” while at the same time taking part in a discourse of difference with black men as women, with white women as blacks, and with white men as black women. She continues: “It is the complexity of these simultaneously homogeneous and heterogeneous social and discursive domains … that enables black women writers authoritatively to speak to and engage both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse” (Henderson 1993:122–123; see also Albrecht and Moe 2015). Taking inspiration from Henderson’s reasoning, Sierra Leone’s chiefs can be seen as “syncretic leaders” – a “socio-political phenomenon, which forges a synthesis between antagonistic forces stemming from different models, bureaucracies and world views” (van Nieuwaal van Rouveroy 1996:49). The subject – whether a chief in Sierra Leone’s Kono District or a black female writer in New York City – is able to incorporate seemingly contradictory and complementary discourse and practice into her or his register of authority. It is their compulsion to do so that is the foundation of their hybridized authority. In sum, attention to the process through which different, seemingly contradictory markers or sources of authority are played out simultaneously helps overcome the limitations imposed by assumptions of discrete internal positive accommodation (homogeneity) and the repression of internal difference (heterogeneity) by allowing both to be part of the analysis. In this reading, a focus on the subject – constituting the basic unit of social relationships – and how he or she internalizes multiple sources of authority

Introduction

17

helps to illustrate what hybridization entails in practice, which makes it impossible to reduce any one subject to a single marker of identity or authority. What is at once characteristic and suggestive of the subject’s authority is its interlocutory and dialogic character. The subject does not just navigate among different sources of authority that are external to him, he internalizes and embodies the varied sources that constitute his subjectivity as an authoritative figure. These varied sources of authority (legislation, belonging to a particular locality, being a member of a chiefly family, etc.) encounter one another and blend within as well as outside the subject (as the hybrid order is produced and reproduced). In short, because of the tension between positive accommodation and difference, sources of authority do not merge into an even hybrid order, but nor can the varied sources that this order is constituted by be fully separated either. For Sierra Leone’s paramount and lesser chiefs, as for the traditional leader across much of rural Africa, it is not a matter of acting as either a state official – even if he has a legal existence defined by a set of centrally governed institutions – or as a traditional leader because his authority stems from microhistories of settlement in a particular locality. Both contribute to his construction as a figure of authority, not in a way that removes separation and dissolves difference, but in a way that ties him to, and makes him the product of multiple sources of authority simultaneously. In this way, the subject becomes a vehicle for hybridization. While the subject might be considered an entity, focusing on how he internalizes and enacts different sources of authority puts into perspective how the tension between positive accommodation and difference is part of the process of authority-making. By applying the concept of simultaneity of discourse and practice, we can grasp more precisely what is implied by the hybridized quality of authority. From this perspective, multiplicity is not primarily evident as a post-colonial order made up of multiple discrete communities or identities, but as identity and authority emanating from multiple sources in one subject. How subjects enact hybridization in both practice and discourse is essential to our understanding of how that order is produced and reproduced because they are at the very center of hybridized articulations and enactments. It is in the subject’s strategies and practices that we clearly see how such processes of hybridization occur. Three sets of data: from Peyima to Freetown and beyond This book is the culmination of fourteen years of work in Sierra Leone as an academic and as a practitioner. As such, it primarily draws on three sets of data collected in the context of three different types of fieldwork, as well as separate trips, the last of which occurred in December 2018. The first data set helps us understand the productive effects of SSR locally in Sierra Leone, as well as providing a more general and vital understanding of how order is produced in contexts where it is the chief, rather than the

18

Introduction

police, who organizes security. It is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2008–2009 in Peyima, a small town in Kamara Chiefdom, Kono District (I made subsequent shorter visits to Peyima between 2010 and 2014). Over a hundred interviews and countless casual conversations were conducted with interviewees from a broad cross-section of Peyima’s population, relevant authorities in Tombodu (the headquarters of Kamara Chiefdom, where the paramount chief is based), and Koidu (the headquarters of Kono District and a regional hub for Sierra Leone’s diamond industry). The data were arranged according to general patterns of how security and justice are organized at the local level, by whom it is organized, and with what implications (for further elaboration on methodological considerations, see Albrecht 2012). Peyima lies on the banks of the Bafi river; it has approximately 2,500 inhabitants and is known for its diamond deposits. While fairly close to the largest town in the district, Koidu, Peyima is relatively inaccessible, particularly during the rainy season, when the path through the forested area that leads to the town is flooded. Its main authorities are the town chief, Gborie, and a group of elders; police come to the township if summoned. Peyima, like other diamond-rich towns in Kono District and beyond, was occupied by the RUF during the civil war and became a rebel base from about 1996 until the early 2000s. During this period most of the town’s population fled to Guinea or Freetown. Those who stayed behind were forced to work with and for the RUF fighters, pointing out diamond deposits and doing the actual mining. People began returning to the destroyed town after the war officially came to an end in 2002. Because a glut of workers has been migrating to western Kono in search of quick diamond riches since the mid-1960s, the demography of Peyima reflects the tribal composition of Sierra Leone in general, its most numerous ethnic groups being the Temne, Mende, Limba, Kuranko, Mandingo and Konos. The economy has focused primarily on alluvial mining, a labor-intensive process in which dirt is dug and sifted, i.e., “washed” for gems. During the mining season, which in Peyima starts after Christmas, diggers spend their days digging and washing under the watchful eye of a gang foreman. He, in turn, represents an investor, who may also hold the right given by the town chief to exploit the land. Alternatively, the investor may collaborate with someone in the town who does have that right and may be based elsewhere. Commonly, the diggers are male and poor, but not always young. A second set of data supports a broader understanding of how community policing specifically has been operationalized and how the SLP functions as an organization more broadly. These data were collected in 2012–2013 while I was working in Sierra Leone as a consultant for DfID’s Access to Security and Justice Programme (ASJP). As part of this work, I led a research team that conducted a qualitative survey of community policing forums in half (17 out of 33) of Sierra Leone’s police divisions (Albrecht et al. 2014). This work was conducted in collaboration with the SLP; as a partial insider I had direct

Introduction

19

access to the police hierarchy, with whom I frequently discussed issues relating to community policing and the broader dynamics of the police organization as a whole. The third body of work was produced from 2007 to 2015 and involves numerous data sets focusing on how SSR has been taken forward in Sierra Leone, primarily at the national level. During this work, which was funded primarily by DfID and the UK Ministry of Defence, I engaged extensively with key individuals across Sierra Leone’s security sector (defense, police, intelligence, national security) as well as international advisers. The first main output of this process explores SSR in Sierra Leone between 1997 and 2007 (Albrecht and Jackson 2009; Jackson and Albrecht 2011); the second output explores the process up until 2013 (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b).

Chapters of the book In Chapter 2, I begin by elaborating the politics underlying the emergence and demise of SSR from the late 1990s until the mid- to late 2000s. The chapter explores the characteristics of the development-oriented variety of SSR that emerged during the 1990s. It argues that, as a development framework, SSR became as much a matter of developmentalizing security as it was a question of securitizing development. SSR was relatively short-lived as a development approach. While the end of the Cold War facilitated a more robust role for development agencies in security-related programming, the fundamental militarization of security-related interventions after 9/11 marginalized development agencies from playing the role that they claimed for themselves during the 1990s. The timing of the conflict in Sierra Leone meant that SSR came to shape international approaches to the country’s peacebuilding process. As such, Sierra Leone was one of the first, but also one of the only, peacebuilding contexts in which development, defense and diplomacy were applied with equal weight in an SSR process. Chapter 3 explores how Sierra Leone’s failure as a state was articulated both academically and by policy-makers and practitioners who were involved in Sierra Leone from the late 1990s onward. Following this, it analyzes in detail how SSR became one of the central components of the state-building process that was initiated around that time. Considered to lack both efficiency and legitimacy, Sierra Leone’s perceived failure as a state, which led to a devastating and brutal conflict, spurred the UN and the UK in particular into action. Through the deployment of troops and the initiation of numerous programs under the label of SSR, a process was begun that sought to provide the country with a centrally governed and permanent political organization that could capture and retain the monopoly over the means of physical and symbolic violence and thus contain instability, disorder and chaos. Despite international intentions to establish a state-centric approach to the provision of security, the hybrid order of authority that existed in Sierra Leone historically was reproduced in the SSR process.

20

Introduction

Up to this point, the book pursues two objectives. First, it explores the context in which the global policy debate on SSR developed and how it was articulated as an attempt to concentrate power in a set of centrally governed institutions. Second, it analyzes how re-composing the distribution of security providers attempted but failed to eradicate the ambiguity that hybrid organizational formations and actors represent. Chapter 4 serves as a bridge to the more ethnographic part of the book. It focuses on Sierra Leone’s traditional leaders – its paramount and lesser chiefs – to argue that hybridity is integral to and lies at the very foundation of long-term state formation in Sierra Leone. The argument lays the basis for the remainder of the book, which explores how local order-making is conducted and by extension how SSR, and police reform in particular, became elements in ongoing processes of hybridization. This historically grounded analysis helps suggest that SSR in general and police reform more specifically contributed to and reproduced the order of hybrid organizational forms embodied by paramount and lesser chiefs in Sierra Leone, rather than fundamentally altering it. At the heart of international support to strengthen the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Sierra Leone state in the late 1990s was the intention to introduce what external advisers referred to as effective visible policing. Sierra Leone was emerging from a war that only ended officially in 2002. In this context, the introduction of “effective visible policing” initially meant building police stations, writing codes of conduct, and training and equipping police officers. This was a political endeavor that entailed a re-composition of the security field as a set of structured relations among actors who enforce order and redistribute the resources they draw upon and generate during that process. Chapter 5 serves two purposes: it explores the evolution of policing in Sierra Leone and hones in on police reform from the late 1990s onward as one of the central components of SSR. It outlines the key elements and different phases of police reform and explores the role and visibility of chiefs in each of these phases. The first phase began during open conflict in the late 1990s and constituted a rigid and narrow focus on state-building. In the second phase chiefs entered the reform discourse, but the emphasis remained overwhelmingly on coordination among institutions of the state system. The third phase of reform began in 2012 and was for the first time centered on what are referred to as “non-state justice and security actors,” but without acknowledging a hybrid order. I conclude that in the future the hybrid order that paramount and lesser chiefs articulate will continue to be mis-recognized in attempts to develop and implement security and justice programs. Chapter 6 discusses one dimension of police reform: the introduction of community policing and its implications at the local level. The focus is on community policing’s primary institutional expression, the Local Policing Partnership Boards (LPPBs), which were established to ensure stakeholder participation in policing. The chapter describes how community policing

Introduction

21

came to be practiced and how LPPBs have been operationalized. It discusses the recent history of community policing in Sierra Leone and analyses two cases that demonstrate how the LPPBs have been co-opted by the chiefs and how the Boards have reproduced rather than challenged the hybrid basis of their authority. The first case explores a boy’s sudden death, and how it was dealt with simultaneously as a cosmological-ancestral matter and a potential criminal case that required police involvement. The second case explores a case of theft and its resolution through the involvement of Peyima’s town chief and an LPPB member without engaging the police. Chapter 7 substantiates the hybrid quality of producing local order in rural Sierra Leone by exploring the order-making functions of the Poro, one of the country’s central secret societies. It provides empirical support for the argument that the authority to make order is dispersed among a multitude of actors and institutions that incorporate and intertwine disparate rationalities and registers to do so. The Poro is explored as co-constitutive of a networked order-making arrangement in which clear hierarchical or vertical relationships do not exist and where authority runs in a multitude of directions rather than from a clearly defined (state) center. As an element of this analysis, the chapter also explores the circumstances in which the Poro and the SLP intertwine, shape and merge with one another in the constitution of local order-making. Poro–police engagement, interaction and merging constitute an analytically privileged space in which the problematic nature of categorically separating state and Poro is exposed, showing how hybrid authority is assembled in practice. The chapter first outlines a brief history of the Poro and its emergence as a localized bulwark against external interference (waves of migration, colonial and post-colonial powers). As such, it has become and remains essential in distinguishing between insiders and outsiders in a given locality – between sons of the soil and strangers. Following a discussion of what constitutes a secret and the ambivalent figure of the stranger and how these categories are produced through the Poro, the case of a land dispute is explored in which Poro membership and lack thereof was central to how it was resolved. The chapter then presents and discusses how and under what conditions the state police engage in Poro affairs, illustrating how rationalities are merged and separated in the act of order-making. Chapter 8 explores a case of diamond theft in order to make empirically explicit how contemporary processes of hybridization occur in practice. It demonstrates how to work analytically with processes of positive accommodation (homogenization) and separation (heterogenization) simultaneously as the basis of hybridization. Chiefs, police officers and diamond dealers, all key authorities in Kamara Chiefdom and Kono as a whole, assembled and articulated different kinds of authority simultaneously, thereby reflecting a basic tenet of hybridization, namely that authority is always already drawn from multiple registers. Authority comes into play at different moments in

22

Introduction

different situations, thereby giving shape to how the authority of the subject is articulated. In Chapter 9, the conclusion, I address the key finding of the book, namely that while comprehensive programs were put in place to support military and police reform, this has had strikingly little effect when it comes to fundamentally altering practices of order-making in a place like Peyima. For that to have been the case would have required a fundamental redistribution of authority at the local level. Instead, those elements of SSR that did reach the local level were co-opted and largely shaped by existing constellations of hybridized authority that chiefs stand at the center of and embody.

Notes 1 This figure is not supported by statistical data, but such estimates emerged in the case of Sierra Leone in 2002 (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:42) and are cited in numerous policy-related publications on informal or non-state justice. See, for example, OECD 2007a; UNDP 2009; Chirayath et al. 2005; USAID 2005. 2 According to the liberal peace thesis which re-emerged in the 1980s, democracies do not go to war with one another. Its proponents at the time included Michael Doyle (1986) and Rudolph J. Rummel (1997), who drew on the suggestion of Immanuel Kant that representative governments are more likely to behave peacefully than authoritarian regimes. While the liberal peace thesis has been the “subject of intense debate” (Selby 2013:58), it has guided much thinking among policy-makers and in academia about how to make and consolidate peace (see Paris 2004). 3 Numerous scholars have pointed out how the weakness of the concept of hybridity lies in its “affiliation with conceptual solidity and policy prescription” (Visoka 2017:311). Visoka (2017:310–320) suggests a modification of its conceptual basis by introducing, for instance, Bauman’s concept of liquidity and Deleuze’s assemblage. Like Visoka, many scholars suggest a more nuanced understanding of hybridity that centers on the peacebuilding encounter/process (see, among others, Mac Ginty 2010, 2011). This book suggests moving beyond a focus on peace and the peacebuilding encounter to approach interventions as occurring in already ongoing processes of hybridization. 4 For an analysis of this critique of hybridity as its point of departure outlined in the context of Somalia – Puntland and Somaliland specifically – see Hoehne 2011, 2013. 5 This and the following paragraphs of this section draw inspiration from a coauthored piece with Louise Wiuff Moe: see Albrecht and Moe 2015.

2

The rise and fall of security sector reform in development

As security sector reform (SSR) developed in international discourse and practice through the 1990s, it shaped and was partly shaped by the conflict in Sierra Leone and its aftermath because of the UK’s intimate involvement in both. The remainder of this book deals primarily with order-making practices in Sierra Leone, but hybridization is evidently not restricted to local or national domains. Simultaneous intersections and competition between international, national and local structures of authority produce effects across all three. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it describes the international environment that enabled SSR and highlights the relatively brief moment in post-Cold War history when security was driven by a development agenda. Second, it constitutes a backdrop to the rest of the book indicating that there was a disconnect between technical policy discussions at the international level and local order-making practices in Sierra Leone that shaped one another in unpredictable ways through mutual translations and appropriations in the late 1990s and 2000s. As a central focus in international development circles, SSR has as its basic premise the idea that failed states should be transformed into functioning, centrally governed political entities (Ansong and Gordon 2018; Jackson 2018). According to this premise, the state as a bordered container of power and the institutions that maintain it were to be isolated and worked upon. At the center of this exercise stood the security sector (Bendix and Stanley 2008:97). This outlook led to a creeping reductionism, caused in part by the propensity of state-builders to reproduce the state–society split. Attempts were made to eliminate or criminalize leaders of armed groups who did not fit the imaginary of the centrally governed state institutions and actors. There was also an uneasiness when it came to working with chiefs, who represent a wide swathe of actors who fit uneasily into liberal-democratic notions of bureaucratic administration. By the late 1990s, as SSR programming began in Sierra Leone and as security and development were combined in security and justice programming, a coherent concept of the security sector had still not emerged. There was no clear sense of which institutions to work on – the armed forces, the

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

police, the judiciary, or all of them simultaneously. In the years to come, this question came to dominate the practical aspects and discussions of SSR. What was clear in the late 1990s, however, was that the object of SSR was to support and simultaneously build centralized, differentiated organizations with a monopoly of coercion across a territory. Doing so was seen as a precondition for development, which in turn was considered a precondition for the consolidation of peace. What was clear in the late 1990s was that SSR as articulated and translated into programming in Sierra Leone and security provision policies internationally came from the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID). As SSR emerged, the main focus was on transforming failed and collapsed states into effective and legitimate political entities, and on preventing post-conflict states from relapsing into open conflict. Thus, SSR became an important item on the state-building agenda as part of “the process of restoring (or building) the functionality of state institutions” (United Nations and World Bank 2007:22). Holistic in scope and politically sensitive in approach, SSR as a development approach did not aim primarily to make security forces more effective in their operational capacity through train-and-equip programs. It was assumed that efforts to improve the state’s effectiveness in the security domain would fail without corresponding improvements in how the security sector and by extension the state were governed (Hendrickson 2009:7). This meant that the primary concern of DfID, as captured in the concept of SSR at the time and maintained through the 2000s, was support to ministerial, parliamentary and civil-society oversight, that is, the checks and balances of the security sector through bureaucratization. This approach involved institutional change across a range of sectors that reflected security as a “multidimensional” condition where “hard” and “soft” dimensions were to be addressed simultaneously (Hendrickson 2009:5–7). While the SSR concept thrived through the 2000s, its popularity in policy was not reflected in the translation of development agencies into programming and practices on the ground. In fact, Sierra Leone is one of the few examples of a country emerging from conflict where comprehensive SSR has been attempted. The reason for this is the general militarization of international support that followed the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and characterized interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 While a number of development experts drove the SSR debate forward in the first half of the 2000s, and while the justice sector, including policing, continues to be a key intervention area for development agencies, the general acceptance that ministries of defense, national security bodies and intelligence services are part of development agencies’ “core business” became and continues to be marginal. This chapter first explores some of the assumptions on which SSR as a set of policies and programs was based, specifically in addressing the challenges posed by fragile and failing states in the post-Cold War international security

The rise and fall of SSR in development

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environment. The chapter then outlines the process whereby SSR initially emerged from the UK’s DfID and from political struggles across government, as well as in multilateral forums such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It concludes by analyzing the policy concept of the multi-layered approach that articulated one attempt to involve “non-state” actors in SSR activities, including traditional or customary authorities and community-based policing groups. Apart from confirming a dichotomy between state and non-state, international policy-makers and experts saw the multi-layered approach as an interim strategy until such a time that “the state can take over service provision” (OECD 2007a:28). In other words, how state institutions operate and should be operated may be discussed, but it was still the state as a centrally governed political and bureaucratized entity that was to be built and consolidated.

War-shattered states, SSR and market democracies Until the end of the Cold War, security and development were considered relatively autonomous fields of intervention. They merged during the 1990s as war and conflict were increasingly seen as integral to that process and were mainstreamed into development discourses (Duffield 2001). Donor agencies regarded the lack of development in the global South as a cause of insecurity instead of an issue of inequality or injustice (Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). The shift from macro-development approaches to good governance, pro-poor policy-making, sustainability and poverty reduction was considered to be a figurative reflection of the desire to contain failed states that had come to represent areas of potential instability with global ramifications. The process of merging security and development led to what has often been described as the securitization of development (Duffield 2001, 2006; Harrison 2001, 2004; Craig and Porter 2003; Abrahamsen 2004, 2005; Fraser 2005). SSR is a concrete expression of this transformed approach to interventions. It became one of the main instruments of state-building that emerged during the relatively short period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror, when the downfall of SSR as a development instrument began (Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). The global distribution of power and capital after the Cold War has often been highlighted as one of the main reasons why the intervention in Sierra Leone took the shape that it did. Conflicts were no longer considered tokens of US–Soviet proxy wars but as an aspect of a complex of weak or failing states, ethnic violence and poverty (Lacina 2004). Crucially, for a brief moment in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, this shift confirmed the political and economic hegemony of the core countries of international society, the United States in particular and the generic West in general (Clark 2001). Discourses centered on what the correct or proper political entity might look like and revolved around democratic ideals and the unconstrained operation of the market for capital and labor.

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

International bilateral and multilateral donor agencies became the bearers of an increased transnational flow of neoliberal ideology that was supported by overlapping concepts of human rights and liberal-democratic norms. Following this line of argument, the legitimacy of the correct manner of governance proposed by Paris (1997, 2001, 2004) and other proponents of the liberal peace thesis at the time could hardly be questioned. Liberal-democratic political structures and processes, including multi-party elections, good governance “and the development of a limited but functional state,” were to be combined with neoliberal economic practices, including the privatization of public enterprises and the deregulation of capital markets (Selby 2013:60–61). In one agenda-setting article, Paris follows this line of argument. The problem of peacebuilding, he argues, is not the objective of political and economic liberalization but the measures taken to achieve it (Paris 1997:57). His work reflects an attempt to correct the how of peacebuilding, not the why: Peacebuilding agencies should preserve the principal goal of liberal internationalism – the transformation of war-shattered states into market democracies – but re-think the way in which they pursue this goal, seeking in particular to limit the conflict inducing effects of political and economic liberalization in war-shattered states. (Paris 1997:58) In sum, failed states were to be reconfigured to reflect the state-centric, Western universalist model of effectiveness and legitimacy. The ephemeral concept of legitimacy expressed directly or indirectly in international discourse should be viewed in light of the concentration of authority in geographically specific parts of the world and within the framework of the global distribution of power. “We are told,” Douzinas (2003:169) argues, “that the new world order is based on respect for human rights.” He continues: “This moral order provides legitimacy to a new configuration of power relations” (2003:173). To back up these claims about the potential power and capital of the liberaldemocratic nation state and to legitimize external interventions to support the building of this type of political entity, a number of views on the global South were produced by both academics and policy-makers. Abiew and Keating (2000:80) argue that one of the primary reasons for developing the discourse and practice of peacebuilding, with which the concepts of state and statebuilding are closely connected, had to do with a “substantial increase” in internal conflicts after the end of the Cold War (see also Paris 1997:54). The notion of a sudden surge in the number of conflicts was used to provide the evidence that externally supported or driven state-building was a necessity. Findings in Eriksson, Wallensteen and Sollenberg’s data on armed conflict from 1946 to 2002 show that there were thirty-one ongoing conflicts in 2002, twenty-six of which took place within states. In 1991–1992, fifty out of fifty-four active conflicts were of an intra-state nature (Eriksson et al. 2003:594), accounting for the largest number of conflicts for the entire post-

The rise and fall of SSR in development

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2

World War II era. Following Jakobsen (2002:270) and Lederach (1997:6), it can be argued that, while there was no permanent rise in the number of conflicts following the Cold War, the international environment in which international interventions proliferated during the 1990s and early 2000s was characterized by relative instability. Conflicts from World War II to the turn of the millennium largely took place within the borders of politically defined state spaces (see Gantzel and Schwinghammer 2000). Therefore, the growing international perception of the legitimacy of interventions in intra-state conflicts was arguably the consequence of changes in the global balance of power rather than a sudden surge in the number of intra-state conflicts. It is as part of these general developments in international politics that the chapter now turns to how SSR was assembled in international policy-making circles.

Merging security and development with justice and security programming The emergence of SSR was based on assumed existence of an integral relationship between development and security and the need to narrow statebuilding down to one core component that could be worked on. The concept originated from narratives of policy-makers and academics about the failure of governance and the waning and disappearance of state capacity and legitimacy, which resulted in the intensification of intra-state conflict. The focus on fragility, that is, on the lack of capacity, emerged after the end of the Cold War and was accentuated by the post-9/11 understanding of the security–development nexus. The absence or weakness of government control in the global South was assumed to be a direct threat to the security of Western states. “Rogue and failing states,” Coletta (2007:393) argues, were looked upon as “the ones most vulnerable to exploitation by millennial groups.” Hence, ensuring or strengthening government authority and control emerged as the main solution to problems of both security and development. As formulated in the mid- to late 1990s, on the surface SSR was not explicitly or conceptually centered on operating on state institutions. It emerged in the wake of the human security paradigm, within which the individual rather than the state was a priority for multilateral and bilateral donor agencies (see Kaldor et al. 2007; Ball 2010:32; Sedra 2010:16). Protection of individuals was considered critical to national and international security, going well beyond defense matters and incorporating broader political, economic and social issues that would ensure a life free of risk (Sedra 2010:32). Along these lines, the Human Development Report published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1990 argued that development must focus on people, even though they are grouped by country, rather than on the security of national (state) boundaries (King and Murray 2001:587). The notion of human security – just like the role of “non-state” actors in security and justice programming – was formulated with the important and

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

somewhat contradictory caveat that the state should continue to be the key provider of these services. The idea that the state should hold the mandate to make order in the justice and security field was not questioned in the debates on human security. Indeed, any alternatives to the state and its centrally governed institutions as the sole enforcers of order could hardly be imagined. The primary questions in the state-centered policy-making discussion were how and toward whom these ordering effects were to be directed and how states could fulfil their functions effectively and legitimately. Lack of development was seen as a cause of insecurity, and financial support was now starting to be allocated to the production of defense White Papers and the building of ministries of defense and intelligence services in Sierra Leone and beyond (for Sierra Leone, see Ashington-Pickett 2010:20; Le Grys 2010:43; Gaeta 2010; Kondeh 2010).

Securitization of development or developmentalization of security? SSR emerged along the lines of the developmentalization of security rather than the securitization of development. This focus constituted an attempt to depart from train-and-equip programs,3 in which training and military hardware is provided to make internal and external security forces more effective (see Sugden 2006:10).4 As one of the practical expressions of state-building, SSR was structured to deal with the governability of a country’s internal and external security institutions. Moreover, the emphasis was placed on the democratic accountability of such institutions through ministerial management and external oversight by parliaments and civil-society organizations. In other words, a technical process was articulated that centered on establishing a centrally and bureaucratically governed political entity (see Sedra 2010:16; Albrecht and Stepputat 2015; van de Goor and van Veen 2010:98; FitzGerald 2010:163; Hutton 2010:197). During the 1990s and early 2000s, the primary focus in development programs on individual military and police institutions and technically driven reform efforts was giving way to approaches that regarded security and justice as part of a single system based on concepts of accountability and the rule of law (Bryden and Hänggi 2005:26; OECD 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). On paper, therefore, SSR arguably evolved as a considerably more intrusive approach to state-building than train-and-equip programs. Figuratively speaking, SSR was conceived in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a way to deconstruct the state in order to build it back up from within to reflect liberal-democratic principles of governance. It was intended to target not one organization within, but justice and security as an interconnected system. In other words, the system of related actors would be rejigged as a set of centrally governed institutions that resembles a state of the Western universalist variety. The train-and-equip notion is ultimately about building up the effectiveness of a security institution, but it rarely considers how the justice and security field

The rise and fall of SSR in development

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as a whole is affected or how power is distributed across it. This narrow and rather technical approach was pursued globally in its purest form by the United States from 2001 to 2008. During this period, the budget of the US Department of Defense exceeded the combined resources of the Department of State and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by a factor of 350:1, compared to a factor of 10:1 in other Western governments. Furthermore, the United States did not adopt the notion of SSR in the early 2000s but continued to speak of military assistance, police training, and democracy and governance. Under the Bush administration, the priorities of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism meant a relatively narrow focus on training the military and police as complementary to and eventually replacements for international forces. Prioritizing hard security has meant that the oversight mechanisms of recipient countries, parliament and the judiciary suffered (Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). SSR was formulated in opposition to the train-and-equip approach and was based on the assumption that isolated and targeted projects, such as military training ultimately, do not help to establish the state as an all-important bulwark against instability, disorder and chaos in otherwise unregulated physical space. In the case of the United States, therefore, the rising concern with insecurity and terrorism was detrimental to the advancement of SSR as the developmentalization of security (see Sherman 2010; Ball 2010).

The US, SSR and the effects of 9/11 9/11 had three major implications for how SSR developed within the United States, which in turn had crucial implications for the possibility and legitimacy of operationalizing it globally. It is true, as Andersen (2011:14) has argued, that in the post-9/11 climate “the state’s ability to control what goes on inside and across its territorial borders” became an even more urgent concern of international interventions than in the preceding decade, but it was a concern that arose when seismic changes had taken place compared with what was envisaged in the 1990s. First, the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to the most comprehensive revision since World War II of the US national security architecture and policy. This included a sweeping expansion of executive authority and a broad erosion of civil liberties. Second, these changes militarized US foreign assistance in areas of strategic interest to the United States, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan (Coyne 2011). For instance, the US Department of Defense was placed in charge of police reform in Iraq and Afghanistan, which meant an emphasis not on community policing and civilian protection, but on engaging the police in military-led counter-insurgency operations. In Iraq, US military police officers trained civilian police despite State Department pleas for a military-to-military and cop-to-cop approach. According to Sherman (2010:59), this type of assistance has often undermined or contradicted principles of democratic governance and reinforced repression and radicalization.

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

Third, this change in US security policy has provided justification for a few countries to repress dissident and opposition movements under the mantle of counterterrorism while making it more difficult to challenge such practices internationally (Sherman 2010). With specific reference to the intervention in Sierra Leone in 1999–2000, the realization of a fundamental militarization of foreign policy after 2001 was captured during an interview with Clare Short. As the UK Secretary of State for International Development when DfID was actively formulating SSR policies and intervening in Sierra Leone, Short considered Afghanistan and Iraq to constitute fundamental turning points away from the possibility of a development-led security agenda: The possibility of absolutely merging commitments to development with all your other instruments of foreign policy, including the military, which was conceivable in those days [in Sierra Leone], is now sort of lost [because of Afghanistan and Iraq], but I think it will come around again. (Short, interview, June 2008) “We were a new Government; there were no mixed messages then,” Short continued, referring to debates over Iraq: You can see a country like Britain taking on the idea of a stronger, multilateral world order, and this is all pre-Iraq obviously, where there was an aim of deploying troops alongside the objective of having a strong international law, well-organized states, and a more evenly developed world. In those early days, you know, DfID was very confident, the government was settling down, there weren’t pecking orders that strongly established [within government]. And when they talk about security reform [postAfghanistan and post-Iraq], it’s part of a prejudiced foreign policy that is unbalanced. (Short, interview, June 2008) Short captures a dominant discourse among bilateral as well as multilateral agencies in the decade between the end of the Cold War and the initiation of the War on Terror in 2001. For instance, as a comprehensive solution for liberal-democratic state-building rather than primarily an extension of trainand-equip to reinforce particular skills to conduct counterterrorism, SSR was a result of the worldview that existed in the aftermath of the Cold War. The well-organized state that Short saw as a genuine possibility – that is, a state that is liberal-democratic, effective and legitimate, as Goldstone (2008:285– 286) puts it – was considered pivotal in combating instability and chaos. Unlike programs that merely aim to render individual justice and security providers more effective, SSR had a more comprehensive aim in mind, namely to build the ability of the state to execute security governance. Above all, this was to be sought by increasing the capacity of bureaucrats and other

The rise and fall of SSR in development

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representatives of the state, including police and military officers, to enforce order and the normative content of reform (accountability, democratization, the rule of law).

Amalgamating security and development in the UK and the emergence of SSR A few years prior to 9/11, in the late 1990s, DfID played a critical role in developing SSR as a set of policies and programs. The beginning of this process has often been dated back to a speech given by Clare Short on March 9, 1999, at King’s College in London. In the speech she states: “We want increasingly to integrate a security sector reform perspective into our country programs and into the thinking of other donors and multilateral development institutions” (Short 1999). By embracing SSR in this manner, DfID crossed an important threshold as a development agency by positing a direct link between the security sector and poverty reduction (Hendrickson 2009:3; DfID 1999, 2001b, 2002). As the head of a new government department established in 1997, Short was charting new territory. Her agenda, however, was motivated by politics rather than by a grand strategy of merging development and security per se. Short was not a development expert, nor was she particularly interested in it. However, she was in the process of building a power base at 1 Palace Street, DfID’s new address in London next to Buckingham Palace, which would reflect what she considered to be the increasing role of development agencies in international politics following the Cold War.5 She did this by engaging in policy-making as well as with the security services, which, according to Short, were looking for new roles to play in the post-Cold War security environment.6 SSR emerged on the basis of struggles over policy-making and the power of DfID to define foreign-policy priorities in collaboration but often in confrontation with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in particular, but also with the Ministry of Defence (MOD). A good example of these intragovernmental struggles, which reflected DfID’s centrality as a development agency in setting the agenda for SSR and the new department’s financial power to do so after the Cold War, emerged when pooled funding was established for the three departments in 2001. The Global Conflict Prevention Pool (GCPP) and Africa Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP), as they were called, to a large extent paid for activities in Sierra Leone: The true story about them [GCPP and ACPP] is that [Chancellor of the Exchequer] Gordon Brown and the Treasury came up with this idea, to put lumps of money up to encourage cross-departmental working. Therefore, somebody in Africa Division [of DfID] said: “Let’s go for an Africa Conflict Prevention Pool.” And we were up for it, we’d done something on conflict in Africa, had a conference, and produced a paper, and the idea was then that the Treasury would contribute £20 million – it

32

The rise and fall of SSR in development wasn’t much – on the table, and then the other Departments would match it. Then that money would be run jointly, and the point, from the Treasury’s point of view, was to leverage better inter-departmental working. For us, of course, it meant really getting into the policy-making, including with respect to the security services. So, anyway, we proposed this conflict prevention, and apparently the permanent secretary at the foreign office went absolute crazy that they didn’t come up with it – and then they proposed the Global Conflict Prevention Pool. The Foreign Office always had an obsession with DfID’s money, which is very silly because they have diplomats, we have money. And they always want little money, little projects. With the Global Conflict Prevention Pool, they got a rather bureaucratic system in place to make little grants in conflict-prone countries, whereas in the case of the Africa one, we were really trying to drive a broader analysis, linking up with the security services and MI6. (Short, interview, 2008, emphasis added)

Under Short’s leadership, DfID began to play “a leading role in several aspects of foreign policy, especially in relation to UK policies towards SubSaharan Africa” (Williams 2004:916).7 And indeed, Short explained why SSR and Africa were top priorities at the time: We were in that Cold War phase where there was a massive growth in conflict, new kind of conflict within and between countries causing enormous suffering and holding out the prospect of development in Africa. I mean, you couldn’t be intelligently interested in development in Africa and not be very focused on how you bring all these conflicts to an end. If you’re serious, it drives you into these issues. (Short, interview, June 2008) Policy-making processes are in general both internal and external to a policyformulating community, and “policy ideas are important less for what they say than for who they bring together, what alliances, coalitions and consensus they allow, both within and between organisations” (Mosse 2004:649). SSR not only reflected the emerging conviction that security was a precondition for development, it also reflected political struggles within Whitehall that were entirely divorced from the Sierra Leonean context. Nonetheless, Sierra Leone came to play a central role in the UK’s defining of the concept, led to a large extent by DfID.

Sierra Leone’s role in shaping SSR It is often noted how Short’s speech at King’s College explicitly defined the security sector as “the military, paramilitary and intelligence services as well as those civilian structures responsible for oversight and control of the security forces” (Short 1999). Short was equally clear that SSR would not involve

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the police or the wider criminal justice system (Short 1999). This separation within DfID of what may broadly be referred to as internal and external security had practical consequences in Sierra Leone, not least for the turf wars between advisers. Keith Biddle, a retired British police officer who was appointed Inspector-General of Police in Sierra Leone in 1999,8 recalls from this period: CHAD [DfID’s Conflict and Humanitarian Affairs Department] was running the show regarding security in the military and came out [to Sierra Leone] on visits. On the other hand, you had the Government and Institutions Department, which said that they would retain all policing aspects throughout the world under all circumstances because it was about governments and communities, and not military solutions to conflict. There were a lot of turf wars involved in this. Logically, the police should have been part of security sector reform, and DfID, in 1998, in fact issued a book [sic] that stated that the police are actually dealt with on their own provisions. So security sector reform was not part and parcel of what we were doing and never formally became part and parcel of what we were doing. There was clearly a lack of integration of thought in London. (Biddle, interview, June 2009) The fact that direction of police and defense programming did not come from the same offices in DfID had implications in practice for how SSR unfolded, which resulted in rivalries between individual advisors and agencies on the ground. Based on his own experience, Robert Ashington-Pickett, adviser to the Office of National Security (ONS) within the Sierra Leone Security Sector Program (SILSEP) from 2000 to 2003, explained: It is a regrettable fact that many government departments, especially in the security sector, create unproductive rivalries, petty jealousies and prejudices towards other security agencies. Inappropriate, exaggerated identification with one’s own programming can also arise, leading to isolation among SSR advisers and overprotectiveness of one’s agency or department. At times, this behaviour is imported into post-conflict arenas, where it creates a new arena for rivalries to be played out, thus undermining key SSR principles and setting a bad example. While SSR programmes in Sierra Leone benefited from [the] professional behaviour [of advisers], they still suffered from inter-agency rivalries and turf battles. (Ashington-Pickett 2010:32) In later communication with Ashington-Pickett, these general reflections were concretized, that is, how inter-agency rivalry among advisers in different security institutions hampered collaboration and coordination across the security system. Keith Biddle had become Inspector-General of Police when

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

Ashington-Pickett arrived. According to Ashington-Pickett “there was competition between Biddle’s vision of the police and the other intelligence agencies, since he [Biddle] was partisan and had little experience of national intelligence and inter-agency cooperation” (Ashington-Pickett, email, August 2008). Such turf wars were partly a consequence of inconsistencies in London about what SSR entailed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the police were considered a separate entity, which in Sierra Leone translated into more than just a little friction between advisers. In both London and Freetown, decision-making and thinking were only partially connected and were determined primarily by personalities rather than by a comprehensive framework of conceptual SSR thinking. Therefore, while state-building and SSR may be represented as coherent policies and programs with clear aims and objectives, this does not reflect their disorderly and multitudinous origins in power struggles within Whitehall in London or how they are transformed in the translation from one context to another and shaped in numerous physical locations. Biddle recalls: “No one was coordinating this [i.e., various programs] in DfID because we were reporting this to separate desks, some dealing with country-specific issues, others with humanitarian matters. DfID didn’t regard community policing as part of SSR at that stage” (Biddle, interview, June 2009). The reciprocal relationship between policy compromises in London and the practices of formulating processes of change in Sierra Leone supports the formation of SSR as an approach to post-conflict state-building. In brief, new policies were being formulated in London, while events that called for security-oriented programs occurred in Sierra Leone. Peter Penfold,9 UK High Commissioner in Sierra Leone, was one of President Kabbah’s closest international allies at that time. When the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) coup took place in May 1997, Kabbah, who had been elected in 1996, was overthrown and fled to Conakry in Guinea. During this time, Penfold recalls: “I used [UK] ODA [Overseas Development Assistance] funds to keep the government going in Conakry – to show that the government was still active” (Penfold, interview, March 2008). During his exile in Conakry, Kabbah did some thinking, Penfold told me, about which actors to engage in security-related programs. Penfold explained how SSR was unwittingly turned into the articulation of a reciprocal relationship between discussions in London and thinking in Conakry, that is, from inside the displaced Sierra Leonean state, which for the time being had no territory to govern. From the period immediately after the AFRC was ousted to when Kabbah was able to return to Freetown, different elements of SSR as state-building were coming together. Penfold explained: At that time [upon Kabbah’s return from Conakry in May 1998], there was a strong feeling from people around Kabbah to do away with the army. The argument was that if you looked at history military coups had

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prevailed, and we came back [from Conakry] with those ideas still going around. But we brought in some military experts and produced a plan identifying the ideal size of an army to be around 6,000. That was sufficient for the army to do what it had to and it would be bearable [financially]. We also discussed getting the police going – and I argued that assistance to the police was equally important, if not more. Then we don’t have to resort to [the] military. What we also said at the time, although the police was becoming moribund, there were enough good people around. In the military there were none. It’s no good getting the police operational if we don’t look at the judiciary, the prison services, and so forth. And so it began – what was demonstrated at the time, a reason for the coup, there was an inadequate intelligence system. Short, ODA [sic] Minister at the time, she very quickly realized the link between poverty and security. She came in with a personal commitment. I remember that I said to her that I fully supported her in that. She, back home in London, began to assemble the idea that you need this integrated policy as security sector reform. Essentially, it was joining the Departments, and the FCO, ODA and MOD were able to develop relationships. (Penfold, interview, 2008) As this statement indicates, the concept of SSR that was crystallizing around the idea of containing the military, and specifically its foundation in the merger of security and development that came from London, was partially based on concrete experiences in Sierra Leone. It also reflected the balance of power between the FCO and DfID and the latter’s attempt to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with in the UK political landscape. SSR as statebuilding, constitutive of a particular set of articulations of state re-composition in the justice and security fields, should therefore not be seen as a structuring effect produced in isolation from and external to the context of Sierra Leone. On the contrary, what was emerging as SSR emanated from numerous political processes in the physical and symbolic spaces of the security and justice fields that interacted and shaped each other. Events in Sierra Leone shaped thinking on policy and programming in London and vice versa. Yet, as we shall see, SSR had caught on in international forums as well.

International debates on military expenditure Short’s 1999 speech on SSR at King’s College occurred during a time when the role that development agencies could play vis-à-vis military, defense and broader security issues was being re-assessed by international donors and policy-makers (Ball 2010). For example, four donor meetings took place in 1992–1993 in The Hague, Tokyo, Berlin and Paris, where it was decided that limits could be imposed on the military spending of developing countries. However, an OECD Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC)

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

conference in Ottawa in 1997 recognized that merely imposing such limits would not be effective. This led to an important shift where the emphasis was placed on the need to strengthen budgetary decision-making processes, i.e., matters to do with the governance of security institutions in the recipient countries (Omitoogun and Hutchful 2006; Sugden 2006:11). In 2000, the developmentalization of donor approaches to military expenditure and performance was further advanced when DfID decided that policy formulation, budgeting and implementation in recipient countries’ defense sectors should be handled in the same manner as other areas of the public sector. In brief, key concepts of transparency, accountability and comprehensiveness were introduced into what planning the re-composition of the security and justice field might look like (DfID 2001a). This new approach, characterized by being process-oriented and governance-focused, combined good governance and sound financial principles with security issues (DfID 2001a). Attention was also directed toward the institutional framework for managing trade-offs between different sectors and for the effective management of the resources devoted to defense (Omitoogun and Hutchful 2006). As in the case of train-and-equip approaches to military and police reform, attempts to impose limits on military spending are less intrusive in their potential effects than SSR. SSR not only seeks to make a particular organization more effective or determine how it is resourced financially – it also seeks to re-compose the justice and security field in its entirety so that how the various bodies it encompasses are organized, inter-related and governed is worked upon and transformed.

How institutional turf wars shaped SSR The debate on military expenditure that occurred during the 1990s and Short’s distinction between the security sector and the criminal justice system remained relatively far removed from the concept of a holistic approach to SSR. As it developed through the 2000s, holistic SSR emphasized the necessity of approaching not one security provider in particular but security providers as a system of actors, thus addressing the overlapping fields of security, law enforcement and justice simultaneously (Andersen 2006; Albrecht et al. 2010; Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). This would also become a central part of the holistic approach that the professionalism and effectiveness of the security sector would be measured not by the capacity of the security forces alone, but also by how well they were “managed, monitored and held to account” (Sedra 2010:16). However, the debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s called attention to an inherent tension within the concept of SSR that was reflected in the relevant organizations, including DfID, which explains in part why SSR never caught on in earnest as a development approach. Debates about whether policing falls within the justice sector or the security sector were continuous. They certainly defined struggles during the course of security and justice

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reform in Sierra Leone, where advisers (see Howlett-Bolton 2010) saw the justice sector as related to human or individual safety and the security sector as related to state or government security. To a large extent these debates reflected turf wars within DfID. As a result, while agreement was being reached on a preliminary definition of “security sector reform,” there was no coherent concept of the security sector itself. It was also unclear what the implications would be for policy development if some institutions and not others were included in the definition and implementation of SSR. It is worth emphasizing that these debates did not transcend the concepts of the liberal-democratic state. They dealt with issues such as whether the military and the judiciary should be considered part of the same system or as organizations within entirely separate domains, which was the way the concept of SSR was initially formulated by Short. Similarly, the distinction between protecting the state and protecting the individual was formulated in such a way that it prevented discussion of the logic of hybridization that shaped Sierra Leone’s justice and security fields. In the 1990s and through the 2000s, the SSR community at DfID was relatively small but nonetheless adamant in promoting what has become a growing trend to conceptualize and operationalize connections between security, development, justice and democracy. Indeed, in the mid-2000s, as Sugden (2006:12) noted, there was “an overwhelming [international] agreement that the UK is the leader in the field of SSR,” the “Godfather” of the variety of SSR that emphasizes a holistic approach. The push for engagement in SSR was driven by many other developments, including a perceived “massive growth in conflict within and between countries,” as described by Short, reflecting her ambition on behalf of DfID to establish political leverage and a clear and distinct identity in relation to the FCO and MOD. This was true in London, and it was reflected in the field. The shift to security-related programming that occurred in Sierra Leone in 1998–1999 constituted a watershed for the development agency: development and security were coming together as a means to establish, maintain and consolidate peace. As the concept of SSR and concomitant practices became part of international processes of hybridization, it was morphed accordingly by individual actors and institutions in international policy-making circles, discussed, disassembled and reassembled – and yet remained recognizable.

SSR moves, meets and morphs In the international field of policy-making, other European countries soon took up the SSR concept. In the Netherlands, SSR became a vehicle for furthering civil–military cooperation: the government introduced an operative, cross-departmental SSR team in 2005. Germany also promoted a holistic approach to SSR, even though the country emphasized internal security organizations, i.e., the police (Wulf 2004). Within OECD-DAC, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany further promoted the assembling of the security

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

and development domains from which the SSR concept was emerging in the European context. OECD-DAC as a multilateral agency came to play a fundamental role in giving further shape to the SSR concept of the late 1990s as it evolved into the 2000s, a process that Sierra Leonean security sector actors, such as the country’s National Security Coordinator, Kellie Conteh, played a direct role in informing. In this respect, the OECD became a vehicle for multilateralizing and transforming the assemblage of SSR that had first emerged in the UK. Between 2000 and 2005, based on concrete experiences of post-conflict reconstruction, the OECD became the multilateral body that developed and designed a policy concept of SSR that is considered a blueprint for policymakers and practitioners alike. This design effort first produced the 2005 reference document “Security System Reform and Governance,” which states that “the overall objective” of SSR “is to create a security environment that is conducive to development, poverty reduction and democracy” (OECD 2005:16).10 There is little doubt that the UK, and DfID in particular, was a key player within OECD in furthering SSR-related policy developments. DfID reputedly influenced the OECD-DAC to promote SSR and the strong linkages that exist among these organizations. In addition, an overlap of experts existed among these organizations. For example, in the mid-2000s, DfID’s Senior SSR Adviser, who was deeply involved in UK programming in Sierra Leone, also chaired the OECD-DAC’s Conflict, Peace and Development Cooperation Network. Between 2005 and 2007, two SSR documents were formulated which have become blueprints in international policy discourse for what SSR encompasses in the ideal-typical sense of the term. The aforementioned reference document, “Security System Reform and Governance” (OECD 2005), provided a consolidated list of institutions to include in SSR, including core security actors, security management and oversight bodies, justice and rule of law institutions, and non-statutory security forces. This could be seen as a checklist of the security organizations that have to be worked on in order to establish a centrally governed political entity. The OECD-DAC “Handbook on Security System Reform,” which followed in 2007 and had strong UK backing, was produced to provide “guidance to operationalize the OECD-DAC guidelines on SSR and close the gap between policy and practice” (OECD 2007c:15). It brought together hitherto separate domains. Unlike SSR formulations in the late 1990s, the police and judiciary were now placed together with military and intelligence services to constitute one seamless security framework of mutually constitutive institutions. This shift reflected earlier thinking within DfID that security and justice were integrally linked through their contributions to community safety and human security. The shift was also a token of the process of hybridization of which SSR is an ever-evolving product, with components constantly being added and withering away.

The rise and fall of SSR in development

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These two documents capture the breadth of what “ideal” SSR entails. The overall aim of SSR reflected in these documents is to ensure that the security sector in a given country is capable of meeting the security needs of both the state and the people in a manner that is consistent with democratic norms, good governance and the rule of law (OECD 2005). In addition, the OECD emphasizes the necessity of approaching not any one security provider in particular but security providers as a system of actors, thereby addressing the overlaps between security, law enforcement and justice simultaneously (Andersen 2006). This represents the application of the holistic approach with a focus on the governance aspect of security providers, who have become fundamental to how SSR is formulated. The commitment to the holistic norm is a key component of what developmentalizing security means, that is, to establish a system of institutions governed by civilians that can manage and direct internal and external security. This also emphasizes that governance is not envisaged as just one set of activities on a par with other, more technical approaches. The act of governing lies at the core of SSR; as such, it is one of the central implements to be worked on in order to strengthen the state as a centrally governed political entity. From its point of origin, which was articulated by Short in the late 1990s, the concept of SSR was shaping policies made beyond Palace Street in London as part of an international working discourse in the justice and security fields. Short might have articulated a process that was already under way, but the manner in which the concept was developed by DfID in the late 1990s and early 2000s was given further shape by and was shaping OECDDAC and other discursive developments internationally (see Albrecht 2012). In short, SSR had become a stake at stake.

Separating state and non-state and the multi-layered approach In debates on SSR, discussions of what is an “effective and legitimate state” have included the engagement of non-state actors, which refers, inter alia, to traditional or customary authorities, community-based policing groups, restorative justice and mediation organizations, and work associations (DfID 2004; OECD 2007a; DANIDA 2010; OHCHR 2006; Albrecht and Kyed 2011:10). It could be argued that the articulation of this category of actors acknowledges a hybrid order, in other words, that the authority to act in the justice and security field comes from multiple sources in concrete physical space and from the symbolic space of the national level. And indeed, the emergence of non-state actors in SSR discourse constitutes one of the most innovative elements of SSR as it has evolved since the 1990s in bilateral and multilateral development agencies. However, the emergence of the non-state also inadvertently reproduced the state as standing above while also encompassing society.

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The rise and fall of SSR in development

In the discourse of international policy-making, the rationale of what has been dubbed a multi-layered approach is that, rather than provide support to those security and justice organizations that are tied specifically to the state idea and system, state as well as non-state actors must be involved in SSR processes simultaneously. “What fragile state justice and security delivery requires, therefore,” the OECD (2007a:11) notes, “is a multi-layered approach. It is a methodology that is highly context-specific, targeting donor assistance to those providers – state and non-state actors simultaneously – at the multiple points at which actual day-to-day service delivery occurs.” This approach has been particularly pronounced in the area of justice, where informal mechanisms of dispute resolution – for instance, through customary law – are regularly included in rule of law programs. It is also an approach that DfID is more comfortable with because it appears to be more in line with the mantra of development agencies, that is, support of the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalized. The 2007 OECD report quoted above, “Enhancing the Delivery of Justice and Security,” draws on a definition of non-state actors produced by DfID in 2004.11 It argues that the intention is to “reinforce the already existing range of choice that users have in fragile states while developing providers’ service delivery to make it more effective, fair, accessible, accountable and rights respecting” (OECD 2007a:7; Scheye and McLean 2006). This realization on the part of external actors was caused by their frustration with collapsed and fragile state institutions that were considered as not developing at a suitable pace; it was also a genuine attempt to be what in policy-making circles is referred to as “context-sensitive.” Thus, the “local context should determine what developments occur when, how and in what order, as the provision of justice and security is based upon historical legacies, cultural value systems, political calculations and intrinsic balances of power” (OECD 2007a:6). Inherent in this debate, however, has been separation of state and non-state and a consolidation of the two categories of actors in separate domains (Boege et al. 2008; Eriksen 2011; Albrecht and Kyed 2010, 2011). This means that, while the importance of non-state actors is acknowledged, it is the conceptual principle of state-building, i.e., the centrally governed political entity, that continues to dominate, a point of departure that is consolidated in the 2007 OECD “Handbook on Security System Reform.” This report states that a multi-layered approach “helps respond to the short-term needs of enhanced security and justice, while also building the medium-term needs of state capacity and critical governance structures” (OECD 2007c:17). The category of non-state actor is defined etymologically by what it is not, namely a centrally governed functioning state. It is “a local context” in which rules other than those of the state presumably apply. However, these rules are precisely context-specific: they are locked in a black box labelled non-state and therefore not to be spoken of in the same general terms as the state and its accountability and rule of law. This may be because the Western universalist state is considered to be the “correct” political entity, as it certainly

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was during the 1990s and most of the 2000s, but it is also because the language for talking eloquently about the non-state is poorly developed. In sum, state-building remains innate in the multi-layered approach to SSR. The OECD’s “Enhancing the Delivery of Justice and Security” (OECD 2007a), which represents the multi-layered approach in its most radical form, warns that whatever support is provided to “nonstate systems [must] be balanced by the establishment of mechanisms to link them to state systems” (OECD 2007a:24; Scheye and McLean 2006:32). This assumption is not hybrid but implies that the non-state exists in isolation because of the state’s weakness, fragility or failure. The multi-layered approach also suggests that it is necessary to extend state control into areas where the influence of the state is limited or non-existent by building state legitimacy and capacity. In other words, the multi-layered approach is not a matter of recognizing, working with and supporting a hybrid order – it is a plea to accept and work with the “local” order that exists until such a time when the state can take over. How state institutions operate and should be operating may be a matter for discussion, but it is the state as a centrally governed political entity standing above and at the same time encompassing, controlling and regulating society that must be built and consolidated. “Benign neglect or toleration (by the state and donors) of nonstate systems” may be necessary, the OECD (2007a:28) notes, but this is only “until the state can take over service provision.” Multi-layered approaches as they emerged in the early 2000s to sensitize security and justice programming to the range of actors that did not fit easily within a state framework thus became tautological. They took the fragile or failing state as their point of departure, arguing that it needs to be rebuilt because it has failed. Until this happens, swathes of other actors may fill in and, as such, “multi-layered” becomes a means, not an end (Scheye and Andersen 2007; Baker 2007). “In the long-term”, the OECD (2007a:20) notes, “supporting the delivery of state justice and security may be the ‘first best’ solution. However, even with the political commitment of the government, most fragile states have exceedingly limited resources and means to provide safety and justice to their citizens in the short- and medium-term.”

Conclusion This chapter has described how SSR emerged as an international policymaking concept in the justice and security field and produced a particular amalgamation of security and development. It is germane to the overall focus of the book because SSR framed the UK’s involvement in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and early 2000s, suggesting that events as they unfolded in the country shaped UK thinking and its approach to the world and vice versa. At first glance, SSR was an example of the securitization and subordination of the development agenda (Duffield 2001, 2006). However, with respect to SSR specifically, it was equally evident that this process of policy development was

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one of developmentalizing security and emphasizing governance, accountability and legitimacy (Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). First, SSR was assembled as a policy concept and branched out within the framework of development agencies. DfID initially articulated this hybridization of numerous processes, including post-Cold War changes in the global security environment, Short’s political ambitions in the UK as the head of a new department within a newly elected UK government, and events unfolding in places such as Sierra Leone. Thus, SSR developed as a set of discourses and practices in the justice and security fields emanating from numerous political processes and physical locations that interacted and shaped one another. Concurrently, and intertwined with this process, the SSR agenda was promoted internationally by DfID to a large degree and by other governments and multilateral agencies such as the OECD (as well as the EU and UN) (see Albrecht 2012; Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). Second, and of importance to the developmentalization of security argument, the justice and security assemblage that SSR came to represent did not simply constitute the promotion of train-and-equip exercises that were narrowly focused on making a particular security institution more effective (if not legitimate). On the contrary, SSR took form and was articulated in international policy discourse during the 2000s when new development concepts were spawned and old ones were incorporated, dissected and reconfigured, including good governance, holistic and multi-layered approaches. Compared to just procuring equipment and providing training to armed forces, SSR thus constitutes a comprehensive and considerably more intrusive approach to state-building. Being holistic implies the targeting of not one organization in the justice and security fields but these fields as a whole, as a system of related actors to be reassembled within a framework of centrally – and liberal-democratically – governed institutions. Introducing the multi-layered approach into the SSR discourse reflected a nascent realization that, in re-assembling the justice and security field to form part of an effective and legitimate state, the engagement of so-called non-state actors would be critical in the setting of a fragile state. This was not, however, a fundamentally different approach to state-building; rather, it was an attempt to separate the state and non-state and work on both “until the state can take over service provision” (OECD 2007a:28). The focus on the non-state as separate from yet etymologically emerging from what it is not (i.e., the state) ultimately reproduces the split between state and society. State-building remained the primary goal of SSR, and the multi-layered approach was articulated to allow intermediate steps to be taken until the state would emerge. These debates and the evolution of SSR beyond policy into the world of practice and programming were hampered by one of the twenty-first century’s defining events: 9/11. With the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and the military interventions that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, a fundamental militarization of SSR occurred. SSR as a development approach was undermined, even though important policy developments continued to

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take place post-9/11, notably within the OECD. It proved difficult, indeed politically impossible, to combine short-term considerations of technical efficiency and immediate improvements in everyday security with longer-term considerations of transparency, accountability, sustainability, and some degree of legitimacy for the security forces. Overall, this has meant that development agencies have been reluctant to engage ministries of defense and intelligence agencies in their programming, as advocated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and attempted in Sierra Leone.

Notes 1 The “War on Terror” sparked by 9/11 aimed “to root out and destroy not only alQaeda, but all international terrorist organizations that supported, associated with or shared its ideology of global jihad” (Sherman 2010:59). In the words of George W. Bush, US president at the time of the terrorist attacks: “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated” (Bush, Address before a Joint Session of the Congress, September 20, 2001). 2 Wallensteen and Sollenberg (2000:648) define a violent conflict as “a contested incompatibility which concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths.” 3 The two approaches are often conflated, however, as was the case in Sierra Leone, where “training and equipping the new army and police force” was seen as constitutive of SSR (Bellamy and Williams 2005:183). 4 The SSR label has been applied to train-and-equip activities in countries beyond Sierra Leone. In next-door Liberia, for instance, DynCorp, a private security company, was contracted by the US government to train 2,000 men to become Liberia’s new army. While initiated under the SSR label, the process was conducted without engaging Liberia’s legislature or any other organizations in defining the nature, content or characteristics of the new army. 5 When I talked to Short in 2008, she explained that her appointment as Secretary of State for international development had been an act of punishment rather than a reward: “He [UK Prime Minister Tony Blair] was annoyed with me for taking transport seriously, and it was a big drama. I would have chosen transport, but then again, a lot of people were not put into the jobs they’d had in opposition” (Short, interview, June 2008). 6 Short provided interesting details about the politics of merging security and development and the evolving role of DfID relative to other UK agencies: “When I first went to DfID, the MI6 would come and see me, and say: ‘Don’t you think we should work together in Africa?’ And I’d say: ‘We’re working with governments. I don’t think I necessarily want to work with somebody spying.’ And at that stage, this was before the War on Terror, all these people were looking for new jobs, Cold War is over, what’s their job? You know, diminishing role, diminishing budgets, we are the coming thing, they want us. I am not interested. And then, I got very interested in the military, due to the Sierra Leone experience, you know, and the Uganda experience and so on. And then somebody in MI6 came and said: ‘You do know, don’t you, that in Africa we always get direct access to Presidents, they always want to know us; they are interested in our kind of guys.’ And I said: ‘Oh, really.’ And then I thought, I mean, we included them in security sector reform and I thought: ‘Right, in that case, we want you to be part of this as well,’ which

44

7

8

9

10

11

The rise and fall of SSR in development we did. The guy from MI6 interested in Sierra Leone I got to know and like – so there’s another little piece of story. At that stage, you’ve got MI6, and the military, to a degree, short of a job. And there is constant disorder and chaos and really a need of re-building states” (emphasis added). That Short was on a mission to establish and consolidate DfID’s power base was undeniable: “Short interpreted her department’s remit broadly and as a consequence became embroiled in a variety of departmental turf wars: notably with the Ministry of Defense (over who should lead security sector reform initiatives) [and] the FCO (over where to focus the pooled DfID-FCO-MoD funds for conflict prevention)” (Williams 2004:916). Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, then president of Sierra Leone, appointed Biddle InspectorGeneral of Police in November 1999. Biddle was appointed to the position for an initial two-year period, which was then extended until June 2003. He had come to Sierra Leone as head of the Commonwealth Police Development Task Force (CPDTF), which was planned to start in 1997 but was delayed until 1998 because of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council coup d’état (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:36). See Chapter 5 for a more extensive analysis of police reform as it developed and Biddle’s role in its initial stages. Penfold was later blamed by the British government for overseeing an illegal arms deal that became known as the Sandline affair. As a consequence, he retired from his diplomatic career after serving nearly forty years with the Foreign Office (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1807756.stm). The OECD has chosen the concept of “security system reform,” while others talk of “transformation” or “restructuring.” OECD’s use of “system” as opposed to “sector” reflects the fact that the conglomerate of institutions involved in the reform process cannot easily be referred to as a sector but rather as a number of institutions that fall within different sectors. The use of “transformation” rather than “reform” should also be viewed as an attempt to clarify and emphasize conceptually the extensive nature of the undertaking. In 2004, DfID published its first coherent brief on the issue, “Non-State Justice and Security Systems,” which states that security and justice institutions presided over by non-state actors are “critically important in the context of DfID’s pro-poor approach to security and justice.” The brief continues, “These actors deal with the vast majority of disputes” and are “widely used in rural and poor urban areas, where there is often minimal access to formal state justice” (DfID 2004:1). The brief recognizes that this approach to reform is politicized, is neither neutral nor technical, and raises broader governance issues. There often is no separation between providing security and justice on the one hand and local governance institutions on the other: “A person who exercises judicial (or quasi-judicial) authority through a non-state justice system may also have executive authority over the same property or territory” (DfID 2004:3).

3

Collapse, chaos and resurrection

By 1961, when Sierra Leone’s independence from British colonial tutelage came to an end, Sir Milton Margai, the country’s first prime minister, greeted the event with the words: “Sierra Leone will become a model state” (Allen 1968:305). The model state that Sierra Leone became over the next thirty years was indeed an example to be observed, but it was analyzed by many scholars during and after the country’s civil war in the 1990s for its failure to uphold an effective and legitimate government (Richards 1996; Gberie 2005; Keen 2005; Pham 2006; Peters 2011). In 1991 a brutal conflict broke out that lasted for over a decade (Richards 1996; Gberie 2005; Keen 2005). Leading up to it, Sierra Leone’s post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004:30) concluded, “[i]nstitutional collapse [had] reduced the vast majority of people into a state of deprivation. Government accountability was non-existent. Political expression and dissent had been crushed. Democracy and the rule of law were dead.” The country had become “deeply divided and full of the potential for violence.” As the Cold War was coming to an end, Sierra Leone had come to epitomize the antithesis of the consolidated peaceful liberal core of states: an ungoverned, chaotic, dark space on the margins of the global order. In the early 2000s, as the conflict slowly came to a halt, some 50,000 people out of a population of six million had been killed, around 500,000 had fled the country, and another 500,000 were internally displaced, many in Freetown. This chapter demonstrates that Sierra Leone never was the political entity envisaged through the lens of state-building. The point is worth considering, if only briefly, because it exposes the truly Sisyphean task of transformation that Kabbah, with support from the UK, formally embarked on in the second half of the 1990s. SSR was not a question of re-establishing state institutions as they existed prior to the conflict; it was built around a neo-patrimonial logic according to which the state’s resources were distributed as marks of personal reward. The central government’s inability to make good on its promise to deliver education and jobs to young people proved particularly destabilizing because education was held up as a key to social advancement (Peters 2011). SSR was envisaged as a process of building democratic and centrally governed state institutions – essentially from scratch – according to a liberal-democratic

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vision of how a legitimate and effective political entity functions and delivers public services evenly and equitably among its population (Clapham 1996; Mamdani 1996; Young 2004; Englebert and Tull 2008). By the mid- to late 1990s, articulating trends in global policy discourse, insecurity and conflict were “holding out the prospect of development,” as UK Minister of Development Clare Short put it, in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in the post-Cold War global South (Clare Short, interview, June 2008). Underdevelopment and poor governance were seen by international policy-makers as “root causes” of fragility and failure (Buur et al. 2007:9). Hence, they had to be addressed in a way that would allow a set of state institutions to emerge that could represent themselves as superior to, while also encompassing, other institutions and centers of power. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the primary concern of UK support for Kabbah and his government in Freetown was to pacify the main protagonists in the conflict, in particular the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and renegade elements of the army that had staged two coups and splintered into several factions by the late 1990s. Intertwining with and preceding a partially unplanned military intervention by the UK during 2000, attempts were made to round up individuals whom external actors such as the UK defined as war criminals and to perform a range of interventions under the label of SSR. This was an attempt to eliminate irregular security actors in Sierra Leone, purge the field of security of hybrid authority as it evolved in a context of war, and establish a distinction between them and the state as the unequivocal center of government and power. There was certainly resolve behind these attempts, but as the chapter shows, the assembled resources, discourse and practices labeled SSR played into an ongoing process of hybridization, shaped it, and were shaped by it. By the force of this circumstance, interventions can only be partial and interstitial, with more or less marginal effects on how and by whom authority is produced. The first part of the chapter takes a brief look at the history of Sierra Leone and how it has been presented, including in academic writing, as destined to fail and collapse into conflict following the country’s independence in 1961. The chapter then explores the perceived state of dissolution and chaos that met external actors as they arrived in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s to embark on state-building in the form of SSR. The second part of the chapter outlines the process of re-composing the security field as it occurred in the initial stages of state-building. Defined and led in large part by the UK, these processes included a military intervention and the arrest of identified war criminals, including Foday Sankoh, RUF’s leader. They also included the implementation of a number of programs under the heading of SSR that together were to begin the process of transforming Sierra Leone into a centrally governed political entity of the Western universalist variety. The history of the Sierra Leonean state may have been marked by a trajectory of failure, but it was assumed among those UK advisers who intervened that SSR would not only reverse this course but put Sierra Leone on the path towards establishing “a legalrational Weberian state” administration (Abrahamsen 2016:281).

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Sierra Leone’s failure: underdeveloped and chaotic In 1994, at the height of Sierra Leone’s civil war, an article titled “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Written by journalist Robert D. Kaplan, it vividly described the political entity Sierra Leone had become: underdeveloped, poorly governed and in a state of anarchy. Sierra Leone’s conflict was seen as a prime example of the “new war,” that is, war fought within a country, as compared to the traditional paradigm of inter-state war articulated in the nineteenth century by the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (see Peters 2011:5). It was also an example of what transpires when states collapse. Kaplan (1994:8) wrote: Sierra Leone is … a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian Atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, “blank” and “unexplored.” However, whereas Greene’s vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa’s future. And West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world. Kaplan’s thesis was that, after the Cold War, Sierra Leone’s modern state vanished, leaving its people to live in collapsing state spaces. In the absence of centrally governed institutions, the people turned to traditional organizational modes of governance that were not constrained by modern law or human rights. Sierra Leone, Kaplan explained, had become an ideal-type failed state, molded in part by conflict between the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC), which had come to power through a military coup in 1992, and the main rebel group, the RUF. Kaplan noted the “withering away” of Sierra Leone as a governed space and described what happens when the state as a bulwark against instability, disorder and chaos dissolves. Warlords, shadow economies, collapse and ensuing violence prevailed, along with environmental degradation, illegal trading, child soldiers and extreme violence against civilians. Atrocities committed during the war were unspeakably violent. For instance, a frequently cited Human Rights Watch report describes the actions of the RUF when they entered Freetown in 1999:

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Collapse, chaos and resurrection The rebel occupation of Freetown was characterized by the systematic and widespread perpetration of all classes of gross human rights abuses against the civilian population. Civilians were gunned down within their houses, rounded up and massacred on the streets, thrown from the upper floors of buildings, used as human shields, and burnt alive in cars and houses. They had their limbs hacked off with machetes, eyes gouged out with knives, hands smashed with hammers, and bodies burned with boiling water. Women and girls were systematically sexually abused, and children and young people abducted by the hundreds.

In the context of this book, two questions emerge after reading Kaplan’s analysis and testimonies of the conflict in Sierra Leone: What were the standards by which the government of Sierra Leone had failed? What type of political entity emerged in 1961 as it attained independence from British rule?

The disappointment of patrimonial promises After independence in 1961, the Sierra Leone government failed to articulate or practice bureaucratically based stateness as a set of institutions spatially above civil society while at the same time encompassing it. In both the figurative and practical senses, this relationship was considerably more fluid. Indeed, according to most academic (and policy) accounts, it was the inability to establish this separation to a meaningful degree that contributed in large part to setting Sierra Leone on the path to conflict (Sesay 1995:166). Thus, measured against the standards of effectiveness and legitimacy, Sierra Leone never experienced a process of state formation that would lead it to assume a form familiar to those accustomed to the centralized states that emerged in nineteenth-century Western Europe (Tilly 1975, 1985, 1995). This circumstance is often emphasized in the literature on post-colonial states, African states in particular. The literature highlights the low levels of civic culture and social capital of these post-colonial states, their considerable ethnic diversity and the inheritance of what are often considered to be artificial or arbitrary frameworks of governance from the colonial state (Jackson 1990; Clapham 1996; Mamdani 1996; Herbst 2000; Young 2004; Englebert and Tull 2008).1 Regardless of the fundamentally different trajectory of state formation, Krijn Peters (2006:44) claims that, “the international system of states from 1960 forced Sierra Leone to behave (externally) as if it was a Weberian (territorial) state.” He also argues (2006:44) that the Sierra Leonean state is therefore better described as a “personal-amorphous polity,” that is, as a political entity that favors personal links between rulers and ruled and resists bureaucratization, the organizational form where, Weber says, the “actual power” of the modern state lies (see Scaff 1973:134). Because the “steady decline in state power” that Peters (2006:44) speaks of is not a decline from a bureaucratized and centrally governed state, it is worth investigating briefly what Sierra Leone’s collapse as a functioning state space entailed.

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In his analysis of Sierra Leone as a “shadow state” and why it eventually collapsed, Reno (1995) emphasizes the significant accumulation of riches by the powerful few, a minuscule and shrinking formal economy, accelerating mass impoverishment, a crushing debt burden, and the collapse of basic state institutions. Since its independence from the UK in 1961, Sierra Leone’s political system had been characterized by attempts to increase the centralization of power and resources in Freetown and consolidate an administrative split in governing structures between the capital and the rest of the country (Jackson and Albrecht 2011:6). One aspect of this split was a continuation of the colonial bifurcation of Western legal systems in Freetown and indirect rule in the countryside based on a system of District Officers – with no executive powers after 1972 – and paramount and lesser chiefs exercising customary law (explored further in Chapter 4). Indeed, one could say that it was the lack of bureaucratization of the state system rather than resistance to it that constituted tacit support for what Peters (2006:43) refers to as “the legalization of various states of domestic dependency, amounting at the most extreme to de facto domestic slavery.” No substantial agrarian transformation occurred, institutionally or technically, which meant that the labor of most young people was, and remains, exploited within a lineage mode of production (Peters 2011:58). The failure of the Sierra Leone state was not caused by the inability of a centrally governed set of institutions – the state system – to provide public services. The leadership in Freetown failed to maintain the extensive neopatrimonial network which had been established and consolidated during the post-colonial era (Reno 1995; Keen 2005; Peters 2006; Fanthorpe 2001). In other words, a boundary between public and private – a central tenet of the concept of modern administration – was not only unstable or incomplete, it barely existed (Bratton and de Walle 1997). This was the case under the Margais, who ruled until 1968 when the mayor of Freetown, Siaka Stevens, became prime minister and then president in 1972, as well as under Stevens’s successor, Major General Joseph Momoh, who came to power in 1985 and was ousted by a military coup in 1992. Richards (1996), referring explicitly to Sierra Leone as a “patrimonial state” where national resources were (and continue to be) re-distributed as marks of personal favor, considered that this type of political entity was doubly in crisis in Africa in the mid-1990s.2 At that time, the price of raw materials was in freefall and the termination of the Cold War had caused aid money to dry up. In addition, the best sources of minerals had been exhausted (see Peters 2006:32). As Peters (2006:6) notes, “[y]oung people, socioeconomically marginalized [from networks of patrimony], soon proved to be a large reservoir to be tapped by those who wanted to cause mayhem.” Indeed, the RUF recruited mainly from a social and economic underclass consisting of, for example, poorly paid diamond diggers (Peters 2006:5). By the 1990s, Sierra Leone had developed into what Reno (1995) describes as “one of Africa’s most decrepit and weak states.” The success and strength

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of the patrimonial network of both Stevens and Momoh, his successor, were also evident. Despite a “shockingly rapid economic decline and falling standards of living, the country remained immune from coups or popular uprisings which some outside observers had long predicted” (Reno 1995:148). Nonetheless, because of the breadth and depth of the crisis that the country was experiencing, Stevens’ patrimonial system eventually collapsed.

External and internal factors leading to collapse Pressures on patrimonial networks were compounded by Sierra Leone’s relationship with international financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in particular. To access IMF loans, Stevens and Momoh agreed to a structural adjustment program (SAP) but failed to comply with its provisions. In 1979 the IMF negotiated an economic stabilization plan which included a demand that the Sierra Leone government limit state spending. In particular, this meant reducing civil service expenditure in a system where minor government jobs were an important means of maintaining neo-patrimonial networks and securing popular loyalty to the state system embodied by Stevens. Implementation of the SAP was a challenge and was complicated further when Stevens planned to host the Organization of African Unity conference in 1980. This yearly conference – an opportunity for the host country to impress visiting presidents – left Sierra Leone with huge debts and an almost useless infrastructure. With total costs amounting to US$200 million, equal to the country’s entire foreign exchange reserves, the government sharply cut its budget for development and social programs (Peters 2006:32, 2011:43–44). By late 1987, the country was approaching default, and Momoh, who had replaced Stevens in 1985, declared a state of economic emergency. This proved to be a considerable blow for the country that hit ordinary citizens the hardest: electricity blackouts, petrol shortages and delays in paying civil servants for months on end became the harsh reality. All of these circumstances challenged both the system and the idea of the state, which were soon to become the target of, and succumb to, the violence perpetrated by the RUF, which was unleashed in 1991, and a military coup the following year. In order to survive, the regime was forced to choose between the accommodation of immediate patrimonial demands – for instance, by supplying cheap imported rice to its clients, including the army and the police3 – and its longer-term needs for survival through the provision of jobs and educational opportunities for loyal subjects (Richards 1996). Momoh, a former commander of the army, did not want to upset the already delicate balance in the security sector and run the risk of a coup or uprising. But his decision to prioritize his personal short-term security came at a high cost. Within the civil service, an elaborate tribute system of appointments and promotions based on bribes benefited only the few (Kandeh 1999:351). The educational sector, the health sector and other social services were increasingly deprived of

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the resources they needed to survive, and the general public – young people in particular – became restive. One of the severe consequences of the reduction in patrimonial re-distribution was the increasing fragmentation of the justice system, where the lowest levels of administration in rural areas became more than usually strapped for cash. This resulted in chiefs and local court chairmen paying themselves through arbitrary and excessive fines and exactions levied on young people (Richards 2005). Appeals against such fines – impossibly expensive for most villagers in any case – could be made to the magistrate’s court and eventually to the High Court. However, at the national level, appeals were heard in a special section in which a judge was advised by special assessors deemed to be experts in customary law (traditional elders – that is, chiefs or individuals closely affiliated with the chiefly hierarchy). There was a strong feeling among young people in the villages that their elders were making up the law to suit their own interests. The foundation and conception of what Reno (1995) refers to as the “shadow state” is historically tied to colonial indirect rule that was a pragmatic response to the need of the colonial administration to govern the Sierra Leonean hinterland at a minimum cost. Post-colonial leadership in Sierra Leone adopted this system of governance and had limited incentives to embark on developing a political system that would be considered a “strong state” to the outside observer. Rather, Stevens had been preoccupied with preserving political security and preventing his competitors from accessing resources channeled through institutions tied to the state system. This was evident in how he dealt with the mining industry and security institutions more broadly. As part of Stevens’ attempt to build a bulwark against his competitors, the mining industry was nationalized. Through the National Diamond Mining Company (NDMC), created in 1971, Stevens acquired control over the mining and selling of diamonds. Chiefs cooperated with the government in exchange for a seat on the NDMC board and access to its resources (Reno 1995). Patrimonial economic politics were also played out at the local level, where “strangers” – i.e., migrant laborers, not Lebanese businessmen4 – were involved in illicit diamond mining under the protection of the local landowner. Since these local landowners, who were often paramount and lesser chiefs, could always threaten illicit diamond miners with prosecution by state officials, the diamond-landowning class was able to exercise practically unlimited informal social control. Stevens not only nationalized mining, the most important source of income in Sierra Leone, he transformed the army and the police to ensure their loyalty to him personally, for instance, by making the head of both security institutions members of his government. Military officers with a Mende background were removed and replaced with northerners – Temnes, Korankos or Yalunkas, the traditional supporters of Stevens’ All People’s Congress (APC) party. Furthermore, as part of his “state hegemonic project,” as ZackWilliams (1997:373) calls it, Stevens created a paramilitary band of armed

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bodyguards, the Cuban-trained Internal Security Unit (ISU), which was renamed the Special Security Division (SSD) in 1977. Its members were, like were the military and police, recruited mainly from northern ethnic groups, especially the Limbas. Stevens’s long tenure as leader (1967–1985) was marked by economic decline. By the 1980s the political and economic conditions that sustained the shadow state – that is, rule by means of a network of informal markets – had weakened considerably. This was caused by a lack of available resources, the result of domestic prioritizations and pressure from international organizations such as the IMF. War was not inevitable, but it was the outcome, not least because one major effect of neo-patrimonial rule is the social marginalization of those who are excluded from clientelist relationships. As a general rule it was these groups, located both within and outside the rank and file of state employees, who posed the biggest threat to the state (Zack-Williams 1997).

From patrimonial failure to violent conflict Sufficient pressure was put on Momoh to force a review of the constitution in 1991.5 However, in March of that year the RUF entered Sierra Leone, seeking to overthrow the one-party APC regime. In the following decade of war, Sierra Leone became known for the brutality of the warring factions toward the population and the military coups of 1992 and 1997. In the first military coup in 1992, the NPRC, a group of young officers headed by Valentine Strasser, came to power. Strasser and his successors were ineffective to the extent that there was an increase in the RUF’s power until a South African military company, Executive Outcomes, became involved in 1995. Increasing popular demands in Freetown for elections, coupled with international pressure, persuaded the NPRC to hand over power to a civilian government. Following two high-level conferences held in the Bintumani Hotel in Freetown, elections were held in 1996, and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of the Sierra Leone’s People’s Party (SLPP) was elected president. Two months later discussions between the SLPP and RUF led to the Abidjan Peace Accords. The unwillingness of either party to agree to disarmament led to a breakdown of peace by early 1997. This in turn led to the second military coup in Freetown staged by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). The democratically elected SLPP government was forced into exile in Conakry, Guinea, only to return the year after when the AFRC was ousted (Jackson and Albrecht 2010:9). Meanwhile, a conflict was being fought across the country by state-sanctioned soldiers, traditional hunters, rebel factions and dissidents from the security forces, who sometimes fought one another, sometimes colluded with each other and sometimes did both (Richards 1996; Keen 2005; Peters 2006; Jackson and Albrecht 2010). The stated aim of the RUF was to fight government corruption and claim accountability for the country’s mineral resources (Peters 2006:4). On the ground, however, this agenda was quickly

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supplanted by a desire to take control of rich resource areas such as Kono and a revolt against social and political figures of authority, inter alia police officers and chiefs (Richards 2006; Fanthorpe 2005; Jackson 2007). The signing of the Lomé Peace Accord in July 1999 formalized a ceasefire between the government of Sierra Leone and the RUF and brought the civil war to a temporary end. However, the power-sharing agreements concluded in Lomé resulted in what Tull and Mehler (2005:395) have referred to as a “warlord’s peace” because central RUF figures were included in the government. Implementation of key areas of the agreement was slow, and disarmament and demobilization deadlines were not met (Conciliation Resources 2000:83). By early 2000 the situation was triggering further RUF violence and renewed conflict. Given the brutality of the violence visited on the civilian population and the failure of the Lomé Agreement, the international community, including the UK government, was prompted to act (Jackson and Albrecht 2011:5). For a number of reasons that will be discussed in the next section, a group of senior UK politicians decided that they would not allow Sierra Leone to remain in a state of conflict. The UK eventually intervened in 2000. This happened during a period when UN peacekeepers6 deployed in Sierra Leone were threatened by the warring factions. At that time the UN commander in the field, Major-General Vijay Jetley, openly accused the Nigerian troops, who were part of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) and also deployed in the country, of colluding with the RUF to profit from illicit diamond mining. Within a year of the government and the RUF signing the Lomé Agreement, the conflict had resumed unabated.

Sierra Leone and the UK Given its historical colonial ties, and for sheer humanitarian reasons, the UK was concerned with developments inside Sierra Leone. But UK interests had intensified because of other events as well, including developments that were entirely unrelated to the internal dynamics of Sierra Leone. The Sandline affair occurred in 1998, which involved Tim Spicer, a former British officer in the UK army and owner of Sandline, a private military company that was found to be shipping arms illegally to Sierra Leone.7 Following this incident, there was widespread agreement at the highest levels of the UK government that a similar situation of diplomatic importance (and embarrassment) could not occur again (Clare Short, interview, 2008, London). Robin Cook, UK Secretary of State in the late 1990s, mentioned this concern to Colonel David Richards at a chance meeting between the two, immediately before the UK intervened militarily in Sierra Leone in 2000, led by Richards himself (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:170). Another story, based on hearsay, reports that Prime Minister Tony Blair had a predilection for Sierra Leone because his father had once been a school

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teacher there (Jackson and Albrecht 2010:7). Short explained this to me in an interview: “The first black person he [i.e., Blair] ever met was a Sierra Leonean” (Clare Short, interview, 2008, London). On a more political note, Short also said that “suddenly Blair said he was interested in Africa, which I am afraid is a piece of public relations; after Iraq he wanted to soften the image. Because it is remarkable, he really didn’t engage [in matters to do with Africa] at all in the first term, apart from that one Sierra Leone decision [i.e., to engage in Sierra Leone]” (Clare Short, interview, 2008, London). With Blair’s and Cook’s significant investments of authority, and a general feeling that, as Short explained, “we mustn’t do this to Sierra Leone” (Clare Short, interview, 2008, London), the military intervention evolved into the UK taking a leading role in the state-building process that was initiated in earnest around the same time. In effect, the UK government took a leading role in a process that fundamentally sought to alter how, by whom and by what means the resources in the security sector were to be distributed and fought over. During the course of this process, they emphasized the system that they knew best: a centralized and bureaucratized liberal-democratic political entity. The next section details what the failure of the Sierra Leone state looked like on the ground to some of the key external advisers who arrived in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and early 2000s to take part in state-building efforts. I then explore what state-building and the reconstitution of the justice and security field entailed, including not only institutional reform of the military, national security agencies and police, but also the effects of the UK-led military intervention and the pursuit and jailing of perceived war criminals, including RUF’s Foday Sankoh.

The chaos of state collapse It is difficult for an outsider to articulate an order if all you see are the chaotic consequences of a state’s collapse. It is a challenge to capture the logic of what appears to be a fundamentally disorganized justice and security field when habits and dispositions to act in certain ways and according to particular logics of order are organized according to and articulated in terms of how a state should ideally function. Mike Dent, a retired UK colonel who arrived in Freetown in June 1999 as a member of a two-man advisory team to the Sierra Leone government’s newly established Ministry of Defence, did not see any order in the failure of the state, only illegitimate, makeshift expressions of authority that the lack of state provided space for. Dent vividly described what he observed upon entering Sierra Leone. “You will appreciate,” he once wrote me in an email, “that the situation when we arrived in Freetown in June 1999 was ‘fluid’ and close to anarchic, with little or no effective police force, a myriad of different armed groups ‘policing’ the city, [and] with ECOMOG8 providing security” (Mike Dent, email, 2008). He described the reality he encountered:

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We found Freetown in complete disarray and still in a state of virtual war. The functions of state had practically collapsed, with ministries in confusion and officials lacking clear aims and direction. Most businesses and government offices had been looted and vandalized during the January 1999 AFRC/RUF [rebel] attack and had not been repaired, and much of the city’s infrastructure had been destroyed or badly damaged. We were taken by car to the Ministry of Defence in Freetown to meet the Deputy Minister of Defence. On the journey from our accommodation, we passed through seven checkpoints manned by various groups of armed persons. From their dress it was difficult to ascertain if they were military, civilian, police, or all three! The rule of law and order appeared to have broken down completely. (Mike Dent, notes, 2008) An order articulated by any standards other than stateness was not available to Dent. The symbolic appellation of stateness through law and legal discourse had vanished, and permanent signs and symbols such as buildings and uniformed personnel did not clearly express the stateness of the state, as it were. In the midst of the conflict the core language of governance centered around territorial sovereignty, though the security forces had morphed into indistinct formations. Dent continued: There was no water, electricity or other public services operating in the city. There were also large numbers of armed military, SLA [Sierra Leone Army] and ECOMOG, paramilitary Special Security Division (SSD) Police, civilians and CDF [Civil Defence Force],9 roaming the city, occupying buildings, manning checkpoints throughout the town, and using threats of violence to extort money from the populace to permit freepassage. The SLP [Sierra Leone Police] force was totally ineffective, untrusted [sic] and seemingly corrupt at every level. The SLA was commanded and controlled by Nigerian officers, who, it was alleged, were misappropriating cash, supplies and equipment for their own personal gain. There were no communication links to towns outside Freetown other than via radio and satellite telephone, and no safe road access to other parts of the country beyond Masiaka. (Mike Dent, notes, 2008) From Dent’s perspective, that of someone who had come to lead a statebuilding process, this was what failure looked like in practice.

The order of chaos In the context of war, a fundamental overhaul of the distribution of power within the security field had occurred in Sierra Leone. This did not mean that an order did not exist, but the order that Dent observed was the order of

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anarchy. In Freetown civilians organized neighborhood security organizations street-by-street, so-called Civil Defense Units (CDU), as explained by Papa Ali, who lived in Freetown during the war and whom I met when he was working as a diamond digger in Peyima in up-country rural Sierra Leone. Having been a CDU commander, Ali explained that this system of self-protection had been organized out of sheer necessity: “Just to defend our area and properties because the rebels, when they [i.e., ECOMOG] drove the rebels out of the city [in 1998–1999, which led to the Lomé Peace Agreement], they come and do some game, thieve, and other things” (Papa Ali, interview, February 2009). While Dent saw a chaotic situation represented by consecutive checkpoints manned by unidentifiable security actors, Papa Ali was engaged in establishing localized spaces of order. “So the soldier joined the rebels,” Papa Ali explained, “so we stole the security. You are a civilian; the army is there to secure the civilians, to secure the state. But if the army turns against the state, who is to be security?” To Papa Ali, security – and insecurity – was something tangible to be produced, and if he did not produce it himself, somebody else would and perhaps use it against him. This was order, the order, that was possible in the chaotic context of war that Freetown was experiencing in the late 1990s. Meanwhile Keith Biddle, a former British police officer and head of a UKfunded police program in Sierra Leone in 1999 who would later become a central figure in re-establishing the Sierra Leone Police (SLP), regarded the CDUs as “extortion checkpoints.” Like Dent, Biddle saw that the absence of functioning state institutions led civilians to take the law into their own hands, which exploited the situation and, in the process, produced chaos. Physical brutality was indeed reported at the checkpoints. This was also the case across the country, where forces wearing uniforms that tied them loosely to the state system and idea were in charge (Biddle, interview, June 2009), symbolizing the fragmented and indistinct nature of security and authority during the latter years of the war (Keen 2005). People and guns could and did move freely into Freetown; in fact, the checkpoints were porous to such an extent that they facilitated a set of particularly brutal attacks on the city in 1999–2000. Kellie Conteh, who became National Security Coordinator after the war ended in 2001, explained this from his perspective as a young colonel in the army in the mid-1990s: It came out clearly that we should begin to try and protect our towns by having task forces. They should be paying attention to attacks coming in and the size of the attack, the approach it is taking, and the kind of weapons they’re having. I prepared something like that for Freetown. I wrote a memo to the force commander to say through all my visitations upcountry I am concerned that Freetown, especially with the perennial darkness in Freetown [due to lack of electricity], we don’t seem to have any unit in place to counter attacks. I was even thinking of rebel attacks

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in Freetown. You saw it everywhere – they’ll just spring up and boom! You would hear they’ve attacked Bo, boom! You’ll hear they’ve attacked Kenema, boom! They’ve attacked another place. When I come back from the provinces in the night you find these big trucks coming into the Freetown dark. The police at the checkpoints are playing the same old game. They’ll just take from the driver whatever they can get and let him go. (Kellie Conteh, interview, 2008) Conteh, a man whose authority was generated by his being an army officer, articulated what Dent observed: the inability of those individuals claiming to represent “the state” to act accordingly. The order established in the institutional collapse of the state was recognized by external advisers as chaos rather than as the type of order that is possible in the absence of permanent and visible military and police forces sanctioned by a centrally and bureaucratically governed political entity. Biddle, Dent and Conteh all expressed what Andersen (2011:39) generally refers to as the “policy logic” of state failure: the state system within the internationally defined territory of Sierra Leone had ceased to fulfill its functions, its institutions had collapsed. Sierra Leone had descended into chaos and anarchy. The aim of the external actors that came to Sierra Leone in support of President Kabbah and his government became one of detecting, isolating and working to re-establish the armed forces, the police and intelligence services. However, reconstituting a field of security actors was not only a matter of implementing a number of programs under the label of SSR – it also became a process of marginalizing, ignoring or outright eliminating a variety of organizational forms that had either been criminalized or did not fit easily into the category of “state institutions and actors.”

Stabilization through purification Dent expressed what the breakdown of the patrimonially networked governed space of Sierra Leone had produced. Sets of institutions in the security field that demonstrated stateness – articulated in visible forms of clearly identifiable enforcement – had fragmented and lost the ability to concentrate resources and the authority to make order. Accordingly, a messy distribution of resources had generated a plethora of order-making organizations with a multiplicity of often conflicting and contradictory effects. Each of them consisted of separately organized actors drawing authority from numerous sources and spaces to make order, including the residents of individual streets in Freetown (e.g., CDUs) and global political organizations (e.g., the UN). From de-centered positions of authority, a number of actors were seeking to lay claim to the legitimate use of force, but were not in a position to monopolize it. The UK’s injection of resources into the process aimed to shift this

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balance toward the central government in Freetown, and it was to some extent successful in doing so, at least nominally. Even though the state system had apparently collapsed, it was still the state and the institutions that represented it that continued to be a core stake at stake: a vital source of symbolic and tangible resources, as well as of authority for Sierra Leonean and foreign actors alike. For instance, individuals who during the war had built armies of local militias and hunters organized around secret-society membership and village safety measures outside Freetown were simultaneously laying claim to ministerial positions in the government led by Kabbah when he returned from exile in Conakry in 1998. As an all-important political idea to be fought over, the centrally governed state thus continued to manifest itself ideationally and in practice, given the resources that it attracted. One thing was clear: the collapse of state functions did not mean that the alternative political formations that emerged during the war were under consideration as appropriate alternatives – quite the contrary. Drawing on multiple sources of authority simultaneously was considered incompatible with the concept of a centrally governed political entity, especially by external actors. The state, as it functioned during the war, suffered an intolerable breakdown of order, not the indication of a possible new avenue toward stability. Thus, purging the security field through the criminalization and elimination of actors that were preventing the efficient re-concentration of state power became an important element of the state-building effort. A political entity was to be built upon the rubble of its predecessor, which, echoing Weber, would ensure that the use of force by any other type of organization would be illegitimate if it was not permitted or prescribed by that very political entity.

Norman, Sankoh and Johnny Paul As already indicated, during the conflict, figures of power derived authority from sitting in government while also heading personalized security apparatuses. One of the central figures embodying that order was Samuel Hinga Norman, who led the mobilization and organization of the CDF on a national scale. The CDF was widely perceived, most notably by the Sierra Leone Army, to be the SLPP government’s de facto security force. The CDF, “Norman’s militia,” as Biddle called them, consisted of kamajors, a Mende term for traditional hunters. The emergence of the CDF was an indication of the failings of government troops, which “meant that civilians increasingly looked to their own devices for protection – and specifically to civil defence units” (Keen 2005:90).10 The term kamajor was soon applied to civil defense groups across the country, a collective term for the Kapras and Gbetes among the Temne, the Donsos in parts of Kono District, the Tamaboras of Koinadugu District, and so forth (Keen 2005:90; Hoffman 2007:642). Norman came to embody the failed-state version of order, straddling a range of positions and explicitly projecting the process of hybridization that

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authority in Sierra Leone rests on. On the one hand he was the Regent Chief of Jiama-Bongor chiefdom and had built his power base as a key figure in the kamajor movement, which was closely affiliated with local secret societies. On the other hand he was appointed the SLPP’s Deputy Minister of Defence from 1998 to 2002 and subsequently Minister of Interior from 2002 to 2004 (Fanthorpe 2001:365; Hoffman 2007:642). Many stories circulated about the infighting between the kamajors (and other irregular forces) and the army, incited by events such as the military overthrow of the SLPP in May 1997. However, that did not stop Norman from managing the kamajors and the armed forces at the same time. RUF leader Foday Sankoh was backed by the Liberian president, Charles Taylor. He was not only pardoned of a treason conviction under the 1999s Lomé Peace Agreement but also appointed Vice President and the coveted position of heading the Commission of Strategic Resources. At the same time, the RUF behaved and considered themselves the only legitimate governing body in the areas under their military control outside Freetown. In collaboration with Sankoh and the RUF, Johnny Paul Koroma led the AFRC coup against the democratically elected SLPP government in 1997. While the AFRC was “kicked out” of Freetown in 1998, as Peter Penfold put it (interview, March 2008, Freetown), they, together with the RUF, invaded Freetown for the first time during the civil war in January 1999. After Lomé, Johnny Paul was still at large and eventually fled the country. This list of actors is not exhaustive in describing all the central actors in the war and their subsequent roles in Freetown’s reforming state institutions. But these men, who were all indicted in 2003 by Sierra Leone’s Special Court, which had been established to try war criminals, are central to my discussion of hybridization. Norman, Sankoh and Johnny Paul exemplified very clearly, in a moment of explicit state fragmentation, the many different types of authority that constitute processes of hybridization that ultimately frame how authority can be mobilized in order to access resources. As Biddle noted, all three “were around [in the late 1990s]. Don’t forget they were legitimate after Lomé” (Keith Biddle, interview, 2009, France). In other words, a peace agreement signed by Sankoh and Kabbah in the Togolese capital on July 7, 1999, was inadvertently constitutive of an attempt to reestablish the split between state and society and to redefine figures such as Sankoh of the RUF as state leaders. Through the authority that a peace agreement constitutes, the rebel leader was transformed into a legitimate government actor who was expected to project stateness. Sankoh’s access to the state, however, far from constituting “statification” of the RUF, led to a process of consolidation and the deepening of the very hybridization that Lomé had sought in vain to eradicate. Although Sankoh was now vice-president of post-Lomé Sierra Leone and in control of the ministry running the diamond industry, the single most important source of revenue for the state, he neither spoke nor acted according to expectations (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:24–25). Eventually, the

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unstable arrangements agreed at Lomé fell apart and led to the UK military intervention in 2000. Only by military means did a purge of the security field seem possible to outside observers. Indeed, only after the UK intervened militarily was the stateness of the state buttressed to a degree where it appeared to gain ground in terms of both its legitimacy and certainly in its capacity to fight a war against the RUF. In the late 1990s, however, the explicit and to outsiders intolerable state of chaos articulated by actors such as Norman/CDF, Sankoh/RUF and Johnny Paul/AFRC remained. Constitutive of the security field, these three figures did not stand alone. ECOMOG was an active security organization at the time and intended to be a regional peacekeeping force. Primarily Nigerian in its composition, ECOMOG was seen as serving both the self-interest of its individual soldiers (who were allegedly involved in trading diamonds) and the wishes and policies of the Nigerian government. All the armed groups “were running checkpoints and taking money off people,” Biddle recalls, “including the ECOMOG soldiers.” In short, as one internal UK assessment noted in the late 1990s, “The armed forces have virtually ceased to exist.” Indeed, it was suggested that “the power held by the CDF extends in effect to a virtual monopoly of force in rural areas, which would be unchallenged if the ECOMOG force were to withdraw” (UK Government 1999). Norman, Sankoh and Johnny Paul all claimed a significant share of the monopoly over the use of force, drawing on numerous sources of authority to make this claim. Indeed, the “war state” that Sierra Leone had become by the end of the 1990s was very much defined by these figures, certainly not by Kabbah, the democratically elected leader of the state – a newcomer, as it were. With UK support, this was about to change. When Biddle became Inspector-General of Police in Sierra Leone in November 1999, he was personally involved in coordinating the arrests of Norman, Sankoh and Johnny Paul (the latter of whom escaped, never to be seen again). In essence these arrests continued the process of reconstituting the field of security by re-concentrating authority to make order among state institutions. Clare Short articulated the sentiment that leadership under such leaders was equal to collapse, anarchy and chaos: “We could not – we, being the British – could not let this fragile, but democratically elected Government [under Kabbah] collapse. Now, I don’t think there was much theory behind that.” There was, of course, nothing but a theory of stateness and what constitutes effective and legitimate government, which was inherent in how UK actors perceived and acted upon what they experienced in Sierra Leone. For Short and other external actors, state-building was their conceptual articulation of relatively stable orientations and ways of acting. State-building might have appeared “un-theoretical,” but it carried with it a strong epistemological outlook on the world, that is, one that asks what order looks like and by whom and what it is constituted. It is therefore doubtful whether the UK and other external actors arriving in Sierra Leone, where conflict determined the distribution of authority, could

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have articulated what they observed as anything but chaotic, a state of emergency, illegitimate. Indeed, these actors coming in would have had to wage a war with their own epistemologies to accept the hybrid order as legitimate and as a point of departure for their work. Moreover, such an approach would preclude the possibility of establishing a coherent system of regulation, accountability and democratic governance. The Lomé Peace Agreement was a milestone in the attempt to make peace in Sierra Leone, but the fragmentation that characterized state institutions was evident, encompassing the RUF and the AFRC on the one hand and the Kabbah government on the other. In short, attempts to transform the RUF and the AFRC into legitimate and effective state actors had failed. The turning point, and one of the terminal blows to stability, came in early 2000, when people marched to Sankoh’s house to protest against the RUF’s activities and approximately twenty demonstrators were shot by RUF supporters. The SLP, led by Biddle at the time, captured Sankoh, who was subsequently handed over to government forces and, together with several senior RUF commanders, taken into custody. The RUF were expelled from the government, which led to a stalemate (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:25). It was in this context that the UK intervened militarily.

Operation Palliser Operation Palliser was the UK’s attempt to use military means to decisively change the balance of power within Sierra Leone in favor of Kabbah, but this was not how it was envisaged at the outset. The following overview of the military intervention is provided from the perspective of the head of the mission, Colonel David Richards, who went on to become the UK’s Chief of Defence Staff from 2010 to 2013. This narrative demonstrates not only the coincidental nature of the intervention, but also the process of hybridization out of which it evolved. It could not have been any different. Nevertheless, it is also the case that the intervention occurred in the name of and on behalf of the state. In early May 2000, the RUF was on the offensive. ECOMOG, the Nigerian-dominated regional force, had left Sierra Leone a few weeks earlier, and UN forces were under considerable pressure, with hundreds of peacekeepers having been detained by the RUF. Richards recalls: The SLA [Sierra Leone Army] was very weak, having mostly disarmed and begun disbandment under the terms of the Lomé Peace Accord. As the situation deteriorated, I found myself bound for SL within 24 hours, on orders to find out what was happening and to prepare to conduct a NEO [non-combatant evacuation operation] should it be necessary. (Richards, original not dated)

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What started as a non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) developed into a small- to medium-sized war operation. These developments were not directed by London. In fact, the order had been to conduct a NEO, and to then “get out.” It was individuals on the ground who changed the rules of engagement and gained support from political leaders back in London in the process, “cutting out all the layers in between,” as Richards put it (Richards, interview, 2008). UK forces coordinated and sustained the efforts of the disparate groupings of Sierra Leoneans loyal to the state because neither the government of Sierra Leone nor UNAMSIL were able to do so. This group of government forces included the Sierra Leone Army and what came to be known as the “Unholy Alliance,” which began to form after Richards’s arrival in May 2000. This had initially been a response to a call to arms by Johnny Paul Koroma, who led the remnants of the AFRC. Scaled down and disarmed under the Lomé Accord, the SLA numbered 2,000–3,000 personnel, with a further 3,000 being trained at the time by a UK Short-Term Training Team. The “Unholy Alliance” consisted of a loose coalition of SLA, ex-SLA, AFRC and CDF combatants, as well as elements of the West Side Boys (a splinter faction of the AFRC). Together, these different force units were directed by a committee chaired by British officers. Richards continued: Unholy they may have been, but guided as they were at every level by British officers over the next few weeks, they succeeded in securing much of the inland road route between Freetown and Lungi, relieving the military and, of course, putting political pressure on Freetown and its beleaguered government. This (at first) ad hoc twin track operational support to the UN on the one hand and assistance to the government and its loyal armed groupings on the other rapidly supplanted the NEO and soon became official HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] strategy. (Richards, original not dated) The UK’s intervention acted as the catalyst for a ceasefire, which was officially brokered on November 10, 2000, and signed in Abuja, Nigeria. While the UK intervened, the Sierra Leone government, supported by international actors, sought to find an RUF successor to Sankoh, someone who was amenable to negotiation. That person was Issa Sesay, a senior military officer in the RUF, as Biddle recalled: The Government of Sierra Leone started to send feelers out – if Sankoh was not available, who would be? There was a suggestion that Issa Sesay might be the one. Eventually it was decided that a letter would be sent to Sesay from Sankoh. We took Sankoh to Lunghi [airport], blind-folded, and placed in the Presidential suite – he thought he was on the way to become the President! At Lunghi he was seen by President [Olusegun] Obasanjo of Nigeria and President [Alpha Oumar] Konaré of Mali, then

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the Chairman of ECOWAS. In the end, Sankoh signed a letter which effectively handed the command of the RUF to Issa; he signed off. Issa Sesay negotiated the RUF into DDR, and massive numbers went into the process. A lot of weapons were surrendered by the RUF from August [2001] to January 2002. (Biddle quoted in Albrecht and Jackson 2009:26) By January 2002, the war had been declared officially over. State House on Tower Hill was yet again to symbolize the state idea, make rules, exercise control over territory and people, and plan and implement official goals. Significantly, however, the “Unholy Alliance” – the military force initially constructed and worked on to fight an enemy that many could agree on, namely the RUF – was itself constituted by numerous, inter-related force elements. Not surprisingly, hybridization was thus embedded in the very foundations of the process of reconstituting and stabilizing Sierra Leone’s field of security actors through military force. But it was, of course, the “stateness of the state” that was the focus and that was worked on in the process, as well as being the reason why an external actor such as the UK considered intervening in the first place. In the process of “statification,” the ordering effects of hybridization were not eliminated. However, SSR as state-building certainly appeared to be a purposeful attempt to do exactly that. This was not so much because some actors and not others were actively marginalized; it was instead the consequence of how support targeted those institutions that were symbolically demonstrating stateness, including the armed forces, the police and the intelligence services.

SSR as state-building: embedding hybrid reproduction SSR evolved out of a particular historical configuration of global policy regimes in the post-Cold War world, UK politics and a dramatic bureaucratic collapse in Sierra Leone that was reinforced and deepened by a decade of war. In turn, SSR came to mean the long-term continuation of processes of stabilization and state-building that were initiated in the late 1990s. A comprehensive reconstitution of the justice and security fields was implemented with the aim of projecting the imagery of order – control and stability – to external observers. The UK was integrally linked to these processes and the driving force behind them, providing financial support, technical expertise and political pressure (Gbla 2006). In turn, the Sierra Leonean government, led by Kabbah, had a clear interest in concentrating power in Freetown. I have analyzed the trajectory of this process in considerable detail elsewhere, spanning more than fifteen years from 1997 until 2013, as well as its different dimensions and its comprehensiveness across the security sector (see Albrecht and Jackson 2009, 2014b; Jackson and Albrecht 2011). The following section does not do justice to Sierra Leone’s SSR process in its entirety

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and the many more or less inter-related programs and initiatives whereby it was constituted. What this section does do is to briefly discuss some of the key elements that were encompassed by SSR as state-building in Sierra Leone. Chapters 5–9 focus on elements of SSR, primarily as it related to policing from the national to the local levels, which directly sought to transform practices of order-making in relation to the general population. SSR was initiated some four to five years prior to the end of the conflict. Its three main components included attempts to build a Ministry of Defence that could oversee and contain an army in the making, establish an Office of National Security, together with an intelligence branch, and ensure that a police force would yet again exert a level of control across Sierra Leone’s whole territory (Albrecht and Jackson 2009, 2014b). The initial focus was on containing and overhauling the armed forces, which had staged two coups in 1992 and 1997, and to build up the Sierra Leone government’s ability to defeat the RUF by strengthening its intelligence-gathering capacity (Ashington-Pickett 2010). President Kabbah considered disbanding the army altogether, and in fact did so for a short while in 1999, reflecting his intense distrust of the military’s political ambitions (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:23, 2014b:28). In the end an army was founded which was effectively a continuation of the Unholy Alliance. At the very root of the military component of SSR was the inevitable circumstance that it would perpetuate the process of hybridization that the Sierra Leonean state and its distribution of political power rest on. In other words, it was not a new beginning severed from Sierra Leone’s history, as is often implied in the discourse if not the practice of state-building. It could not be. Under the planned military re-integration program, it was assumed that 3,000 fighters from the RUF, CDF and AFRC would become members of the post-war army. Creating a hybrid army was established at the onset of SSR as one of the centerpieces of the process. Fighters were included who had served under disparate factions and who had assumed authority as traditional hunter militias and rebel fighters, among others. A total of 2,091 former combatants from different factions were ultimately incorporated into a state-sanctioned army of 12,000 personnel as the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:64).11 After May 17, 2002, when the last basic army intake graduated, soldiers were mixed up so that the members of units and sub-units were not exclusively drawn from the army, the RUF or the CDF (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:29). From July 1999, military support had been provided by the International Military Assistance Training Team (IMATT) and paid for by the UK, primarily through the African Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP), and consequently dominated by UK personnel. In addition to setting up training facilities, IMATT started a comprehensive military training scheme and mentored army officers who were located in the newly established integrated civilian-military Ministry of Defence. Support to the Ministry of Defence was prioritized as an exercise in bureaucracy- and democracy-building, that is, as

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a way of ensuring that control and management of the army was embedded in the civil service, not in the army hierarchy. Until this process began, the Ministry of Defence had just four employees and amounted to little more than a “post box” (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:46). Its staff included two executive officers whose main function was to sign off checks for the Chief of Defence Staff and personnel that supported the CDF as the war progressed during the 1990s. Establishment of a ministry based on a UK model, together with the Office of National Security (ONS), represented attempts to thoroughly bureaucratize Sierra Leone’s security sector, which came under severe pressure after 2002. They also represented attempts to reduce personal power, notably that of the president and military hierarchy, which ultimately resulted in marginalization of the ONS and the suppression of civilian staff in the Ministry of Defence. As both institutions, but particularly the ONS, were hailed as a considerable success for externally supported SSR, they ended up garnering more support from external (UK) advisers than from the president they were supposed to serve and advise (Albrecht and Jackson 2009, 2014b:15–16, 48–49). The ONS had been set up under the leadership of a National Security Coordinator in 1999 under pressure from a number of external advisers in order to ensure that intelligence reports that the president was expected to act on were based on reliable data that had been properly collected and assessed, that is, subjected to bureaucratic procedures. However, there was pressure on both Kabbah and his successor, Ernest Bai Koroma, to use existing networks outside the formal state system, which, prior to and during the war, had fed inaccurate and contradictory information to State House and practically paralyzed its ability to respond to security threats either within or outside the territory of Sierra Leone. The feeling among the advisers who supported the establishment of the ONS – and thus a new intelligence capacity – was that this had led to inadequate and uncoordinated responses to the different warring factions, including the RUF. Apart from being a prime example of institutional engineering based on external conceptions of effective and legitimate statehood, the ONS also represented a vision of separating organizations that collect from those that assess intelligence, again a concept peculiar to legitimate and effective bureaucracy. It was a vision of creating an organization which had the aim of establishing an autonomous space of operation for the state. This was an attempt to concentrate power hierarchically and to vest a single organization with the authority to force a process of differentiation and concomitant subordination of alternative actors. This process of subordination was to include figures such as Norman and Johnny Paul, but also, in the longer run, a swathe of more benign actors that nevertheless claimed a role in ordermaking, such as paramount and lesser chiefs. Military reform, national security coordination and the intelligence capacity of the Sierra Leonean government were crucial elements in the SSR process and were particularly important, and prioritized, in the late 1990s and

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early 2000s as the conflict lingered on and state institutions in Freetown proved unable to perform their functions in a state-like manner. However, the center of gravity within the conglomerate of practices, systems and discourse that were labeled SSR – and the main focus of this book – was to establish the ability to make long-term order beyond war-fighting. To do so, the SLP became the main priority, both for the Sierra Leonean government and the UK. As early as 1996, immediately after the elections in February of that year, which Kabbah won, the president requested support from the UK to resurrect the police, which had all but collapsed by the late 1990s (Albrecht 2010:4; Albrecht and Jackson 2009:4). The initial stages of building the SLP became known as Operation Phoenix, and was approached on the assumptions that the SLP was recovering from a crisis, but also that it should be rebuilt from scratch, which was a somewhat contradictory approach (see Chapter 5 in particular). In the words of the initial UK-led assessment of the remnants of the police, it would now have to “reclaim its rightful primacy in the maintenance of public tranquility and law enforcement … There is a need for visible targeted policing to be introduced on a twenty-four-hour basis every day of the year” (CPDTF 1999). The efforts of these actors to reconstitute the security sector initially took place in a context where neither Sierra Leonean officials nor international donors and advisers were clear on what SSR would entail. According to one definition circulating in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, SSR would deal with security and defense management, specifically institutions such as the ONS.12 An alternative definition discussed at the time included the intelligence services (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:26–27). It was thus unclear which institutions to include and articulate through activities that were to be given the SSR label and, more importantly, how they were to morph into effective and legitimate organizations that could monopolize the use of force. These discussions reflected contemporary international debates on SSR, but they also ignored the question of how authority was distributed in Sierra Leone, neglecting the fact that figures of authority such as the chiefs had quickly resumed their positions in the rural areas of the country after the war ended. In no documentation, regardless of the state of the police, was the appropriateness of what was referred to as “SLP primacy” questioned – not by international experts, and not by Kabbah. This was the case even though police headquarters in 1998 were able to communicate with only three of the thirty-eight police stations that were located outside Freetown before the war, and only eight vehicles were available for use by a police force of an estimated 9,000 personnel.

Conclusion The attempt to reconstitute a chaotic and anarchic security field in Sierra Leone that would reflect the image of a centrally governed political entity was initiated by military means. The main external partner of the country, the

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UK, fully supported Kabbah’s aim to consolidate his position as president. First, this was done by eradicating rebel (RUF) and militia (CDF) leaders who, in the late 1990s, occupied central positions of authority both within and outside Freetown’s nominal state institutions. Second, these immediate concerns became intertwined with a state-building process initiated through a set of programs under the SSR label, partly to support the ongoing war between the government and a range of rebel factions. The notion of purging the justice and security fields of the products of hybridization, as it were, in order to articulate a recognizable version of the centrally governed liberaldemocratic state was never a realistic outcome. The disconnect between vision and reality was unbridgeable – indeed, whether this vision was at all realizable was ultimately never questioned. Initially, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, what its alternatives might look like were not even considered. Criminalizing and removing figureheads such as Norman and Sankoh might have been a way of decapitating organizations that posed a direct and visible challenge to the vision of what post-war Sierra Leone should look like. However, doing so did not arrest or fundamentally alter hybridization – the historical process that produces particular constellations of authority, including those that Norman and Sankoh embodied. The deep politics of the endeavor that SSR came to represent lay in the external attempt to establish, define and enact a particular order. This involved actively trying to exclude alternative forms of authority (cf. Mouffe 2006). In short, these attempted exclusions were articulated by making distinctions about what and who represented particular versions of legitimate and illegitimate authority respectively (cf. Kyed and Albrecht 2014:17). This is the basic tenet, regularly reiterated, of the misrecognition that state-building encompasses. Certainly, in Sierra Leone concentrating power on the one hand and a parallel process of differentiation on the other to lead, for instance, to the establishment of separate juridical and legislative fields did not take place, despite differentiation being a hallmark of bureaucratic checks and balances. Nevertheless this process of separation and “statification” was what the UK supported: what was attempted was the incorporation of bureaucratic practices into the justice and security fields, however vaguely that process was crafted and brought to its logical conclusion. Accordingly, the building of distinct organizations began that could figure as centers for the concentration of sufficient power and authority to be able to allocate roles and responsibilities among clearly defined symbolic and physical spaces, e.g., internal (police) and external security (army), information collection and assessment, the ONS, the armed forces, and the police. When the appropriate organization did not exist it was created, as was the case with respect to the ONS and, to a large extent, the Ministry of Defence. In the case of the ONS, in the early 2000s it was hailed as a great success of externally led institution-building, yet it too was bypassed by the political leadership, including Kabbah, who had overseen its establishment, but preferred to have an informal group of advisers around him.

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After January 2002, when the conflict was officially declared over, SSR activities were rolled out across the country. Because this book is particularly interested in what this looked like at the local level, and how elements of SSR were translated, appropriated, and co-opted by the chiefs, the focus of the analysis will be especially on how the SLP interfaces directly with the population on a daily basis (which the ONS, the army, and other security personnel do not). To understand the context in which police reform and policing occur and are shaped into particular practices and discourses, it is vital to understand how authority is produced. The following chapter therefore analyzes the shape that hybridization has assumed in the long term through processes of state formation in Sierra Leone that center on the figure of the chief. Subsequent chapters explore the interplay between elements of police reform and policing and the processes of hybridization that characterize Sierra Leone’s history.

Notes 1 Tilly (1985) refers to nineteenth-century state formation in Europe as “organized crime.” It was a top-down system that was based on the logic of coercion and extraction and was driven by war. 2 The basic logic of patronage is well described by Ferme (2001:106) with respect to Mende social practices. “The crucial point,” she notes, “is that everyone must be accounted for by someone else – that everyone must be linked in a relationship of patronage or clientship.” The person who stands for someone else is responsible for overseeing his or her behavior within a community and providing for his or her basic needs. In other words, for acting as a patron. In return, the patron can expect the performance of favors, a share of any wealth that the dependent or client might accumulate, and a level of respect, support and privilege. 3 Sierra Leone had a vested interest in declaring itself in food deficit. Food imports allowed the president to buy the loyalty of junior cadres by showing an interest in family welfare. Stevens gave exclusive import authorization to the former stateowned enterprises in which he often had a share. In 1984 Sierra Leone imported almost three times as much rice as it did in 1978. Domestic production dropped by more than 30 percent (Peters 2011:44). 4 Lebanese traders achieved rapid prosperity in both small- and large-scale commerce in Sierra Leone from the end of the nineteenth century on (see Reno 1995). 5 The constitutional review commission recommended the re-establishment of a multi-party state, which was approved by parliament in July 1991. 6 The UN intervention under the banner of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) was plagued by a number of challenges immediately after its deployment in October 1999. A chronic lack of resources was exacerbated by misplaced faith in the Lomé Agreement itself, as well as by fundamental disagreements at the top level between the civilian Nigerian Head of Mission on the one hand and the Deputy Force Commander and Indian Force Commander on the other. In April 2000 a hostage crisis arose when several UN peacekeeping units were surrounded by a re-animated RUF; several units managed to fight their way out, and many held out until they were rescued by UNAMSIL and UK troops. By mid-2001 there were around 15–17,000 UNAMSIL troops on the ground, along with a UK troop contingent.

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7 The arms shipment had been sanctioned in part by the then British High Commissioner, Peter Penfold. 8 It was the civil war in neighboring Liberia that prompted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a sixteen-nation group formed in 1975, to set up an armed Monitoring Group – ECOMOG – in 1990. A non-standing military force, ECOMOG was composed of soldiers from the national armies of member states. In practice, Nigeria contributed most troops, material, and financial backing. ECOMOG was deployed to Sierra Leone after President Kabbah was overthrown in the second military coup in 1997 (he was reinstated in 1998). 9 The CDF was a group of local militias comprised of the Kamajors, Donsos, Gbethis, Kapras, Tamaboros, and the Organized Body of Hunting Societies from the Freetown peninsula that used methods similar to the RUF to fight fire with fire. 10 Keen (2005:90) further explains: “As hunters, Sierra Leone’s kamajors were licensed to carry guns and knew the terrain near their home villages. Traditionally, kamajors had to be at least 30 years old, but as the war progressed, the term ‘kamajor’ was soon being used to describe more broadly-based civil defense organisations which included many younger people and relatively few professional hunters.” The original kamajors were recognized for their ability to enter the forest and confront natural and supernatural beings, including dangerous animals like elephants, leopards and chimpanzees (Leach 1992:40–42). Kamajor rituals have tended to emphasize discipline, loyalty and self-sacrifice – qualities that were seen as lacking in the rebels and the army (Fithen 1999:196). 11 For in-depth analysis of the life of combatants after the war in Sierra Leone, see Christensen (2015) and Christensen and Utas (2008, 2016). 12 The ONS, located in the Office of the President, is the Secretariat of the National Security Council, providing advice and guidance on security matters to the Head of State. ONS was a response to what one observer plainly noted in September 1999: “Sierra Leone does not have a Security or Intelligence Service. Responsibility for security (counter-espionage, counter-terrorism,and counter-subversion) and public order rests with the Special Branch (SB) of the Sierra Leone Police Service” (see UK Government 1999).

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Hybridization and the authority of chiefs

This chapter demonstrates how the notion of hybridization can be used to structure analytically the processes by which and figures around which the authority to govern rural Sierra Leone are assembled. In doing so, it adopts a historical and contemporary ethnographic perspective by exploring the paramount and lesser chiefs and their simultaneous roles as central figures of authority in both local and national politics. I argue that hybridization, far from being a recent phenomenon, is a long-term, ongoing historical process that has given shape to the distribution of authority in rural Sierra Leone and continues to do so. This process does not have a set beginning or end; it is not generated by particular events or constellations of practices and discourses. Hybridization is relentless and foundational, shaping and being shaped by resources introduced through processes of translation, appropriation and sometimes enforcement. In the colonial encounter, as in SSR as a particular example of a more recent and significantly shorter externally led intervention, everyone involved was and is transformed through the negotiations, mergers and confrontations entailed by these processes. In this space – a space of negotiation-cum-hybridization – the subalterns have a voice and shape, unsettle, subvert or integrate with external and, sometimes, what are presumed to be hegemonic structures of authority (colonial powers, peacebuilding interventions, etc.). We need to understand the empirical reality of hybridization from which paramount and lesser chiefs have emerged and which they embody before we can genuinely appreciate the productive effects of SSR, and police reform in particular, especially at the cutting edge of translation and negotiation. The focus of this book is Sierra Leone. However, this chapter suggests that the concept of hybridization is generally applicable to the institution of the chieftaincy across Sub-Saharan Africa. As Sara Berry (1993:32) notes, colonial rule did not freeze African societies “into precolonial molds.” There is also strong evidence to suggest that chiefs are not the deliberate product of colonial policies and practices, despite what a number of seminal scholars have argued (Mamdani 1996; Herbst 2000; Ntsebeza 1999).1 Finally, because chiefs both embody and govern processes of hybridization, the assumption of Donald Ray (1996:185), that “traditional authorities and the state draw upon

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(largely) mutually exclusive bases of legitimacy,” can also be dismissed. Chiefly authority is the product of ongoing processes of the mixing and reconversion of sources of authority and power in response to changing conditions of resource distribution and reconfigured political orders. Hybrid orders are more than the sum of the mixing of elements. The hybridization process gives rise to Homi Bhabha’s (1994) third space, that is, a moment or place of untranslatability where new, often unpredictable, and changing agency and institutional forms emerge. These discussions are substantiated empirically by drawing on primary data from ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Peyima, Sierra Leone, and secondary sources. While the fieldwork has provided unique insights into how sources of authority are articulated in both practice and discourse, the secondary sources provide a long-term perspective on how chiefs have emerged as a form of local authority over time. Both demonstrate how the authority of the chiefs has been produced historically and how it continues to be built around a multitude of intertwined local and extra-local sources of authority simultaneously, including bureaucratic practices and the legal texts of colonial and post-colonial governments deposited in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, party political agendas, locally bound initiation into secret societies, autochthon status and chiefly descent. The chiefs’ embodiment of these processes of hybridized authority allows them to continually transform, adapt and endure political change and upheaval. The chapter first provides a historical overview of the emergence of chiefs in rural Sierra Leone and compares it to its occurrence elsewhere in SubSaharan Africa. It argues that, through processes of hybridization, the basis of authority of existing local leaders were shaped by, but also shaped, the distribution of power within colonial and post-colonial state institutions. In the process, chiefs emerged as the central figures of authority in rural Sierra Leone. This historical analysis serves as a backdrop to the chapter’s case study from contemporary rural Sierra Leone, which demonstrates how chiefs in Peyima both generate authority and are challenged by what Richard Fanthorpe (2001:372) calls “extremely localised” claims to status and entitlement. The chapter concludes that the hybrid basis of chiefly authority has been particularly pronounced in the chiefs’ ability to re-establish themselves as figures of authority following the end of the civil war in 2002. This occurred despite the fact that there were considerable popular grievances against the chiefs for acting as local despots before war broke out in the early 1990s.

The emergence of chiefs During the turbulent late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in what is now known as Kono District in Sierra Leone, local warriors fought continuously over trade routes, control of land and the accumulation of dependent populations of clients and slaves. The power of the pre-colonial authorities in Sierra Leone was predicated on a mixture of biological

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legitimacy, patrimonial largesse and military strength. In turn, popular allegiance was tempered by tensions between the ruling and non-ruling houses of powerful lineages, between free men and slaves, and between the respective advantages of “going it alone” and forming alliances with rival strongmen (Abraham 1978; Kup 1962). The epitome of the powerful Kono man in this period was of a successful warrior, a man capable of controlling people and resources, and of clearing space and establishing new habitable settlements. Such men achieved their positions of power and leadership by manipulating patron–client relationships, often along kinship lines, in which clients exchanged allegiance for resources such as land and communal privileges (Hardin 1993:45). In Kono, and in Sierra Leone more broadly, warrior chiefs became integral to the colonial policy of indirect rule. Understanding the evolution of these warrior chiefs is vital to understanding the contemporary process of hybridization that paramount and lesser chiefs embody today. During the nineteenth century, warrior chiefs were given the opportunity to re-invent themselves as a chiefly land-owning class while retaining their hegemony over the descendants of their former slaves and subordinates through tributary demands, agricultural corveé, polygyny and other customary claims upon their labor and resources. This was not a simple topdown process led by a colonial center but an evolving process of hybridization. Berry (1993:34, emphasis added) captures this general dynamic well: while colonial administrators sought “to apply customary rules in governing colonial peoples … African colonial subjects renegotiated rules and social identities in order to cope with or take advantage of colonial rule and commercialization.” This mutual influence, which included an element of exploitation, was inevitable in large part because of how the colonial administration was organized. Minimal efforts were made in the colonial period to establish bureaucratic practices outside Freetown and the Western Area. The colonial government did not attempt to build a democratic political culture or a central political entity through the expropriation of alternative deliberative assemblies. On the contrary, as in Ghana (Berry 1998), Nigeria (Omobowale and Olutayo 2007), Botswana (Vaughan 2003) and other British colonial territories (Berry 1993:35), administrators sought information on traditional social structures and identities to render indirect rule more efficient. In short, this was colonialism-on-the-cheap, not by default but by design.2 Between 1896 and 1921 in Sierra Leone, a population of 1.2 million people was governed by only five District Commissioners and one circuit court (Kilson 1966:25).3 Furthermore, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, British administration was primarily confined to Freetown and its environs, known as the Colony, which governed rural Sierra Leone, which was known as the Protectorate (Sesay 1995:166; Hirsch 2001:23). The development of indirect rule was an attempt to identify and fixate interlocutors between colonial administrators and the population in the

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hinterland, in part to facilitate tax collection (Cooper 2002:18; Fanthorpe 1998:116; van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1996:42). In Sierra Leone, as elsewhere across Sub-Saharan Africa, this led to the emergence of semi-autonomous administrative units, or chieftaincies, which became the historical focus of the struggle for political control over the countryside and have remained so until today (Tangri 1978; Allen 1968; see Albrecht 2018b).4

The chiefdom and the expression of hybridization By the time the separation of the Protectorate from the Colony was announced in 1898,5 the British colonial authorities had granted chiefs a variety of financial incentives to participate in the administration of their subjects, including permission to accrue personal fees and fines from native courts. Despite their minimal administrative presence in Sierra Leone’s hinterland, the British were instrumental in making the chieftaincy a lifetime, inheritable position. (See Berry (1993:35) for a discussion of Sub-Saharan Africa in general.) The colonial administration assisted in suppressing local rivals to incumbent chiefs, reduced the option of seceding from a chiefdom, and prohibited the withholding of payments or compulsory labor from a chief. While Anwyl (1916:37) noted that in the early twentieth century “the office of the paramount chief seems to be of recent origin,” he was also clear that the emergence of chiefs cannot be explained by reference to colonial bureaucratic practices alone. Rather, they were seen as the product of “the wealthy status” of the person who became the chief, “a man who was rich enough to stop the contentions of opponents by gifts” (1916:37). There is therefore little doubt that the institutions of paramount and lesser chiefs fundamentally shaped how colonial administrators could exercise and extend colonial authority. This point is worth emphasizing because much contemporary analysis tends to see African chieftaincies as a direct product of colonial manipulation through policy and practice (Herbst 2000; Mbembe 2001; Ntsebeza 1999). Similarly inaccurately, Ray (1996:184) suggests, based on work in Ghana, that the legitimacy of the chiefs “comes (mainly) from the sacred and political order that existed before the imposition of the colonial state.” These categorical assumptions may be overcome by applying the notion of hybridization because the authority of chiefs is articulated as emanating from neither state-based practices nor local custom. Rather, I emphasize how chiefs incorporate multiple sources of authority, which are enacted simultaneously in acts of order-making (Albrecht and Moe 2015:16). Chiefs were therefore not simply incorporated as an extension of colonial regimes. Rather, the metamorphosis of warriors into chiefs strengthened the role of the latter by expanding the registers of authority that could be drawn upon, which now included the products of a set of centrally governed institutions such as the legal texts and financial resources coming out of Freetown. At the same time, it is not surprising that David Keen (2005:10) notes of Sierra Leone in the 1930s, “[d]evelopment programs were a threat to chiefs

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if they offered new choices and new sources of loans and patronage [to the general population].” Chiefs made considerable efforts to capture such programs and largely “undermined the capacity of Native Administrations to undertake modern social services for the local populace” (Kilson 1966:26). In other words, establishment and recognition of the institution of chiefs occurred in a manner that denied colonial rulers direct control over them, and they, the colonial rulers, were never willing to pursue alternatives to the authority of chiefs by expanding the colonial administration. As Frederick Cooper (2002:18, emphasis added) notes, in the decades before World War II, the “attempts of colonial rulers to remake African societies … had petered out, as colonial governments realized the limits of their own power.” Certainly, in the case of Sierra Leone, the administrative and financial advantages that indirect rule afforded the colonial administration were offset by the rather large claims that chiefs were permitted to make upon local resources. These claims were instituted when the Sierra Leone Protectorate was declared in 1896 and were carried forward under the 1937 Native Administration Scheme, which was the colony’s first concerted attempt at local government reform (Fanthorpe 2001:380). The approach of the Native Administration Scheme thus became an inherently contradictory attempt to fit administration through chiefs to new state-sanctioned tasks without causing any significant diminution of chiefly authority (Kilson 1966:26–27; for similar discussions on Botswana, see Vaughan 2003). The main objective of the Scheme was to devolve the considerable economic and juridical powers formerly vested in paramount chiefs to a local assembly called the Tribal Authority (later called the Chiefdom Council) directly represented and funded by local taxpayers. Yet, while the chiefs strongly criticized the Scheme when it was introduced, little was done in practice to prevent paramount and lesser chiefs from continuing to collect payments for political and juridical services and appropriating tax revenues for private use. Indeed, attempts to closely supervise the administration of chieftaincy waned in the late 1940s, which in turn contributed to and solidified their positions of power. This approach is indicative of the entire colonial and, as we shall see in the next section, post-colonial eras, in which successive governments continued to recognize the authority and central role of chiefdoms. While they were legally recognized, oversight of their actions was limited, bordering on non-existent. What emerges from these discussions is a notion of hybridization that takes its inspiration but also differs from the focus of Roger Mac Ginty (2010, 2011) and Oliver Richmond (2011), who have been at the forefront of developing the concept of hybridity as a critique of the liberal peace thesis and the fragile state discourse. In this book, hybridity is seen as encapsulating the historical process of assembling different sources of authority simultaneously. On the one hand, the diversity that marked political orders across Africa was transformed during the colonial era and subsumed into a unifying colonial administrative structure, becoming part of long-term state formation

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processes. This was the political entity that was recognized by outsiders as a bureaucratically and centrally governed state. On the other hand, chiefs also drew authority, first, from their autochthon status, and second, from their role as intermediaries with alien rulers, including colonial and post-colonial impositions by the administration in Freetown. These different forms of authority assembled different logics, practices and forms of power to reinforce a process of hybridization that was embedded in the very foundation of Sierra Leone as a political entity.

Post-colonial Sierra Leone As was common across colonial Africa, the transition of Sierra Leone in 1961 from a colony to an independent state was an elite affair. Led by Sir Milton Margai, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) won the first general elections held in 1962 (Barrows 1976:98; Sesay 1995:167). The new Sierra Leonean rulers could have chosen the approach of post-colonial governments in other African countries, where traditional leaders were considered to be “repressive collaborators of the colonial masters” (Kyed and Buur 2007:1; see also Englebert 2002; Oomen 2005). In Ghana, for example, this anti-traditional leader approach was the main reason why the Nkrumah government abolished the judicial powers and relative political autonomy of traditional authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s (see Boone 2003:146; Kludze 2000). In Nigeria too, there was, according to Vaughan (1995:512), a “vocal anti-chieftaincy lobby, consisting mainly of radical intellectuals,” who contended that chieftaincy institutions were “vestiges of an oppressive past … anachronistic and dysfunctional in a rapidly changing and complex country” (for Botswana, see Vaughan 2003). Had the SLPP in Sierra Leone pursued a similar line, this could have constituted an important break, symbolically if not necessarily in practice, from the principles of indirect rule that were part and parcel of the emergence, preservation and perceived corruption of the chieftaincy. Instead, chiefs became integral to political party formation in Freetown while remaining the primary gatekeepers to external pressures on the localities over which they ruled. In the first decade after independence, national politicians often found it necessary to engage in factional rivalries in the chiefdoms in order to obtain electoral support (Minikin 1973). This remains the case today, and differs from the case of Nigeria, where the chieftaincy, “although firmly rooted in kinship and community structures, still lacks access to formal political authority” (Vaughan 1995:512). As the SLPP assumed power in post-colonial Sierra Leone, the party emerged as a mixture of “chiefs and educated protectorate Africans,” with the chiefs playing a crucial role in strengthening the party (Hayward and Dumbuya 1985:64). What is more, given the initial lack of an independent organization, political parties relied on the chieftaincies to solidify their power base throughout the country (Minikin 1973:130). Party policy in general sought to increase the power and

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wealth of the chiefs while seeking to subordinate them nationally. This simultaneous and contradictory approach that combined subordination and fortification accounts to a large extent for the extreme localization of political organization in rural Sierra Leone, which is based around long-established criteria of identity and belonging (Allen 1968:306; Fanthorpe 2001:372). Irrespective of which political party has governed in Freetown, a majority of party politicians who were elected to the new state’s central legislature were the members of chiefly families. By 1967, when the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) came to power, the party was being confronted with a relatively autonomous local political network of chiefs in Kono, where 75 percent of the district’s parliamentarians claimed to belong to chiefly lineages (Reno 1995:80). Siaka Stevens, the APC leader and president from 1968 to 1985, concluded that, if interests of the state that fueled his authority were not to bend before challenges from strong chiefly interests, he had to either banish or co-opt the chiefs in a drive to assert his position as a pre-eminent political force. He pursued the latter strategy by deepening patrimonial networks, which, far from strengthening state power, confirmed the role of paramount and lesser chiefs and thus consolidated the hybrid order they embody. State formation in Sierra Leone thus took the form of assemblages of connections and mutual influences between colonial and post-colonial government agents, who were entwined with local leaders. There is no clear line of separation between chiefs and government institutions in the political structure of the post-colonial Sierra Leonean state. Fanthorpe (1998:116) argues that paramount chiefs continue to have the somewhat “paradoxical role” of being “state agents commissioned to exercise ‘traditional’ authority.” This chapter suggests instead that paramount and lesser chiefs today stand at the center of processes of hybridization, that is, of simultaneous processes of positive accommodation and separation. The state idea and system are both sources and outcomes of that order.

The legal existence of today’s chiefs Sierra Leone’s 149 chiefdoms, each subdivided into a number of sections, have been established in a series of legal documents. Some date from before or just after independence in 1961, including the Tribal Authorities Ordinance (1938), the Chiefdom Treasuries Act (1938), and the Tribal Authorities (Amendment) Act (1964). Other, more recent pieces of legislation include the Local Government Act (2004) and the Chieftaincy Act (2009), both of which were drawn up and ratified under pressure from external actors. The 1991 Constitution of Sierra Leone ratifies the official position of the paramount chiefs, stating that “the institution of the Chieftaincy, as established by customary law and usage” and “its non-abolition by law” are to be “guaranteed and preserved” (GOSL 1991:72(1)). This is in contradistinction to many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana, where both the 1971 Chieftaincy Act and the 1992 Constitution put considerable limitations

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on the judicial functions of the chiefs. In Sierra Leone, the government has an obligation to restore the traditional role of paramount chiefs, including their administrative and customary judicial responsibilities. With reference to the colonial era, this is done on the basis of the Ruling Houses that existed at independence in 1961, of which there are one to three in each chiefdom; paramount chiefs can only be drawn from these families.6 The fact that chiefs in Sierra Leone are partly the expression of a “state effect,” to borrow a term from Mitchell (2006), is therefore not in question. Indeed, this argument is generally applicable to the institution of the chieftaincy across Sub-Saharan Africa, reflecting the integral role of colonial regimes in the continent’s processes of state formation (Berry 1993; Cooper 2002). This often leads to the drawing of boundaries between state and society which makes the former appear like an “inert ‘structure’” (Mitchell 2006) that somehow stands apart from individuals (including chiefs), contains them, and provides a framework for their authority and their lives. The authority of the chiefs continues to be based around their symbolic representations in state legislation, which projects the impression that they are produced and given authority by the state, rather than being co-constitutive of it.7 The chieftaincy therefore constitutes the basic unit of local government, and paramount chiefs sit on District and Town Councils across the country. The 2004 Local Government Act stipulates that chiefs have a “traditional function,” for instance, in preventing offences in their area, prohibiting illegal gambling, making and enforcing bylaws, and so forth (GOSL 2004:28).8 At the core of their state-sanctioned power lies their legal mandate to hold the land in trust for the people of the chiefdom (GOSL 2004), which in rural areas of Sierra Leone, including Kono, means that they have almost exclusive powers over the distribution of the most important source of income, land for farming and mining. Nationally, paramount chiefs are Members of Parliament and advisers through the National Council of Paramount Chiefs. Understanding the dynamics of how a large-scale political entity such as Sierra Leone developed and was recognized internationally as a sovereign state in 1961 is fundamental to grasping how the production and reproduction of processes of hybridization have occurred in Sierra Leone. The way in which authority is produced, reproduced and manifested in localities across Sierra Leone is equally fundamental. Indeed, it is the ability of the chiefs to incorporate a wide variety of sources of authority from different domains and origins that gives them the flexibility to claim a stake in national politics and power while at the same time expressing extreme localization as “sons of the soil.”

Hybridity, origin and owning authority in Peyima So far, this chapter has emphasized the emergence of chiefs in Sierra Leone as a product of long-term processes of hybridization rather than as products of

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the colonial state per se. Hybridization, an endless and never-ending row of disjunctive repetitions that open up the possibility for transformations, draws in a multitude of sources of authority that position the chiefs at the center of this argument. The result is transformations that are partial, based on compromise, and occurring at the very center of where power, privilege and authority are constructed. At the core of this chapter’s argument is a colonial state that was an appendage of colonial military and administrative complexes. However, this does not negate the importance of the agency of the colonized in fundamentally shaping that encounter (Cooper 1994). It is therefore important to develop a greater understanding of how this agency is structured and of the local sources of authority that have shaped and continue to shape it, as well as its embodiment, Sierra Leone’s chiefs. This, the chapter suggests, is best done through ethnographically collected data because they allow us to approximate, if not fully obtain, an insider’s view of how authority is produced locally and the role that the centrally governed bureaucratic system has played in this regard. Ethnographic data are also important because the claim to be a chief in rural Sierra Leone is derived to a large extent from oral tradition and its (local) interpretations and manifestations (Albrecht 2012:152). In this regard, Fanthorpe’s (2001:372) notion of “extreme localization” is helpful for conceptualizing how authority is distributed. The enduring position of chiefs in rural Sierra Leone has at times been explained negatively as a “lack of state” (Sesay 1995) rather than by the types of authority that these hybrid organizational formations can draw upon in making order. Among those who do not interpret localization as a lack of state are Kris Hardin (1993), Paul Richards (1996), Lisa Denney (2014b) and Fanthorpe (2001). In her study of Kainkordu,9 a small town in Kono, Hardin (1993:93) makes an important observation about what localization implies by demonstrating how identity relies on ritual actions that “locate individuals in particular spaces by giving them rights, as well as obligations, to others who share those spaces.” In short, this is patrimonialism in its very basic form, where the authority to govern was the personal domain of one or a few leaders.10 Articulations of localization express important distinctions, for example, between the “natives” and “strangers” of a locality, a common ordering principle across West Africa (see Berry 1993:32–33). This distinction allows local communities to make boundaries, draw on sources of authority that have a local origin, and undergo the same rites of passage in the same location in order to defend it. In fact, the application of these principles of localization defines a community’s very existence as a habitable space that should be defended from external challenges and interference. Historically, the Guinea Coast was the site of early intersections of transSaharan and trans-Atlantic systems that generated intense interaction within and among large and ethno-linguistically diverse and migrating populations (Fanthorpe 2001:374; Fulton 1972:1218). The slave trade in the western Sudan had begun by the eighth century and continued under European

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control from the mid-fifteenth century. Out of these developments grew a keen sense of insiders and outsiders – natives and strangers – that was institutionalized, for instance, in locally organized secret societies (Bledsoe 1984:456; see Ellis 2010; Højbjerg 2007; see Chapter 7 for a detailed discussion). Migration continued to mark Sierra Leone’s Kono District into the modern era through diamond mining, which began in the 1930s and boomed in the 1950s (Sesay 1967:258), attracting miners and overseas companies from across Sierra Leone and West Africa into the twenty-first century (see Keen 2005:12; Reno 1995; Albrecht 2012). In other words, strangers as opposed to natives have been part and parcel of Peyima’s – and the Guinea Coast’s – long-term history since well before, but also including, the colonial and post-colonial eras. In Peyima today, a stranger, or allochthon, is considered to be merely seeking personal gain if he or she moves to the town. Because he is not tied genealogically and therefore ritually to the place by being a son of the soil, he is expected to exhaust the location of its riches and then leave. A stark example of the native–stranger dichotomy from the civil war is that between rebel fighters from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which captured Peyima in the late 1990s, and the donsos, the locally recruited Civil Defence Force (CDF) of hunter militias (see Ferme and Hoffman 2004:75; Hoffman 2007:647).11 Ibrahim “Kalilu” Kamara, a man in his thirties and a close ally of Peyima’s Town Chief who had been a refugee in Guinea and Freetown in the late 1990s, told me that “the level of destruction done to this town, the way I saw the town cannot be compared to anywhere … It was a ghost town, everything completely destroyed.” As strangers, the RUF were standing against the CDF, the sons of the soil: [When the RUF took control of] the mining, the CDF, sons of the soil, said: “This is our land. We can’t sit and watch a stranger destroy our land in the town. So what we will do is we have to stop them. If the government cannot stop them, then we have to forcibly stop them.” That was their aim. Our brothers, our grandfathers, our fathers, our siblings; they own the authority here. We should take care of our own affairs by collecting our own dues and then seeing what we can make out of that for development. And then the caretaker chiefs:12 since our brothers are coming, they should take over again. The RUF was very furious with that. (Ibrahim “Kalihu” Kamara, interview, Peyima, 2009) Kamara’s statement describes literally how strangers are perceived in Sierra Leone: by definition they are considered to “neither understand nor respect local precedents” and to “represent a threat to the rights and properties of all” (Fanthorpe 2001:383). However, a successful claim to “own the authority” is not fixed – it must be reproduced continuously. While the names of the paramount chiefs are recorded as Ruling Houses in the Government Gazette,13 being a son of the soil and

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forcefully articulating this claim is open to manipulation across Sierra Leone, at the town, section, as well as chiefdom levels. It is a status that is constantly challenged and invoked in symbolic and physical struggles because it provides access to resources within and beyond the chiefdom. As such, it is deeply political with respect to who occupies what positions in relation to other contenders at any given time. This is particularly relevant in the case of town chiefs: because they are not listed in the Government Gazette, their indigenous status cannot be fixed in a written text (Connerton 1989:7; Herzfeld 1992:118). Being a “son of the soil” does not feature in bald, de-contextualized, legal prose. Claiming to be a son of the soil is also of the utmost importance to the lives of Peyima’s residents because it can be transformed into claims over economic forms of capital and livelihood such as land for mining and farming. Production of this status, and local political struggles over it, are central to defining the authority and legitimacy of a chief.

Challenging the chief and the origin of Peyima The authority of figures at the center of localized expressions of power can be challenged through authoritative languages of origin, family history and belonging. The case of Gborie, the current town chief in Peyima, was no exception, as he was regarded by the Tankos – the other chiefly family in town – as having had taken over the position illegitimately. Pa Kongue, an elder with close ties to the Tankos and considered by many to be an important town historian, explained this to me. Gborie, Pa Kongue claimed, had come to power “only by politics,” that is, illegitimately, through external interference and the mobilization of his family’s patronage networks. One argument used to dismiss Gborie’s status as a son of the soil was that he was mining excessively for diamonds in more than a dozen pits in the outskirts of Peyima while doing little to develop the town to everyone’s benefit. In other words, he was acting as if he was a stranger. Allegedly through external political pressure from the APC in 1985, Gborie had taken over the leadership of Peyima at a young age. He was now supportive of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), not the APC that won general elections in 2007. (There was a sense among Peyima’s elders that before the war the APC had exploited mineral deposits without giving anything in return.) Once he was installed as a chief, very few measures could be taken against him. It seemed that there was nothing the Tankos could do because Gborie was a close ally of Kamara Chiefdom’s paramount chief, Melvin Ngekia, whom he had supported when Ngekia ran for the paramount chieftaincy of Kamara chiefdom a few years earlier. This alliance had paid off for Gborie, who had become the Mining Chairman, a lucrative position within the state system that signs off all mining licenses in the chiefdom. In short, no mining would take place in Kamara without his prior agreement. The Tankos simply had to wait until Gborie either died or stepped down, and

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then “replace him with the correct person that is entitled,” as Pa Kongue put it (Pa Kongue, interview, Peyima, 2009). The basis for challenging Gborie and the micro-struggle it led to was historical and localized – it was not articulated by the symbolic language of the state (Hansen and Stepputat 2001:7–8), that is, by a legal document stamped for approval by the government. Gborie had not been elected on the basis of a list of ruling houses in the Government Gazette as paramount and section chiefs generally are. If anything, it was party politics that had corrupted the patrilineal line of descent, Pa Kongue explained. The state itself was closely linked to these events, of course. It had delineated the Chiefdom geographically, that is, the physical space that was being fought over, and it “owned” the title of Mining Chairman that had been given to Gborie, which endowed him with considerable power to decide who could mine. Pa Kongue nevertheless demarcated the symbolic boundaries between state and locality, and explained that the Tankos’ claim to power was based on a historical fact, namely that the Tankos, not the Gbories, had been among the original founders of Peyima. This had not been recorded by colonial or postcolonial governments; such micro-struggles were neither recorded, given the resources allocated to governing Sierra Leone, nor relevant to governing Kamara chiefdom, let alone a small town like Peyima. However, it was a piece of history that was central to local struggles over power that would be used by the Tankos to eventually lay claim to Peyima as well as Bondu, the section in which Peyima is located. Pa Kongue told the following piece of history about Peyima; while it is set at an unspecified time, the story reflects historical records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when warrior chiefs ruled the area: People lived here long before, and there was a war between them. Warriors were fighting to capture land by then, and drove the people that first lived here away. After the warriors drove those people [away], people started to come back to resettle. The entire area was bushy. The first settlers to come into Peyima settled in Tombodu, a village about four miles from here [the headquarters town of Kamara chiefdom]. There was no road for them to come here. They followed the river, Peyi, where [the settlement] got the name from, Peyima. They were three persons: Kombo, Soema and Pardomba [who have no direct descendants in Peyima today]. When they came, they met [at] a place where formerly people were settled; just a round house was there, but it was destroyed. They had all gone. They had a youth with them who was called Chief Jimmy [from whom the Tankos descend14], and said: “Well, now we are going to initiate that of our son, that youth named Jimmy, we are going to initiate him here now for us to settle.” They had one female behind them called Daiya, who was there when they brushed the area to get out the dirt and throw it away, and they decided to stay there. Some of their friends and relatives followed to come

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Thus did Pa Kongue explain to me who had founded Peyima and who could legitimately count themselves among its leaders today as an original son of the soil. Evidently the Gborie family was not among them. However, when we spoke about the point in time when the town had been established, Gborie stated as a matter of fact that he was a direct descendant of those who originally settled in the locality now known as Peyima. He did not justify this claim with an elaborate historical narrative. The power base he invoked to back up his claim was buttressed by the land for mining and farming that he controlled through his position as town chief. In addition, he gathered considerable support from the majority of town elders, many of whom benefited from his patronage, which he was constantly under pressure to generate. Finally, it was descendants of the Tankos – not the Gbories – who felt marginalized and thus had a direct interest in challenging the town chief ’s legitimacy. In analyzing Gborie’s position of authority, it is clear that his power was drawn from numerous mutually reinforced sources simultaneously. He embodied authority that emanated from the physical space of Peyima, its history and its (literal) origin, from political pressure to assume the position of town chief, and from his position as Mining Chairman, a position within the state system to which he had been appointed by Ngekia, the paramount chief. His position did seem unassailable, as it depended on entitlement and the use of force – he owned the authority. And yet, he and his family were being challenged by words, if not in practice, by the Tankos and others who did not stand to profit from patronage relationships with the Gbories (even if they did benefit from being a family of authority in Peyima, claiming the ownership of houses and land in and around town). These people were waiting until the time came when they could reclaim a formal position of authority and thus of control over the township’s land. That time had not yet come, but without the ability to claim a stake in these political micro-struggles, the Tankos would not even have had a case to make. Certainly, when a new town chief was to be found, local history and how it was presented and interpreted by local elders would be central to the search for a legitimate successor.

The death of a boy, the lack of diamonds and the dark world Legitimate claims to being a chief are derived from the oral history of Peyima’s founding and the ability to manipulate it. The only way to lay claim to a chiefly position or another position of community representation and authority is by successfully claiming a probable ancestral link to the founders of the town, that is, by making the case to be a son of the soil in the literal

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sense of the term. A lot is at stake – in particular, claims to land as the most important source of income. The centrality of land as a source of cosmological-ancestral authority worth fighting over is in turn exposed and reproduced by the repetition of numerous ritual procedures for its clearance and enclosure. As the primary figure of local authority – the formal descendant of those who made Peyima habitable – the chief is expected to oversee and sometimes participate in such ritual enactments. They are constitutive of the belief system among people in Peyima – and Sierra Leone more generally – that ancestral spirits and devils zealously guard the land and demand attention and sacrifice from their descendants. Spirits have the power to both give and take, so sacrifices, or kwaebonda, which means to “pour libation for your forefathers,” must be made. And events were occurring which were taken as an indication that insufficient sacrifices were being made. Indeed, a number of Peyima’s inhabitants suggested that these events were a consequence of Gborie’s preoccupation with making money, rather than fulfilling sacrificial responsibilities on behalf of the town. One day during my fieldwork an epileptic boy had a seizure while he was crossing a narrow path through the swamp to reach his father’s farm. He fell into the water and drowned. Nobody witnessed the accident, but the scene became quite dramatic as news of it spread across town. Everyone was drawn to the place, women yelling and screaming, shocked and in mourning for the boy and his relatives, running back and forth between the edge of the town and where the boy had been found in the swamp. He was the second child in two months who had drowned. Peyima’s residents believed that the devil had taken the boy and lured him down to the river and into the water. “We cannot see him,” one of the spectators said about the devil, “but he looks like you and me and is hungry for small children.” A few days later, a woman had a seizure while doing laundry by the river She collapsed and died on the river bank. Events and accidents such as these may seem coincidental to an outsider, but the people of Peyima do not recognize coincidence: they connect such events to other occurrences. For example, diamonds are scarce, and investors prepared to inject cash and prosperity into the town from the outside are not forthcoming. According to local beliefs, the town’s ancestors were punishing their descendants for not paying appropriate attention to them, and offerings were required. In corroboration of this, people cited a dream reported by a local woman that a rope had to be tied from one end of the town to the other. No reason for having to do this was provided other than to please the ancestors, but there was an expectation that the town leadership would take action. After discussions among the elders led by Gborie, Pa Kongue staged a ritual with a few prominent young men in Peyima, all descendants of the main families of the town. A small hut was built down by the water where the epileptic boy had died. Rice was boiled and fowl were killed, blood was dripped, food was prepared, and the spirits of the ancestors were invoked.

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Some of the food was left in the hut by the water for the ancestors; the rest was eaten by those who had conducted the ritual. The deaths, the lack of diamonds: dangers and harmful forces are ubiquitous, and significant authority, including that of the chiefs, stems from the chiefs’ relations to these forces and their ability to appease them. This is no simple task. Indeed, while the chiefs must respond, they are not all-powerful. As the following example illustrates, an undergrowth of dark forces is at play as an omnipresent challenge to Peyima’s inhabitants. As residents of a center of alluvial mining, young men from Peyima and across Sierra Leone try their luck in the many diamond pits that perforate Kamara Chiefdom. Miners inevitably became key informants during my fieldwork, as mining is the most important avenue to making a potentially lucrative living. And mining itself is shrouded in ritual activity (Albrecht 2012:156). One day a miner whom I talked to regularly gave me four handwritten pages with a number of narratives, one of them entitled “The Dark World in the Villages and Towns.” It describes the direct impact of the otherworldly on people’s lives and the potential harm that these powers may trigger, which are often referred to as “black magic”: The dark world consists of evil spirits, good spirits and wizards. The wizard in the village is dangerous and evil, children die rapidly, and even miners suffer a lot. Whenever miners extract gravel in the mining, some evil elements who do not like your prosperity play a great role in destroying you through their fetish power, washing your gravel at night and taking your diamonds to the dark world. Then you become zero after a lot of expenditure. Even business people, whenever your business starts to rise, some of your neighbors become annoyed, they don’t want you to prosper more than they do. They will start fetish practices in your shop or business. They will come with a big note of money to purchase articles in your shop and then ask for change. When given the change, they take it to the dark world, and you will see a rapid fall in your business until you collapse. Whenever the land has been polluted with bad malpractices and dubious acts like starvation, a witch doctor is invited in the town or village to come and show the reasons why children are dying and production of diamonds has become less. The witch doctor is a powerful resigned wizard who knows the secret of the society. Whenever the witch doctor starts to play, you will see some people you don’t expect coming in the Court Barry15 in front of the community and confess their evil deeds, how many children they have killed, diamonds stolen and shops destroyed. They are so blessed and lucky that no court or law will convict them. When a witch doctor destroys you, only the lord will fight for you. Some of them, when they are at the point of death, confess about their evil deeds. (Miner notes, Peyima, 2009)

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The sources of authority articulated by referring to ancestors and devils and their respective authority to give and take life and prosperity are at the center of ritual practices in Peyima. Authority, including that of chiefs, emanates from participating in these processes of ritual inclusion and exclusion, and is thus part of the patronage networks that define a particular person’s social position and authority. In turn, these networks define links to and relations in the locality and thus the right to govern it. This does not mean that chiefs are fully in control of cosmological-ancestral forces, but they are expected to play a central role in keeping them – evil spirits, good spirits, wizards – in check. The chiefs’ authority and legitimacy to govern is related to their ability to do so. In the context of Sierra Leone, Peyima is not unique. Localities throughout rural areas of the country – indeed, along the Guinea Coast as a whole – are the primary social matrices for those who inhabit them and are both literal and metaphorical “clearings” (Fanthorpe 2001:375), that is, spaces suitable for humans to inhabit. Thus, what is analyzed in these ethnographic discussions is the extremely localized sources of authority that constitute and shape the chiefs. Localization and the authority that emanates from it are to be understood in literal terms: they tie the individual, including chiefs, to concrete physical spaces and define their authority.

The constitution of hybridization Scholars who study Sierra Leone generally accept that the paramount chiefs are the definitive figures of authority outside Freetown (Fanthorpe 1998; Richards 1996; Reno 1995; Peters 2006; Jackson 2005). This is the consequence of a legacy of colonial indirect rule that is “particularly strong in Sierra Leone,” according to Fanthorpe (2005:28). The involvement of chiefs and their relatives in governing Sierra Leone since independence in 1961 means that they have remained closely involved in almost all aspects of everyday governance in rural areas of the country (Minikin 1973:130; Fanthorpe 2005:28). Mac Ginty (2011:72, emphasis added) argues that “both entities [the international and the local in peacebuilding processes] are likely to be the product of significant prior mixing of peoples, ideas, and norms concerning the exercise of power, the distribution of resources and the organization of society.” This chapter suggests that, by exploring the emergence of Sierra Leone’s chiefs from a historical and ethnographic perspective, “significant prior mixing” is in fact always the case. And certainly, SSR, a set of interventions concentrated in a short period of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, would not change this trajectory but merely add to it and enable interstitial transformations. Hybridization denotes that authority always already emanates simultaneously from multiple sources, including sacred and other spiritual powers, kinship, and secret society membership, as well as from an operational decision-making center of government, bureaucracy and legislation (Albrecht and

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Moe 2015). The “state” and “tradition” do not exist independently of one another in a dichotomous relationship. It is the simultaneity and mutuality of this relationship and the fact that they cannot be divided into two (or more) pure forms that is constitutive of the permanence of a process of hybridization. Therefore, the paramount and lesser chiefs in Kamara Chiefdom and chiefs in general across Sub-Saharan Africa cannot simply be characterized as institutions that assert authority because they are formally recognized in state legislation. The assertion of authority is inevitably intertwined with notions of locally embedded autochthony, spiritual beliefs and rituals. Chiefs are aware of this and play on the hybrid nature – the many sources – of their authority by strategically referring to and utilizing their legislative as well as extremely localized positions. The government of Sierra Leone continues to be supportive of chieftaincy’s central position in governing rural Sierra Leone. Indeed, colonial and post-colonial governments have both been dependent upon and partly constituted by the chiefs. Thus, the state did not create the chiefs, just as chiefs did not create the state. Instead the two entities were and remain mutually constitutive of one another, shaped by and shaping each other’s sources of authority through constant and innumerable repetitions that are interstitial, and that allow for the introduction of discourses, practices and resources that have a transformative effect. The authority that paramount and lesser chiefs wield as central figures of authority in rural Sierra Leone played an important part in creating the animosities that led to civil war in 1991. And yet, as the final section of this chapter argues, precisely because of the historically generated hybridized order that constitutes chiefly authority in Sierra Leone, paramount and lesser chiefs re-established themselves after the conflict in positions similar to those that they held before the war.

Conflict, caretaker chiefs and the return of the old guard Analyses that emerged in the early 2000s, buttressed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in the aftermath of the war, centered on the role of “custom” and its function as an instrument of oppression (Sawyer 2008:389). “Customary rule, in varying degrees, was simply a dictatorship of rural gerontocrats,” Sesay and Hughes (2005:55) state; “forced labour, arbitrary fines, banishments, and discrimination against women and young people were part of everyday life” (see also Sawyer 2008:389; Richards 2005:577–578). Richards (2005:580) explores how the war was bound up with abuses associated with rural custom. Peters (2006:71), who conducted extensive fieldwork among former combatants, concludes that “[t]raditional gerontocratic and patriarchal principles were despised.” According to both scholars, the motivation of the RUF was grievance rather than greed. “Chieftaincy, ‘customary’ courts and traditional bride service” bore down unfairly upon

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impoverished youth, who could not control the fruits of their own labor because of chiefly levies and arbitrary fines (Richards 2005:580). Richards remarks that the civil war is thus best understood as an ongoing rural “class” conflict, a revolt of former slaves and subordinate classes against customary authority. Kono District was a stronghold of the RUF from 1996 to 2001 (Peters 2006:55). From the beginning of the war, most paramount and lesser chiefs were either killed or fled into exile in Guinea and Freetown. The RUF replaced the chiefly authorities with their own leaders, so-called “caretaker chiefs,” thus replicating the system of paramount and lesser chiefs that they had fought against. Benjamin Kamara, who originated from Kailahun District, worked in Kono for the United Nations in the late 1990s and now runs a hotel in Koidu, told me, “Everybody that was in authority had to run away. Otherwise they [the RUF] will see you as an element of the old regime that destroyed the land” (Benjamin Kamara, interview, Koidu, 2009). To the RUF, pre-war chiefs symbolized a land-owning elite that, like the central government, was corrupt and unaccountable and therefore a legitimate target. In Peyima, Gborie had fled to Freetown, and a caretaker chief had been selected among the remaining villagers. While Peyima’s caretaker chief was not a fighter himself, he came under RUF command. Chosen because of his knowledge of the town and surrounding areas, including where diamond deposits might be found, he was beaten half to death and then given the choice between being killed and taking the caretaker position. He chose the latter, something that was considered acceptable by Peyima’s inhabitants, and he was still a central elder in the town after the war when I met him. When the war ended, the government of Sierra Leone, with support from the United Kingdom, re-established the administrative system of paramount chiefs through the 2000–2002 Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme (Albrecht 2005:16). Some observers considered this reconstitution of the chiefly system to be a re-creation of the conditions that had led to the war in the first place, that is, allowing a rural elite to recapture a position from which to use local resources and tax the local population for personal enrichment (Jackson 2005; Sawyer 2008). At the same time, consultations carried out by the NGO Conciliation Resources (CR) just prior to the official ending of the conflict reported that “chiefs have a vital role to play in restoring stability; there is no other institution capable of replacing them at this stage in the Sierra Leone polity” (Conciliation Resources 2000). A “breakdown in traditional order” had admittedly occurred, according to President Kabbah (2003), but the government of Sierra Leone pledged to restore dignity to the chiefdoms of the country. Benjamin Kamara’s explanation of why this was the case summarizes succinctly how this was possible. In a discussion about the current importance of paramount and lesser chiefs and why they had been able to recapture their positions of power after the war, he talked about “tradition,” a source of authority that is different from, and therefore cannot be reduced to, references to the state:

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Hybridization and the authority of chiefs Because no matter how you look at things, people have to preserve tradition. They will tell you “We have had these structures for decades.” They will tell you “These are our ancestors.” The ancestral lineage is there. They will tell you “These are our protectors.” They will tell you “These are our advocates.” The structures should remain in place, but they have to be reformed. What should go to the central government – that’s the police – in terms of cases should be reported immediately instead of being kept in the community. They should not impose on the people because in some areas the people are so afraid of especially the paramount chiefs that anything they say, whether wrong or right, is final. And people still hold this opinion: whatever the chief says, you can bring your suggestion, he can listen to your views and comments and everything. But if he says anything, that’s the gospel truth, and that’s the final judgment. (Benjamin Kamara, interview, Peyima, 2009)

Even after the war ended in 2002, a war in which they had been directly targeted by the RUF, a war that they themselves have been considered partly responsible for, the paramount and lesser chiefs were able to reconstitute themselves as local leaders in rural Sierra Leone. This underscores the perseverance of chiefly authority and echoes Rosalind Shaw’s (2007:184) discussion of the TRC and the politics of memory in Sierra Leone: “healing and reconciliation,” generally speaking, “depend on forgetting rather than truth-telling.” In other words, the chiefs benefited from a genuine urge to “forgive and forget” (Shaw 2007:184), and as Fanthorpe (2005:45) concluded in 2006, “Many continue to find chiefs preferable to elected politicians and bureaucrats because, according to their calculations, chiefs are predisposed to defend the customary property and citizenship regimes that establish their own authority.”

Conclusion Sierra Leone’s paramount and lesser chiefs are central figures in Sesay’s (1995:166) argument that “Sierra Leone offers a classic example of a country with a ‘strong society’ and ‘weak state.’” The role of the chiefs was “frozen in place,” Richards (2005:582) argues, through policies of indirect rule and because “a strong state” with “rigid bureaucratic lines of command” did not emerge either before or after independence in 1961. Indeed, the emergence of a strong centrally governed bureaucratic state was never a goal of colonial and post-colonial policies and practices. Instead, a patrimonial system emerged that was definitively non-bureaucratic in its make-up, one based on reciprocities, that is, on personal, densely interwoven relationships and the intangible and symbolic dynamics of status (Pitcher et al. 2009). This chapter has argued that viewing Sierra Leone through the lens of a strong society vs. a weak state amounts to a reductionist reading of how

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authority is configured and continuously produced in rural Sierra Leone. It does not accurately reflect processes of state formation through indirect rule or the fact that, while the state did not create the chiefs, nor did the chiefs create the state. They were and remain constitutive of one another as particular embodiments of authority, shaped by and shaping each other’s acts of authority. This also means that, while war and hybridization may have become mutually reinforcing processes during the 1990s, making it more visible and obvious to the external observer, hybridization is not a function of war, just as it is not the product of post-conflict reconstruction efforts. Hybridity lies at the very foundation of how Sierra Leone emerged as a political entity that, by 1961, was being “forced to behave (externally) as if it was a Weberian (territorial) state,” as Peters (2006:44) puts it. It is this explicit historical dimension of the concept of hybridity that is often lacking in current analyses of the term. Hybridity represents an important challenge to the failed/fragile state discourse and the binaries through which the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state modes of political ordering in the global South (Albrecht and Moe 2015; Lemay-Hébert and Kühn 2015). However, if the concept is used ahistorically, the danger is that it reproduces analytically the very dichotomies that it seeks to overcome, rather than demonstrating empirically and theoretically how hybridization is inevitably constituted through long-term processes. The hybrid never arrives because it is in constant movement between spaces, a never-ending process in which origin and arrival are identifiable and yet can never be fully determined. Rather than constituting a centrally governed state, throughout the colonial and post-colonial eras Sierra Leone became and remains a multi-centered system of governance in which assemblages cluster around and are expressed through the figures of paramount and lesser chiefs as embodiments of hybridization. In turn, these figures draw significant authority to act from a centrally governed state, including legislation, and played a key role in how the state system emerged and then collapsed in Sierra Leone. At the same time, paramount and lesser chiefs invoke sacred and other customary powers locally that revolve around kinship, autochthon status, and secret society membership. The chiefs are thus in a position to incorporate seemingly contradictory and complementary discourses and practices into their register of authority. It is their ability to do so that lies at the foundation of their role as vehicles for hybridization, a concept that captures the multiplicity of discourses and practices that are at play simultaneously and are constantly in the making.

Notes 1 The point worth noting here is that traditional leaders in Sierra Leone and elsewhere cannot be seen simplistically as a pure form of African authority that is legitimized by traditional beliefs and practices, nor as an indigenous form of power

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Hybridization and the authority of chiefs corrupted by colonial politics (Kyed and Buur 2006). Caution is similarly advised when applying the dualist perspectives of scholars such as Ekeh’s (1975) “two publics” and Mamdani’s (1996:18) notion of the Janus-faced state, where urban/ civil power speaks the language of civil society and rights, while rural/customary power emphasizes community and culture (see Fanthorpe 2001:368). It is precisely the ability of chiefs to incorporate, if not always smoothly reconcile, a wide variety of sources of authority that gives them the flexibility to claim a stake in nationallevel politics and power, while at the same time, in an act of extreme localization, making the argument that they are “sons of the soil.” On top of this, because of Sierra Leone’s reputation as the “White Man’s Grave,” the colony did not, as Reno (1995:30) notes, attract “able colonial officers”; instead, it became a training ground for young civil servants. The risk of dying, as well as the territory’s reputation as “the dumping-ground for freed slaves” and the “Land of Freedom” (Hayward and Dumbuya 1984:63), were what Sierra Leone was best known for in the early twentieth century (Anwyl 1916:36; Hirsch 2001:23). According to Kilson (1966:24), in the 1920s, for example, the average British colony in Africa used one administrator for every three used in a French colony. In 1926, Nigeria had one British administrator for every 100,000 persons in the Northern Province and one for every 70,000 in the Southern Province. The fact that the chiefdom as an administrative unit remains politically significant became evident during the run-up to the general elections on March 7, 2018, when the government (APC) tried to prepare the ground for a win by establishing and consolidating institutional and administrative changes in support of the chiefs’ patronage networks. President Ernest Koroma and the APC redrew administrative boundaries, mostly in APC strongholds in the north. Two new districts were established, and forty-one chiefdoms were split up. As a push for decentralization, the government claimed that the redrawing of administrative borders was an attempt to bring governance closer to the people. In August 1895, Britain issued an Order-in-Council authorizing the Colony to make laws for the territory around it, which extended out to the agreed boundary that corresponds closely to that of present-day Sierra Leone. On August 3, 1896, a Proclamation was issued in the Colony declaring that territory to be a British “Protectorate.” The Colony remained a distinct political entity, and the Protectorate was governed from it. Most of the chiefs whose territories the protectorate subsumed did not enter into this arrangement voluntarily. A handful signed treaties of “friendship” with Britain, but these were between sovereign powers, and as such, the chiefs were not subordinate to the colonists. Strictly speaking, a protectorate does not exist unless the people in it have agreed to be protected, so initially the Sierra Leone Protectorate is better described as the outcome of a unilateral acquisition of territory by Britain (Fyfe 1962:541). The concept of a “ruling house” specifically related to northern Sierra Leone passed into professional ethnography as a result of the work of the colonial administrator and Africanist scholar E. F. Sayers (Sayers 1927; Parsons 1964:125– 129). The 2009 Chieftaincy Act attempted to institutionalize the status quo of chiefly power; the paramount chiefs’ role as the highest political authority in rural areas has been reconfirmed by the government through an amendment to the 2004 Local Government Act. According to the Local Government Act (GOSL 2004:90), a bylaw may “not [be] inconsistent with the Constitution or this Act [i.e., the Local Government Act] or any other enactment for the purpose of any function conferred on it by or under this Act or any other enactment.”

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9 The town lies in Soa chiefdom near the border with Guinea and has two ruling houses, Foyoh and Gbenda. 10 It is worth noting that for Weber patrimonialism was not a synonym for corruption, violence, tribalism or a weak state. While “the state,” in whatever form it might take, and Weber’s focus was indeed the personal domain of the leader (or leaders), it was based on reciprocities that were personal, densely interwoven, and often lopsided, and on the intangible and symbolic dynamics of status, loyalty and deference, as much as on material exchange. This was a way in which rulers sought obedience from the ruled (Pitcher et al. 2009:127). 11 Peyima and Tombodu were important locations during the war. As Sierra Leone’s primary diamond-rich area, Kono District was of particular interest to the government as well as the RUF. Up until 1997, when the RUF and the AFRC took over power in Freetown, the district was relatively stable because of the presence of Executive Outcomes, a South African-led private security company hired by the Sierra Leonean government. RUF/AFRC established checkpoints at the entry and exit points of Tombodu, where they confiscated any items of value or of interest to them from people passing through. In 1998, RUF/AFRC forces would burn part of the town of Tombodu each time an ECOMOG jet flew overhead. On one occasion, over fifty civilians – men, women and children – were locked up in a house at Yusufuya Road, and the house was set on fire. 12 “Caretaker chiefs” is the term used to describe how the RUF replaced the town authorities with their own leaders, thus replicating the chiefly system that had existed before the RUF takeover. 13 Kamara chiefdom traces its origin to a warrior called Hindowa Ngandi, who dislodged the “Kamaranos” from the area. According to local interpretations, Kamara means “someone who does not eat baboon” (Reed and Robinson 2012:86–87). Another interpretation is that the name means “stay away from us,” and relates to when the Konos first arrived in the area as the slaves of warriors. The warriors left and never returned. The first chief to be recognized by the British was Sumana Tieh, a son of Hindowa. The paramount chief at the time of my fieldwork was Aiah Melvin Ngekia II, who was elected in 2003. His predecessor from the Fania family left in 1992 and died in the UK in 1999. Apart from Ngekia and Fania, there are two ruling houses in Kamara: Tieh and Pitikol. 14 The issue of how the Tankos fit into the equation was the subject of a separate conversation with Pa Kongue. 15 A Court Barry is found in all chiefdoms. It is where the chiefdom’s court chairman holds sessions and the chief holds meetings.

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The interplay of police reform and hybridization

An intrinsic aspect of international support for building the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Sierra Leone state in the late 1990s was the “intention to introduce effective visible policing” and “for the police to resume primacy in maintaining law and order” (CPDTF 1999). In the context of conflict, this involved building police stations, writing codes of conduct, and training and equipping police officers. This political endeavor entailed an attempt to reconstitute the justice and security field and the distribution of authority within it (Denney 2014a, 2014b; Krogstad 2012). The Sierra Leone Police (SLP) – representing the state system and idea – was placed at the heart of this endeavor so it could monopolize the enforcement of order and establish “state legitimacy” (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:29). This chapter analyses how the politics of police reform has been played out in Freetown between the Sierra Leone government and its primary international supporter, the UK government, since the late 1990s. To explain how this process occurred, the notion of hybridization is incorporated into the analysis. Doing this implies seeing police reform as a case of cultural exchange (Hutnyk 2005:83; Pieterse 2001) and emphasizes the need to clarify the restless and uneasy mixing and permutations that occur as the process unfolds (Pieterse 2001; Hutnyk 2005:83; Wade 2005:604). As in the book as a whole, the strength of the concept of hybridization in the context of this chapter emphasizes the dynamism of interaction and the permeation of diverse and competing structures of authority, logics of order and claims to power that articulate a “radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent revolution of forms” (Young 1995:25). Thus framed, the chapter describes the struggles and alignments that have occurred in the course of Sierra Leone’s police reform process since the late 1990s. The emphasis is on how, in its very design and initiation, the police reform process was developed to delegitimize and marginalize practices of order-making and actors that were deemed to fit uneasily with donor definitions of a well-functioning, centrally governed state. As discussed in Chapter 3, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while the war was still going on, activities around the SSR process involved arresting and pacifying actors who had played a central role in the conflict, including, for instance, Norman and

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Johnny Paul. In the course of police reform in Sierra Leone as the country emerged from violent conflict, paramount and lesser chiefs came to occupy this uneasy position, not quite fitting in, but at the same time unavoidable. Because of the ambivalence that the chiefs embody in being situated between the state and its “other,” police reform has resulted in both the acceptance and the dismissal of alternatives to security and justice institutions that are sanctioned by a centrally and bureaucratically governed political entity. Paramount and lesser chiefs are certainly central to the context of the politics of police reform in Sierra Leone.1 Much has been written about them, both as figures of authority in rural areas of the country (Albrecht 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2018a; Fanthorpe 1998, 2001, 2005) and, more specifically, about the challenges of incorporating them into internationally funded security and justice programming that is shaped around an external imaginary of a bureaucratically governed system (Denney 2014a, 2014b). Yet, little detailed information exists on the central government’s response to and discussion of the issue of how to incorporate chiefs into internationally funded police reform. There has also been limited analysis exploring how policing is practiced in rural Sierra Leone and how it has been shaped by reform efforts (see Albrecht 2015, 2016, 2017a). Through this analysis, the chapter addresses an important critique of the application of hybridity in peace and security studies. As outlined in the introduction, the concept constitutes an important challenge of the fragile/ failed state discourse (Boege et al. 2008; Richmond 2011; Mac Ginty 2011). But it also contains an unresolved tension that has not been comprehensively addressed in the literature. The literature has assumed separation and otherness precisely because the concept of hybridity takes its point of departure in the contemporary peacebuilding literature and its often rather narrow focus on the meeting of separate entities, that is, the international and the national (or local) in peacebuilding processes (Millar 2014b). On the other hand, there is also a danger of overemphasizing positive accommodation that does not describe what processes of hybridization entail in practice. This runs the risk of erasing differences between the elements that constitute the hybrid order, their histories, and the symbols and practices that represent them (Albrecht and Moe 2015). The goal of this chapter is thus to demonstrate the tensions that are inherent in hybridization, and in the notions of positive accommodation and separation as simultaneously occurring in police reform. This analysis specifically explores how practices, discourses and resources were all rolled into this process. In the early stages of police reform, the paramount and lesser chiefs were not well understood as figures of authority by Sierra Leone’s international partners and were therefore often ignored, underestimated or simply left marginal to how reform efforts were designed and implemented. The omission was criticized at the very top of Sierra Leone’s security sector for being dismissive of the legitimacy that the chiefs were considered to have and for simply being impractical. However, the Sierra Leonean government resisted

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when, in the late 2000s, international policies and programming began to incorporate notions of the “non-state.” From the perspective of security institutions in Freetown, this was seen as ignoring a central government that was still struggling to establish functioning institutions and as bypassing it when it came to resource allocation. Ultimately, focusing on non-state actors in police reform programming was considered a challenge to Sierra Leone’s sovereignty as a state. This chapter centers on a discussion of the role of the paramount and lesser chiefs in three consecutive phases of police reform in the country. The first phase began in open conflict and constituted a narrow focus on establishing security institutions that could support the central government in claiming a monopoly on violence in Sierra Leone. In the second phase the chiefs entered the reform discourse, but the emphasis remained on coordinating the institutions of the state system in Freetown and deciding how chiefs might be held to account better by that system. Design of the third phase began in 2009– 2010 and centered on what are referred to as “non-state justice and security actors.” The Sierra Leonean government successfully resisted this approach because it would entail loss of access to and control over program resources. The chapter illustrates the co-existence of processes of separation and positive accommodation as inherent in hybridization by exploring close to twenty years of police reform in Sierra Leone.

A decade of state-building through police reform In the late 1990s, when conflict was still ongoing in Sierra Leone, the UK, with the agreement of Sierra Leone’s President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, supported the establishment of a police force within the internationally defined borders of the country. From the perspective of Keith Biddle, who played a key role in the SLP’s post-war emergence, Kabbah, as he sat in exile in Conakry in 1997–1998, expanded on his theory that the police should be dominant [in relation to the military] – when I say dominant, that’s the wrong word, and probably President Kabbah didn’t use that word. He expected the police to be the primary force to maintain law and order, and deal with problems inside the country that emanate from civil dispute, civil dishonor, and crime – without military assistance. (Keith Biddle, interview, June 2009) The capital city of Freetown was yet again expected to monopolize instruments of violence and assert the state’s territorial sovereignty. Reconstitution of the security field was intended to compartmentalize the armed forces and project “vertical encompassment” by establishing a police presence throughout Sierra Leone. This concept expresses the central and unequivocal idea of the state as an institution “above” and in opposition to civil society,

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community and family, while at the same time encompassing them (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Kabbah’s objective was to make the SLP the primary security force of the country in order to drive state-building forward. In the context of the collapse of the bureaucracy and the obvious chaos of war, this was an objective that UK state-building experts arriving in Sierra Leone during the 1990s and 2000s could understand, appreciate and support. “Blue-sky thinking”: re-articulating the justice and security field Building a police force during the later years of the war in the 1990s was primarily supported by the UK-funded Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Project (CCSSP). How re-organization of the security field in Sierra Leone was envisaged and pursued cannot be analyzed separately from how investments were channeled by the CCSSP into equipment, infrastructure, logistics and the human capacity to establish a particular type of police force. On the one hand, these resources were used to retain a significant armed capability within the police because there were large numbers of often armed former combatants on the streets of Freetown.2 On the other hand, these investments of resources by the CCSSP were simply a matter of establishing a police force that would begin to build relations with a population that associated uniformed personnel and other state bureaucrats with violence, repression and corruption (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:8). This was literally a physical attempt to resurrect both the imagery and practices of a state that had ceased to perform its functions. As Clare Short, the UK Minister of Development, said, the police had to be put “back together, smashed and destroyed, both by rebels and lousy pay, and, you know [there was] just nothing. Rebuilding police stations, giving them some uniforms … they had to get their authority back, not go around shooting people, but, you know” (Clare Short, interview, 2008). The assembling of words, actors and things into what became known as police reform during the 2000s was intricately linked to the effects of programming supported and driven by an externally funded organization. In this regard, while it is possible to identify the different components within and beyond Sierra Leone that went into assembling the SLP after the war, precisely how these various components played themselves out in the practice and discourse of the police cannot be categorized as emanating unequivocally from either within or outside the territory of Sierra Leone. Separation (distinguishable) and positive accommodation (indistinguishable) are processes that are played out simultaneously, and both can be identified in how the SLP evolved, as well as in the police force that exists today. While hybridization lies at the very foundation of Sierra Leone as a political entity, the UK has been part and parcel of the SLP’s configuration since its very inception in 1808 when Freetown was declared a British Crown Colony. The CCSSP constituted the financial heyday of police reform in Sierra Leone. From 2000 to mid-2005, investments of approximately ₤27 million

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were made in equipment, training and advisers with the sole purpose of establishing a police organization that could enforce internal security and replace the chaos of war and military coups with the rule of law. New vehicles, uniforms and radios procured from the UK became essential logistical props in articulating stateness, thus laying the foundations of state authority yet again (Krogstad 2012:171). As Arie van Roon, one of the UK procurement advisors involved with CCSSP at the time, said, a police force of several thousand existed in name, but with “twelve working vehicles and no reasonable uniform” (Arie van Roon, interview, 2008, UK). All personnel files had been destroyed: the SLP had effectively lost whatever pre-war bureaucratic existence it had had. Given the extent to which the Sierra Leonean state was considered a failure in the late 1990s and infrastructure had collapsed, police advisers believed that they were working with a clean slate and that, if the state did not fill the imagined power vacuum created by war, criminal gangs and warring factions would (Jackson and Albrecht 2011:52–53). Adrian Horn, who managed the CCSSP, believed that “a complete re-structuring of the police service in Sierra Leone,” and by extension how order was made, was not only necessary, but also possible in principle (Horn quoted in Albrecht and Jackson 2009:32). Indeed, building a police force independently of the context in which it was to function was imagined as a possibility. “I had the luxury of free thinking,” Horn recalls. “My previous involvements in developing change were usually constrained by systems and procedures, which only allowed tinkering and not ‘blue sky’ thinking. This was different” (notes, Adrian Horn, not published). Faithful to the reductionist state-building project of SSR in Sierra Leone, attempts were made through the CCSSP to attribute action to a small number of centrally governed institutions that were mandated by pre-war legislation produced by the state system in order to enforce its laws. Apart from reconstituting the security and justice field by working on the formation of the SLP, Biddle, a high-ranking retired UK police officer, was appointed by Kabbah to become Inspector-General of Police (IGP) in 1999 (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:33). This was a remarkable move, not least because the last foreign police chief in charge of the Sierra Leonean police, W. G. Syer, was also British and oversaw the formal decolonization of the SLP during the 1950s and early 1960s. The historical resonance of Biddle’s appointment was, understandably, enough to make decision-makers in London uncomfortable. The UK government, and especially Short, whose department was going to pay for it, had been “totally against” it, Biddle told me, but Kabbah, with whom he had built a close relationship since returning to Sierra Leone a year before, had insisted.3 In addition, Biddle said, there had been some confusion in the British High Commission about the exact mandate of the IGP, which made the decision more straightforward:

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The post that Peter [Penfold, British High Commissioner] had before he went to Sierra Lone was Cote d’Ivoire, which runs a very traditional French structure. The inspector general in the French system does not run the operations in the police. That is run by the commissioner general. It hadn’t been apparent to Penfold what the inspector general was supposed to do in Sierra Leone. Bear in mind, he hadn’t been the High Commissioner very long when the coup [in 1997] happened. So, Peter thought that the inspector general [in Sierra Leone] was like the French one, that you were there to advise on policies and look at the efficiency of the force on behalf of the minister. But the inspector general was the head of the police force, as well as head of operations. (Keith Biddle, interview, June 2009) Biddle also explained that Kabbah “expected the police to be the primary force to maintain law and order and deal with problems inside the country” (Keith Biddle, interview, June 2009). In other words, and in the eyes of those who propped up the state, Kabbah had “won” a monopoly over the state idea and what was left of the state system from the likes of Foday Sankoh, leader of the RUF. Biddle, a product of the Western universalist state model, was dyslexic in any other languages than that of stateness. He knew of no alternatives and by default became Kabbah’s dedicated servant. “What was very heartening,” Biddle said, “was that the president had a very clear view of where he was going.” Kabbah was establishing a power base through statebuilding, including police reform, and Biddle, personifying the UK’s support to Sierra Leone, was supportive of the president’s objective (Keith Biddle, interview, June 2009). Indeed, it has been argued that Biddle played a crucial role in developing confidence in the rebuilding of the SLP precisely because he was considered not to be subject to the political interference and loyalties to which a Sierra Leonean candidate inevitably would have been. This role as an external catalyst of change helped develop confidence among younger officers and was undoubtedly aided by Biddle’s own strong personality and willingness to be both visible and to make decisions on the ground. One senior SLP officer noted, “We needed a neutral person to come in. He cleaned up.” Another SLP officer explained that, “If outsiders had not come, there would have been a lot of political pressure on the IGP at the time” (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:35–36). Horn and Biddle had arrived in Sierra Leone in 1997 to initiate project appraisal activities (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:29). They wrote the new policing charter that was delivered to and signed off by Kabbah. “I did the first draft,” Biddle explained. “That police charter was presented to Kabbah by Adrian [Horn] and myself” and was made publicly available in August 1998. The new slogan of the SLP became “A Force for Good,” which Biddle took from his time in Kent in the UK, where police department stationery had been produced that had “The Kent Police are a force for good” printed at

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the bottom. “So Kabbah took up this, and I christened the police in charge as a ‘force for good.’ That was the basis that we then gave to everybody and said: ‘That is the type of police force you’ve got to create’” (Keith Biddle, interview, June 2009). In line with the re-birth of the SLP as a “force for good,” its new doctrine became Local Needs Policing (LNP). Related to notions of community policing, this was defined as: “Policing that meets the expectations and need of the local community and reflects national standards and objectives” (Horn quoted in Albrecht and Jackson 2009:32). While “the community” was treated as a black box – that is, the relations of power that it is constituted by were not unpacked – it became the focus around which the police were expected to develop further. Financed by the CCSSP, dozens of Sierra Leonean police superintendents attended training in the UK at the Police College at Bramshill’s International Commanders Programme. At the training, most superintendents wrote papers titled “Key Issues in Community Policing: Sierra Leone.” In these papers, variations on the theme of community policing are articulated that were gleaned from the “history of policing in England and Wales.” Based on the formula of “police officers and private citizens working together to solve community problems” (Mannah 2001), LNP emerged as a key principle in SLP community programs across the country (see Krogstad 2012:159–165). However, as a principle of policing, it was meant to direct the SLP as a whole, including the armed units within the OSD. Because the first years of police reform began during open conflict, police reform before 2002 took place mainly in Freetown and emphasized the strategic level of the police organization, partly because of a genuine need to do so, and partly because it was not yet possible to move outside the capital. Particular emphasis was placed on building capacity among the senior levels of the SLP. The emphasis on Freetown at the time was also precipitated by the security situation in the city itself, particularly the high number of internally displaced people occupying any large building available in the capital, including former railway train sheds and derelict factory buildings in the east end. In these efforts, the traditional role of the chiefs, who presided over justice and security issues outside Freetown, was considered marginal and in any case was not properly understood by external actors. Despite this, they came to play a central role in reform efforts in rural areas of the country and thus in making order across Sierra Leone. As analyzed in Chapter 4, chiefs were directly targeted by the RUF during the war: they were perceived to be a rural gerontocracy that exploited local resources and taxed the local population for personal enrichment (Albrecht 2017a; Fanthorpe 2005; Jackson 2005). Consultations carried out by the NGO Conciliation Resources (CR) just prior to the official ending of the conflict in 2002 reported that “chiefs have a vital role to play in restoring stability; there is no other institution capable of replacing them at this stage in the Sierra Leone polity”

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(Conciliation Resources 2000). In response, the Government of Sierra Leone pledged to restore the country’s chiefdoms (Kabbah 2003).

Approaching the justice and security field holistically In 2005, the CCSSP was taken over by another program cycle with different priorities and a considerably less personality-driven approach. Biddle left Sierra Leone in 2003, and Brima Acha Kamara, a Sierra Leonean, was appointed to the position of IGP (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:91–92). Not surprisingly, according to Acha, with the “handover of leadership came public fears that the police would resort to what it was [before the conflict].” Moreover, it was evident that a Sierra Leonean head of police could not make the same demands on UK support as Biddle had, who had some access to the higher echelons of the UK government. At the same time there was also a sense, according to Acha, that “Sierra Leonean police officers would fare well, because they knew Sierra Leone better.” He continued: It became easier because we started to own the thing – everybody became involved in a very active way. The umbrella [of international leadership] was gone, and the message that had very much been conveyed to us was that in any situation there must be one leader, but that we could only make it as a team. There was that awareness among us, and that we should be seen to sustain what had been done. We started to review some of the policies, whether they suited us, and the Executive Management Board [consisting of heads of departments and regions] became much livelier. Before, we said that whatever Keith decided was the right thing – without much discussion. Confidence started to come; we became bolder and dismantled a lot of the checkpoints that existed across the country. Our own situation in the SLP had been unique. Keith was British, but the whole team was Sierra Leonean. In our various roles we were able to assist him; he worked through us. If you take Keith out, all the key players were still in place. (Acha Kamara, interview, June 2008, emphasis added) Increasingly, there also started to be a pushback against, and open criticism of, the support that continued after Biddle and Horn had left: Some of these advisers were sergeants, inspectors, they did not know what we did at the strategic level, and they were overly confident. Just because you are British, doesn’t really mean that you know it all – we studied at Bramshill at the very best courses. At one point, I insisted on seeing copies of the reports that they were doing, that they should be given to me. I started to interfere. I started to tell the program manager what we wanted and what we didn’t really want. (Acha Kamara, interview, June 2008)

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While considerable changes occurred in the leadership of the police, changes also occurred in the way that the police had been supported up to that point. The Justice Sector Development Programme (JSDP) that replaced the CCSSP reflected a turn to what was referred to in international policy discourse as a more “holistic” approach to SSR. In short, this meant that programming should be formulated in opposition to a narrow focus on individual, often military institutions and reforms that were technical in nature, addressing security (and justice) as an interconnected system (Albrecht and Stepputat 2015). This also meant that a more determined effort was made to encompass rather than marginalize traditional leaders. It was a process, however, that continued to be cast firmly as a state-building exercise, assuming the incorporation of chiefs in a hierarchically organized bureaucratic system of mutual accountability (and possibly eventual disappearance). Rather than targeting one organization, such as the SLP, and addressing its effectiveness as a law enforcement agency, the justice and security field and its governability were to be treated as an inter-connected whole of organizational formations. The JSDP constituted a fundamental break with previous efforts in the sense that the chiefs, as well as bureaucratic oversight, for instance, were now factored into the reconstitution of the justice and security field within a single overarching program framework. Adopting a holistic approach meant that the primary focus was now on establishing an interlinked state system, something that Horn and Biddle, under the aegis of CCSSP, had worked against by focusing exclusively on the SLP. Work with the judiciary was left to the considerably smaller Law Development Programme, which began implementation in 2001 with a budget of £3–4 million (Albrecht and Jackson 2009:41, 2014b:39). The tables were turning on the SLP. Until 2005, investments of approximately ₤27 million had been made in equipment, training and advisers for the purpose of establishing a police force of 9,500 officers that could manifest articulations of stateness across the territory of Sierra Leone and replace the chaos and anarchy of war with one centrally governed organization (White 2010:77). In this next phase, approximately ₤25 million were to be distributed among the actors that were considered to constitute the justice and security field as a whole, which encompassed, inter alia, the judiciary, prisons and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Only £3–4 million was to be spent on the police (Albrecht 2010:69–70). In practice, this turn of events had dramatic consequences for the position of the SLP in the course the programming took. Within the SLP, the greatest beneficiary of the CCSSP by a wide margin, it was not very clear how it was going to become part of the JSDP, precisely because of the latter’s much broader and more holistic focus. This problematic was reflected in part in the lack of clarity about where the SLP sits in terms of falling under “justice” or “security.” In terms of funding, this lack of clarity in the SLP mission is significant, in part because of internal DfID funding arrangements. In the words of one DfID staff member witnessing the transition from the CCSSP to the JSDP:

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It was not beyond the realm of foresight to predict that expanding a programme entirely focused on one institution into a broader sector starved of resources would cause a level of animosity within the criminal justice sector. The Sierra Leone Police felt aggrieved at having to share donor resources with the prison service, the judiciary, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and others, at the opportunity cost of further progress being made within the SLP. (Howlett-Bolton 2010:76) With the demise of the CCSSP and the start of the JSDP, the SLP may have lost Biddle as a clearly identifiable and decisive international leader. However, it continued to be financially dependent on contributions from international donors, the UK in particular. As one key adviser to the JSDP noted, this was something of a double blow to the SLP: “Withdrawal of international funding inevitably leads to short-term paralysis and degradation of service with a real danger of attrition to the status quo ante” (Howlett-Bolton 2010:96). Access to funding certainly did change in the sense that a Sierra Leonean IGP could not make the same demands as Biddle. It was also clear, especially when Koroma became president and the APC came to power in 2007, that the government’s political grip on the police and the security sector as a whole became firmer (for an analysis specifically relating to security and justice institutions, see Albrecht and Jackson 2014b). As the historian David Harris points out, while Koroma was undoubtedly a reforming president, he was also the head of a relatively conservative party whose institutional memory of being in power was established under Stevens and Momoh before the war began in 1991. Conservativism in Sierra Leone implies the continuation of patronage politics, which intensified up until the 2018 elections (these observations are based on interviews carried out in Freetown during February 2017). Indeed, in 2014 one high-ranking police officer, whose comments reflect the opinion of many Sierra Leoneans, explained that the APC: is a party that has been known for undermining institutions. It’s part of our history, and they did that when we became a one-party state. It was a deliberate ploy. The [current] president is a contemporary [to me]. We all shared similar visions. It’s a pity that we are slowly descending into a situation where most of the things that caused war is coming back fresh – in slow-motion. (Chris Charley, interview, Freetown, 2014) The particular variety of Sierra Leonean conservativism that lives on has had profound implications for SSR in the country broadly speaking, especially for the police as a state-sanctioned body. It was visible in a very concrete manner in the SLP’s 2015 budget of recurrent expenses of around 76 billion Leones, which represented between 30 and 50 percent of the total budget that was

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successfully negotiated with the Ministry of Finance during the budget writing process. This observation, drawn from a review of security and justice in Sierra Leone by the UK government’s Whitehall Africa Group in 2015, is common. However, the review went on to explain what this situation meant for the SLP’s ability to function: The review team were informed that as of the end of May [2015] the police had not received any of their second quarter funding. The Deputy Inspector General (DIG) stated that they were actively negotiating loans from private sources to enable operational services to be delivered. It is likely that the police will default on these loans and then may be open to influence from individuals and commercial entities. Plans are in place for the SLP to start their own production processes for brick-making and tailoring, allegedly to save money on building works and sourcing new uniforms, however, it is a short step to policing resources being diverted to commercial activity. (Whitehall Africa Group 2015) In other words, the quasi-privatization of policing had become a reality at the very core of the SLP. Under Koroma, who replaced Acha Kamara as IGP with Francis Munu, recruitment into the SLP has become considerably more politicized – a situation that resembles the pre-war context. As argued in Chapter 3, the failure of the state before war broke out in 1991 was not caused by its inability to provide services per se because service delivery was never its raison d’être. Rather, the leadership in Freetown failed to maintain the extensive neo-patrimonial network that had been established and consolidated during the post-colonial era. Precisely because there is no history of a politically neutral bureaucratic system in Sierra Leone, the APC’s trust in the institution that had been built under the SLPP prior to 2007 was limited, as they were seen to be the product of, and thus as serving, the SLPP and its interests.

Chiefs and state-building Rather than working with processes of hybridization of which the chiefs as figures of authority are embodiments, police reform under the auspices of the JSDP categorized chiefs as part of the state system. Biddle’s and the CCSSP’s view of the chiefs had been the opposite: they regarded them as a problem that should be solved in the long run and managed until that happened. Effectively, the CCSSP and JSDP had the same end-game in mind: the chiefs would have a marginal ceremonial role or disappear altogether. In early 2002, just after the conflict ended, Biddle went to Koidu, the main town in Kono, where the chiefs were demanding a new police chief for the district, and rebuked their demands. “If we are going to run a proper democratic policing system,” Biddle told me he had argued to the Kono chiefs:

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with you working in partnership with us, then you gotta be sure that you can work with the guy who is the inspector-general in Kono, so X will be moved. But the next one is not going to be removed, and he will not be a Kono. And they said: “but we got our traditions”, etc.; and I said: “well, I’ve sent you one Kono, and now you’re telling he is not a proper Kono, he doesn’t come from the right family, and all the rest of it, so the last thing you need is a Kono”. So I sent Y, my heart man from Moyamba, who couldn’t give a monkey’s about any of these things, a very brave man … It was important that we didn’t send a Kono, because he would have been immediately undermined, his family would have been compromised, because the Kono chiefs want everything their way. I made the mistake of trying to be democratic and placatory; take notice of their tribal distinctions and so on. (Keith Biddle, interview, February 2009) The JSDP was more sensitive to the central role that the chiefs play, but like Biddle and the CCSSP, it did not take into account that the chiefs’ sources are both locally embedded and come from the state (Albrecht 2017a). This led to a misrecognition of how authority is produced in Sierra Leone, especially the authority of the paramount and lesser chiefs, which draws on seemingly contradictory and complementary discourses and practices, “including legislation passed in parliament, party political agendas, locally bound initiation into secret societies and locally and nationally oriented autochthony” (Albrecht 2015:613). Unwittingly, police reform contributed in part to the consolidation rather than eradication of alternatives to state-sanctioned security (and justice) institutions across Sierra Leone. Indeed, as will be shown in Chapter 6, the ability in practice of the SLP to work at the local level outside Freetown very much depends on their capability to “work with and through actors” such as the chiefs (Albrecht 2015:617). While externally resourced and driven reform efforts definitively influence exactly how policing is carried out, particularly as they are part of the SLP’s very foundation, it was also inevitable that the local experience of ordermaking would be shaped and controlled by Sierra Leone’s chiefs. In late 2005, a National Policy Framework for the Justice Sector in Sierra Leone was presented within the JSDP framework. It was framed as a “holistic sector-wide” approach to support the “development of an effective, efficient, impartial and accountable justice sector capable of meeting the needs of all the people of Sierra Leone” (JSDP 2005). This document is long on formulations that emphasize the importance of “Customary/Traditional Laws and Practices.” It includes, for example, the development of policies on the judicial role of traditional leaders, the implementation of initiatives that promote constitutional principles and human rights, and the enhanced accountability of traditional leaders to the public. Likewise, the Justice Sector Reform Strategy and Investment Plan launched in February 2008 had as one of six targets to “improve public satisfaction levels with Local Courts, Paramount and Local Chiefs” (GOSL 2007:V).

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“Each system will have its own advantages and disadvantages, and both need support,” one JSDP advisor noted, “even if the state system will inevitably require a greater share of financial resources” (Howlett-Bolton 2010:101). To some degree this statement was more theoretical than practical, because working with the paramount and lesser chiefs never was a central objective of the JSDP, but part of a broad range of activities that centered on support to the central government (Krogstad 2012:220). The statement also exposed the ambivalence that inevitably shaped the gaze of a seasoned British police officer who had no prior experience of a system of governance that included traditional leaders as central figures of authority. Individual JSDP advisers spoke about two systems as if they had separate existences. The Local Courts operated according to a hybrid order, but JSDP documentation suggests that they were seen as part of the state system, which implies that they were managed by that system. According to a 2007 assessment, “local courts constitute the lowest level of the formal system” (Bredemear et al. 2007). However, while the local courts were under the oversight of the Ministry of Local Government until 2011, when the Local Courts Act was passed and they came under the Ministry of Justice, the local courts were not and are not managed by a ministry. In practice these institutions, which are based in Freetown, remain too weak to play a meaningful role in such a capacity, and there is no political will among Sierra Leone’s political leaders to change that. Indeed, the Ministry of Justice lacks the political will to actively regulate the local courts, primarily because it is accepted that they fall under the authority of the paramount and lesser chiefs. When representatives of state institutions in Freetown articulate the distance between chiefs with the order they oversee and politics in the capital, they are not ignorant of the connections that exist between the two. Quite the contrary, not only are they part of the same system, they are mutually constitutive in a non-hierarchical sometimes antagonistic, sometimes reciprocal, and always productive relationship. For instance, chiefs and civil servants as well as politicians need each other to access the extra-local authority that only a system of institutions, referred to collectively as the state, can produce. For this, an elaborate consolidated bureaucracy is not necessary, but the imaginary of such a bureaucracy is, as represented materially through state officials and legal documents such as the pink government gazette that lists the ruling houses of each chiefdom and section in Sierra Leone. At the same time, land for mining and farming, as well as access to voters, is distributed according to “extremely localized” claims to status and entitlement (Fanthorpe 2001:372), again confirmed in legislation because traditional leaders hold land “in trust” for the population. Articulating this distance is a common strategy to subject chiefs to statesanctioned institutions based in Freetown. Brima Acha Kamara, the IGP until 2011, suggested in an interview: “Our own role is quite different from the Chiefdoms because we are accountable to the law” (Brima Acha Kamara, interview, May 2009). Inherent in Acha Kamara’s statement is the seeming

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articulation of a split between police (state) and chiefs (society). However, this split dissolves in practice; in fact, it is impossible to maintain. (Chapter 6 provides a detailed analysis of the role that chiefs play in local order-making.) As noted above, substantive work had been undertaken in Freetown around the institutions that external advisers naturally gravitated toward as constituting the state. Inevitably, as the focus moved to the chiefdom level, as in Moyamba District, attempts by the JSDP to influence institutions controlled by the chiefs faced the issue of the distribution of power at the local level and thus the composition of the justice and security field. Working with the chiefs became a deeply political endeavor where issues of power, resources and rights were at stake and where authority was being competed over (cf. Albrecht and Kyed 2014). Essentially, while support was provided to Moyamba, the main town in the district of the same name, the police’s limited mobility made them directly dependent on communications from the chiefs in case a crime occurred. (I carried out fieldwork in Moyamba in February 2011, and interviewed members of the chiefdom administration as the JSDP was coming to an end.) During the implementation phase of the JSDP, there was no attempt to fundamentally alter the Local Court system or to inject resources into the administrative system that supported the chiefs.4 Rather, the focus was on how to confine the chiefs to their legally defined role, primarily through training in the arbitration of cases, a role that was intended for the effective and legitimate state (Goldstone 2008:285–286). However, actors belonging to the state system entered into a complex relationship with chiefs, where one could not be said to stand hierarchically above the other. The two sets of institutions became integral to one another: their authority became mutually constitutive, not exclusive. It is not evident, as Bruce Baker (2008a:158) suggests is the case, that there is conscious intent behind state actions, that “it,” the state, regardless of how “disunified” or “contradictory” it might be, “seeks domination over all other organizations within the national territory and is intent on establishing binding rules regarding the other organizations’ activities.” It is, however, a default position of donor-driven programs to work with and operate on organizational formations that may be articulated in the language of stateness and that claim a willingness to play that role, even if it is merely a desire or an aspiration. Donors and individual advisors avoid engaging with de facto hybrid orders because they are convinced that state institutions are the rightful holders of a monopoly over the making of order. This is reflected in assessments of the JSDP carried out in 2007, 2008 and 2009, where remarkably little space, if any, is devoted to the chiefs and the order they make (Bredemear et al. 2007; Bredemear and Lewis 2008; Biesheuvel et al. 2009). The function and rationale of how chiefs operate, particularly in their political role, is not properly understood by international actors. They believe that the institutions of the chief will wither away as state institutions are built. Some international actors may accept the importance of including chiefs in

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justice programs. Yet, donors and the consultants they hire have yet to design programs that do not default towards a state-building rationale of establishing a bureaucratically organized system of at least some degree of centralized control. In a conversation I had with the paramount chief of Kayamba in 2012, he appeared confused, noting that the JSDP had supported closer cooperation among Moyamba District’s paramount chiefs. These activities had not continued after the JSDP had left.

The simultaneous processes of separation and positive accommodation From the early 2000s, when Biddle and Horn were still the international leaders of police reform, a key component of how to reconstitute the articulation of authority in the justice and security field occurred with the establishment of Local Policing Partnership Boards (LPPBs) by the SLP. According to one review of the SLP produced in February 2011, they were established “to enable the local communities to have a say and be involved in finding solutions to local problems, and to act as an interface between the SLP and the local community” (Horn et al. 2011:36). In this capacity, LPPBs have become one of the concrete vehicles for hybrid reproduction outside Freetown; they will be explored in detail in the remaining chapters of this book. LNP – the “mantra,” if you will, for the SLP as a whole and the OSD, its armed wing – was meant to reflect that, where it did operate, policing was no longer the regime-preserving instrument of a one-party state it had been before the war. As noted in an essay on community policing that SLP superintendent Amadu Mannah wrote in 2001 for a course in the UK before the war ended: “There are communities in some parts of the country where the national police have not established their presence” (Mannah 2001). According to international advisers and SLP officers alike, the aim of state-sanctioned police actors establishing a presence in urban and rural Sierra Leone was defined by the ability of officers to use force. It was also evident that this had to be combined with the police’s ability to negotiate access to areas where they had not been present for more than a decade when war came to an end in 2002. In fact, this skill is as important in rural as it is in urban areas, including around Freetown’s Eastern Police Station, the busiest part of the capital located only a few hundred meters away from both police headquarters and State House on Tower Hill (King and Albrecht 2014). The concepts of local needs and community and the order they articulate were never explored or made explicit by the international experts nor, for that matter, in police headquarters in Freetown. These concepts are more often than not treated as an unproblematic category consisting of a depoliticized administrative unit comprising a certain number of people. Little attention was paid to the foundational hybrid order that police reform was both shaping and being shaped by. The underlying rationale of police reform, particularly prior to 2005, was that strengthening the SLP would automatically marginalize, dominate and encompass alternative makers of order, notably

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the chiefs, and dictate rather than be dictated to by these actors (Albrecht 2010:9). However, at the very top of the formal security sector sat Kellie Conteh, the National Security Coordinator from 2001 to 2011, who argued “that the paramount chiefs can play a very, very key role as an extension of the National Security Council.” Conteh mentioned this in connection with establishing security committees at the chiefdom level, a state-building exercise that would incorporate localities across Sierra Leone into one centrally governed framework (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:64).5 Conteh was from the countryside in the north and, like all Sierra Leoneans outside the Western Area, had been raised under the rule of chiefs. He disagreed with the assumption that the national police should, or indeed could, dominate the enforcement of order by the chiefs articulating a degree of de facto positive accommodation within the state system. During an interview I conducted with him in 2008, Conteh discussed the issue of how to approach Sierra Leone’s chiefs: I think they [international actors] should help to strengthen chieftaincies in the sense that our people, whether you like it or not, for now seem to respect that traditional setting. No amount of education from, you know, human rights organizations, international organizations on this sort of thing would work right now. They [the general population] would listen, yes, but as soon as you leave, they go back to their tradition. They simply respect the chief. I think we should not undermine the authority of the chiefs by trying to introduce several layers of governance within the chiefdoms. At the end of the day, it would only hurt government because we would not have the capacity to do it properly, we simply don’t. Let’s not make ourselves look stupid on this matter. Let’s go back to basics. This is how our people live. They live in these villages, and in the village there’s a town chief, they have a youth leader, a women’s leader – these are structures that are there, and they all respect the chief. Even if you want to put lawyers and judges at chiefdom level, do you have the roads for these people to be travelling to court? You want the farmers to leave their farms to come to court? No, that is not going to happen, so leave it with them, empower the chiefs if you want to regulate it, yes, we can do that, I’m sure the chiefs are open to that. This is not just about security – it’s the whole system we’re looking at which goes far beyond the security sector. It’s looking at transforming an entire culture, an entire society so that they would do things that will provide an enabling environment for development to take place. (Kellie Conteh, interview, August 2008) As this statement suggests, Conteh not only dismissed attempts to fundamentally reconstitute the justice and security field, he also indicated that it would be impossible to do so. It would be an unrealistic attempt at social

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engineering that is out of touch with the reality of how Sierra Leone is governed at the local level and for which external actors did not have the resources, authority, or ability to carry through. Working with the chiefs was and for the foreseeable future would be a question of negotiation, not imposition.

The politics of hybridization As we have seen reflected in the analysis of police reform since the 1990s and the chiefs’ role within it, hybridization is constituted by a simultaneous process of separation and positive accommodation. It is possible to speak analytically of entities – e.g., the state – as the product of positive accommodation and recognize at the same time that those entities result from the prior mixing of peoples, ideas and norms as the product of exercised power, the distribution of resources, and the organization of society (Mac Ginty 2011:72). Any entity that emanates from the restless and uneasy mixing and permutations that occur in cultural exchanges should be seen as part, and the momentary product, of an ever-evolving process of hybridization (Albrecht 2018a). This also implies that tension and separation are inherent in this process and driven in part by state institutions insisting on their unique and central position in the security sector as compared to the position of the paramount and lesser chiefs or any other actor that claims a stake in local order-making. In the Sierra Leonean case, this tension, separation and continuous transformation emanate from continuous attempts to access and control resources. Processes of separation were accentuated in the transition from the JSDP to its successor, the Access to Security and Justice Programme (ASJP), which became the CCSSP’s contradistinction. The ASJP reflected the UK Department for International Development’s (DfID) White Paper from 2009, Eliminating World Poverty: Building Our Common Future. This paper emphasizes the provision of security and justice as being “basic” public services that should be delivered to counter “immediate threats to poor people’s lives” (DfID 2009a:74–75). Until this point, programming in Sierra Leone had been “largely ‘top-down,’” as DfID noted. It was therefore time to counter the JSDP’s approach with a stronger emphasis on the local-level organization of security and justice, “a ‘bottom-up’ focus on basic security and justice service provision for the poor” (DfID 2009b). As one review of the SLP noted in 2011, there was certainly a sense that “[a]s a crude measure, any intervention that requires recurrent resources is failing, and this is reflected in the SLP’s inability to provide an acceptable level of effective policing services” (Horn et al. 2011:15). Indeed, “[c]ommunications, mobility, office machinery,” the investments that were a significant part of the CCSSP’s legacy, “are a few examples” of how the SLP was supported with equipment that they were unable to maintain (Horn et al. 2011:15). Moreover, although the JSDP did not restrict its activities to

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Freetown, as had been the case during implementation of the CCSSP, in 2009–2010 it was considered to be a largely state-oriented and supply-driven program (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:140). In early 2010, a team of experts from the Libra Advisory Group, a London-based consultancy firm, was hired to design the ASJP. Libra was expected to pursue an elaborate consultation process with stakeholders from across Sierra Leone’s security and justice sectors. However, it quickly became clear, as one of the consultants in the design team noted, that “[w]hat the funder [i.e., DfID] wanted and what the government wanted were two different things” (interview, consultant #1, August 2013). Indeed, “they [i.e., DfID] didn’t tell the SL [Sierra Leone] government that we were coming, that we were under explicit instructions to make a demand-driven design. When they heard about us, they were furious, because they weren’t informed, and misguided; they weren’t told what the mandate was.” In turn, the team was told to manage the political sensitivities of the process “because we, DfID, can’t and won’t” interview, consultant #2, October 2013).6 Libra’s interpretation of what a demand-driven program entailed meant that the focus would be on “a local approach to problem solving” that emphasized the importance of “non-state actors,” for instance, by supporting paralegals and the SLP’s LPPBs (Libra Advisory Group 2010a). According to Libra, the ASJP should be designed to support the institutions that were believed to be used by “ordinary people,” who “do not yet enjoy appropriate, affordable and accountable services” (Libra Advisory Group 2010a). In practice, this meant a shift toward a greater focus on bottom-up processes in which the chiefs play a central role, rather than emphasizing state-sanctioned security and justice, including ministerial control (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:141). Given Sierra Leone’s continued dependence on foreign aid, it was not surprising that the changed focus from supply- to demand-driven programming would cause tension. The shift also illustrates how separation and otherness occur as an inherent part of hybridization processes. The outcome of prioritizing institutions such as the LPPBs and paralegals meant that funding would be channeled away from Freetown, the center of government, which had been the primary beneficiary of both the CCSSP and the JSDP. Thus, the ASJP came to represent a political shift in programming. Reconstituting how programming was structured implied a fundamental redistribution of resources that the police, courts, chiefs, community policing groups, and so forth would be able to draw on during the course of implementation. Certainly, the program transition revealed that, regardless of whether the program was supply- or demand-driven, it was definitively not a mere technical matter (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:141). The political tensions inherent in the ASJP proposal were reflected in the Sierra Leone government’s initial response to Libra’s program outline, which was presented in February 2010. The government stated that, “At a strategic level, the options paper seems to undermine all the effort put into developing

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a sector-wide approach in tackling the issues of security and justice” (GOSL 2010). Noting that without UK support the security sector would in effect be unable to function, the government warned of the danger inherent in prioritizing non-state actors over centrally governed institutions. Indeed, the government emphasized, it would be “a recipe for friction” (GOSL 2010; see also Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:141). The government continued, “Therefore, the suggestion is to continue to build the capacity of key state structures in both the security and justice sectors (supply-driven), who will work in concert with non-state actors to implement demand-driven security and justice” (GOSL 2010). This would ensure support that was more balanced and fend off the “dangers associated with building the capacity of non-state actors to demand and expect more service whilst declining to build state actors’ capacity to deliver” (GOSL 2010). In sum, making a definitive separation between state and non-state as if they had distinct existences was thus articulated as a strategy to maintain both authority and control over the resources that a DfID-funded program would give access to. In mid-June 2010, when Libra presented the final outline of the ASJP, it remained decidedly justice-oriented, “with the security sector having historically received more … funding/support than the justice sector” (Libra Advisory Group 2010b). As such, the final program document was in line with DfID priorities in Sierra Leone as well as the organization’s 2009 White Paper (DfID 2009a). As ASJP implementation began in 2012, following a difficult and prolonged transition from the JSDP (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:93), the emphasis was placed on continuing program activities in Freetown and Moyamba while moving beyond them, initially to Western Area Rural, Kenema and Koinadugu. Most of 2012 was spent building momentum within the ASJP and navigating the general elections in November and their aftermath. In 2013, with the ASJP under increasing pressure to deliver, a broad range of activities was launched through which the ASJP sought to split its attention considerably more equally between the central government and the local level. Further program expansion was planned for 2014 to four additional districts. Striking a more balanced approach to supporting national and local levels than originally planned, activities included, for instance, the training and mentoring of paralegals, as well as technical support to the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Internal Affairs on policy-making and planning processes. Both the design and initial implementation of the ASJP reflect how heterogenization may occur in hybridization, a relentless process that goes to the very core of how authority is manifested in the pursuit of resources. In the previous section, this chapter has shown how LPPBs became a vehicle for positive accommodation between chiefs and police. However, different actors occupy different positions of authority. The contours of these positions are sharpened and heterogenization is accentuated when interests related to resource distribution are at stake.

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The ASJP was disrupted by the Ebola crisis that swept across West Africa, notably in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, in 2014–2015. In late 2014, David Miliband, then British foreign secretary, said while visiting Sierra Leone: “We are at an absolute tipping point where either the disease is contained to the low tens of thousands or it becomes an epidemic of a very serious kind” (Miliband quoted in Bosely 2014). The Ebola crisis did not, in fact, become the catastrophe that seemed probable in late 2014, but it has fundamentally shaped current narratives on Sierra Leone’s financial difficulties. The Ebola crisis has now passed, and while it constituted a considerable assault on Sierra Leone, the real challenge to a functioning state remains the existing system of neo-patrimonialism. Indeed, Ebola exposed the Sierra Leonean government’s inability to deal with the disease, as well as its mishandling of the international funding that was ushered in to support the country’s fight against the looming epidemic (see Audit Service Sierra Leone 2014–2015).

Conclusion By exploring the politics of police reform in Sierra Leone, this chapter has demonstrated the continuous and ever-evolving tension between positive accommodation and separation that is integral to any process of hybridization. In the particular case of traditional leaders and state institutions in Sierra Leone, this means that, while there is no clear line of separation between them in the political structure of post-colonial Sierra Leone, these entities are nevertheless distinguishable due to the different types of authority they are in a position to draw on. Hybridization lies at the very core of how authority is enacted and ultimately has to do with mobilizing power to access and defend resources (Albrecht 2018a). The original intention behind police reform in Sierra Leone was to establish and consolidate a state system and, in the process, to marginalize other actors that play a central role in enforcing order. Indeed, in an attempt to establish a state–society split, the government of Sierra Leone, with support from the UK, initiated police reform to situate state institutions above and at the same time containing localities across the territorially defined space of the Sierra Leonean state. In the first phase of reform, which began in the late 1990s during a period of open conflict, attempts were made to eliminate or marginalize actors that did not fit easily within the concept of a centrally governed state: most of these actors, such as the RUF’s Foday Sankoh, were considered war criminals. In the second phase, from the mid-2000s onward, a so-called holistic approach was pursued that sought to incorporate all actors in the justice and security field into one inter-linked state system. While chiefs were only explicitly engaged to a limited extent during the first years of police reform, their involvement became inescapable as the war in Sierra Leone ended in 2002 and the institution of the chieftaincy was reestablished in the countryside. The UK government, which was at the

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forefront of supporting police and broader security sector reform in Sierra Leone, always had difficulties working with the hybrid practices that are characteristic of order-making in rural areas of the country. These difficulties were reflected in alternating criticism by central figures in the Sierra Leonean administration that the UK-led reform process either ignored the role of chiefs – and other so-called “non-state” actors – or overstated it. The simultaneity of positive accommodation and separation between state institutions and traditional leaders in processes of hybridization illustrates the separate yet mutually constitutive nature of these institutions. In turn, this allows for a contradictory conclusion. On the one hand, there is no clear line of separation between chiefs and government institutions in the political structure of the post-colonial state of Sierra Leone (see Albrecht 2017a). On the other hand, state institutions and chiefs are distinguishable because they have different types of authority drawn from different varieties of sources. As such, connections and sameness, as well as contestation and difference, all come into play when it comes to interaction between individuals embodying state representatives and traditional leaders. They may fully recognize one another and collaborate closely while also competing and fighting with each other. This is the inherent political component of any process of hybridization.

Notes 1 Sierra Leone’s 149 chiefdoms are governed by paramount chiefs and divided into a number of sections that are led by section chiefs. Each village within the sections are overseen by headmen, also referred to as town chiefs (Albrecht 2010:6). 2 For an extensive analysis of the SLP’s armed public order management unit, the Operational Support Division (OSD), and how it evolved, see Albrecht and Jackson 2009, 2014a. 3 The appointment of a British national to the position of Chief of the Defence Staff was considered in 2000 during the British intervention in Sierra Leone. However, the idea was rejected as being too controversial (Paul Richards, interview, 2008; Keith Biddle, interview, June 2009). 4 This is also reflected in the Chiefdom Police, which appears in numerous pieces of legislation as a separate legal entity from the SLP. The primary role of the Chiefdom Police is to deliver summons for cases in local courts, enforce bylaws and assist with the collection of chiefdom revenue. It was previously the enforcement arm of the district councillors and paramount chiefs as “court messengers.” Around 1956, as the British began to prepare Sierra Leone for independence, the SLP moved into the Protectorate (beyond the Western Area). The commissioner at the time was asked by the colonial secretary to take over the court messengers. He refused for basically the same reasons as Biddle did in the early 2000s: the financial and management burden of doing so (Albrecht 2010:9; Albrecht et al. 2014:30–31). Biddle noted about the Chiefdom Police in 2009: “I had enough on my plate without taking on the personnel problems that would emanate from such an amalgamation and suggested to Peter [Penfold, British High Commissioner in the late 1990s] that the CP [Chiefdom Police] be left to wither on the vine, with the SLP through LNP and LPPB filling the space. An issue that exercised my mind was the manner in which the PCs [Paramount Chief] and DOs [District Officers] managed the CP.

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Many were enforcing questionable practices and collecting ‘local taxes’ – extortion money – for the chiefs and DOs. In some chieftainships, they were used to drag recalcitrant girls to the Bondo Bush for FGM [Female Genital Mutilation]. Many of the PCs and DOs really opposed the suggestion [of incorporating the CP into reform efforts], as they were apprehensive that things might turn difficult for them and that they would lose their power base” (email communication, Keith Biddle, 2009) (Albrecht 2010:9). 5 District and Provincial Security Committees (DISECs and PROSECs) were integral to the reach and functioning of the ONS beyond Freetown. They were formalized in the 2002 National Security and Central Intelligence Act and became important vehicles for involving the entire country in security governance. Bringing together key actors from the security sector, as well as local leaders and civil-society groups, they supported increased local government and community cooperation with the security agencies, enabled more efficient co-operation between the security agencies, and improved the quality of information passed to the central government. From 2009, the concept was devolved further to the chiefdom level with the establishment of Chiefdom Security Committees (CHISECs) in border regions of the country, funded by the UN Development Programme (UNDP). 6 Based on experience of the author of this book, this is a quite common occurrence.

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The chiefs of community policing

An appreciation of the hybridized basis of chiefly authority in Sierra Leone helps us understand how and under what conditions social and political transformations are likely to occur, be resisted or eschewed in rural areas of the country. This is because of the breadth of registers of authority that chiefs can and do draw on in their order-making practices that in combination invest legitimacy in their order-making practices. Chiefs invoke sacred and other customary powers at the local level that revolve around kinship, autochthon status and secret society membership. Nationally they derive authority from an operative center of government, bureaucracy and legislation. Unlike the SLP, whose power base, authority and legitimacy to act depend more substantially on the products and effects of the central government – the state – the chiefs are in a unique position to combine locally and nationally generated sources of authority. They embody a historically embedded process of hybridization and thus stand at the center of how authority is distributed to claim resources and a role in shaping decision-making (see Chapter 4). This chapter argues that, rather than establishing a consolidated state system, police reform as part of broader state-building efforts reproduced the hybrid political order that paramount and lesser chiefs embody and control. To substantiate the practical dimensions of this argument, the chapter explores one aspect of police reform in Sierra Leone: how and with what implications community policing has been introduced at the local level during police reform from the early 2000s onward. The focus is on the primary institutional expression of community policing, the Local Policing Partnership Boards (LPPBs) that were introduced with little written guidance, albeit based on experience in the UK. Integral to the concept of Local Needs Policing, LPPBs were established to ensure stakeholder participation in policing. They signified an articulated need within the police and among international partners to try to build relations of trust and legitimacy with the population that did not exist either before or during the war. Formalization of the LPPBs through policies or legislation has been limited:1 while internationally led police reform has been extensive, direct funding of the LPPBs by national or international actors has been restricted (Albrecht et al. 2014:25).2 Yet LPPBs have been established across all of

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Sierra Leone’s police divisions (officially referred to as Local Command Units) to a greater or lesser extent. The reason for this relative success from the perspective of the SLP is that they are organized around human infrastructure rather than technical logistics, that is, existing and consolidated structures of authority. In rural areas of Sierra Leone like Peyima, this means that chiefs have a direct say in who may be a LPPB member (and by extension play a direct role in order-making). As such, there is a conflation between an individual’s involvement in the LPPB, and his or her status in relation to the chief, as is the case in Kono and across many other districts in the country. In principle, no individual can engage in community policing without chiefly consent. Understanding the hybrid and deeply political foundations of chiefly authority as outlined in Chapter 4 constitutes the context in which the SLP has been and remains able to promote its community policing model outside Freetown and the Western Area more broadly. The particular composition of local politics, and the chiefs’ authority over local order-making practices, exposes conservative attempts to maintain social cohesion and stability, which are nonetheless constantly challenged in symbolic and physical struggles over who occupies what positions of authority at any given time (see Minikin 1973; Tangri 1976; Jackson and Albrecht 2018). Policing as a set of ordermaking practices and the introduction of LPPBs – to the extent that they have productive effects in any one locality – enter into these extremely localized struggles over power and resources. This chapter first discusses the recent history of community policing in Sierra Leone and the traces of transformation in local power structures that it has engendered. While the bulk of the evidence derives from my own fieldwork in Kono District and Kamara Chiefdom specifically, observations are also drawn from a study of LPPBs from across the country, including urban areas (Albrecht et al. 2014). The chapter also demonstrates that, regardless of whether we are speaking of chiefs or urban business people, a primary driver behind the engagement is personalized, that is, extremely localized interests. This analysis is followed by an exploration of two cases in Peyima that demonstrate how the LPPBs have been co-opted by the chiefs and how they have reproduced, rather than challenged, the hybrid basis of chiefly authority. The first case explores a boy’s sudden death and how it was dealt with simultaneously as a cosmological-ancestral matter, as analyzed in Chapter 4, and a potential criminal case that required police involvement. The second case explores a theft and its resolution through the involvement of Peyima’s town chief and LPPB member without engaging the police. The chapter concludes that LPPBs are the product of local power structures and relations, and specifically of self-perpetuating elites. Founded in historical processes of hybridization, they define what order means and which order-making practices are acceptable. This does not mean that changes are not possible, but they are incremental at best.

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Origins: Local Policing Partnership Boards In Sierra Leone’s police reform process, initiated in the late 1990s at a time of open conflict, LPPBs were central to how the process developed locally and have continued to function, albeit irregularly, across Sierra Leone (see Albrecht 2015, 2017a; Albrecht et al. 2014). They were established to ensure stakeholder, that is, popular participation in the process of policing. This in turn signified a perceived need within the police and a drive by international partners such as the UK to rebuild community relations after a war that many Sierra Leoneans considered to be against inter-linked kleptocratic national (government) and local (chiefs) elites that the police had played a central role in protecting. The ideal was that LPPB members would be drawn from a cross-section of society to ensure a wide range of positions from which to define security needs and how they should be addressed. From this point of departure, LPPBs were expected to support the investigation and resolution of conflict between members of the community and in the process increase levels of interaction and trust between the police and the local population (Albrecht et al. 2014:7). While the need was perceived to be particularly acute in the context of Sierra Leone in the late 1990s and early 2000s, principles of relationship-building between population and police are common characteristics of community policing globally (Kyed and Albrecht 2014). Certainly, LPPBs, as with many civilian policing groups, are not “a thing in itself,” but “a fundamentally relational phenomenon, which does not make much sense except in connection with and often in contrast to others” (Abrahams 1998:7). As such, setting up boundaries between the state and civilian policing groups, especially in the case of LPPBs, is a misnomer because they are not only relationally defined (see Vandenberghe 1999; Lamont and Molnár 2002:167) but part and parcel of the same organizational formation. The underlying rationale of the LPPBs was moral, but it was also a pragmatic response to Sierra Leone’s collapse, the SLP’s limited ability to function, and the range of groups that had occupied a role in order-making during the decade of war and bureaucratic breakdown that Sierra Leone had experienced since the early 1990s. Brima Acha Kamara, Sierra Leone’s first post-war IGP after Biddle, described the police’s scope for enforcing order in the late 1990s as “policing by consensus.” Borne out of necessity, LPPBs, he emphasized, are in a horizontal rather than hierarchical relationship with the warring groups. Policing by consensus was not meant in terms of policing that is community-sensitive, accountable and transparent, as international community policing discourse prescribes (Brogdon and Njihar 2005:1). It was a necessity, not a choice, Acha Kamara explained: There were other forces, warring factions, RUF, CDF, competition about who should really be in charge of internal security. We were not able to flex our muscles, and we were ultimately doing policing by consensus –

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we managed the situation until reintegration [of combatants from the different factions] was gathering some momentum. (Acha Kamara, interview, 2009) Acha Kamara’s approach provided the rationale for policing in the years to come, not just with respect to combatants who challenged the very existence of the SLP, but also regarding the basis on which LPPBs were established in the aftermath of the conflict. They were originally developed as a pilot project in 2003–2004 in Kissy, a busy and congested part of Freetown’s east end where many internally displaced persons had taken refuge. Mustapha Kambeh, who was the police chief in Motema police division when I first met him in 2008–2009, was involved in developing the LPPB concept for Kissy. “[Y]ouths, traditional leaders in the area, businessmen, motor drivers’ unions, and other key stakeholders who mattered in the area were integrated into it,” he said, “and they did very well by assisting to curb the fear of crime within that community [i.e., Kissy and around the same time Congo Cross]. It became clear that it is not only the people in blue who can provide policing” (Kambeh, interview, 2009). Moreover, Kambeh noted, in the context of developing the LPPBs, that they signified a change in “policing style from authoritarian to community-based policing” (Kambeh, interview, 2009). The LPPB model emerged from the initial attempts in Freetown to engage combatants in police efforts, and from there they were developed to re-establish a (state) presence in rural areas of the country (Lahai, interview, 2013). At the same time, as noted above, the initial articulation of LPPBs was inevitably inspired by community policing models from abroad, as Acha Kamara recalled: I went to Northern Ireland twice when I did my MSc at Exeter University. When I went there, they were also going through the same change process [as Sierra Leone]. I picked up the idea of policing boards there, as a form of accountability to the public. The LPPBs were set up as a way of ensuring stakeholder participation in the process, that the needs and expectations of normal people are heard. We were going to change the way we did criminal investigations. How could we involve the local in policing, a shared vision, shared values, share resources? When we do that, they own the process. (Acha Kamara, interview, 2009) The reorganization of the justice and security field that was part of ending the conflict entailed the marginalization or elimination of “other forces” and “warring factions.” As described in Chapter 3, this reorganization included leaders such as Foday Sankoh (RUF) and Hinga Norman (CDF), as well as the rank and file of the conflict’s different groups, by integrating them either into the newly established police and army or into civilian life. Yet, as the process gathered momentum, it became clear that the necessity of policing by

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consensus was not simply a consequence of war and the breakdown of a central government and its reach. It was also an accurate description of everyday policing in Sierra Leone.

Policing, community and chiefs Policing by consensus was configured by a long-term historical process of hybridization that transcended the years of conflict, at the center of which stand the paramount and lesser chiefs in rural Sierra Leone.3 The re-establishment of the state system that involved the resurrection of the SLP was therefore not going to make the principle of policing by consensus obsolete. Indeed, there was no desire within the police to bypass or marginalize chiefs as part of their re-establishing a presence across the country and no resources with which to do so. Police reform became de facto a matter of strengthening the order-making system that already existed to make it more legitimate and accountable, not to fundamentally alter or replace it. LPPBs became a concrete vehicle for appropriating and translating into practice the SLP’s ethos of Local Needs Policing formulated by British police advisers in the late 1990s. Unlike the SLP’s regime-preserving approach prior to the conflict and its collapse during it, the SLP was to be oriented toward the community as the space in which the interface and amalgamation of different approaches to order-making would take place. However, while the SLP used a language of benevolence, inclusion and collaboration to explain the rationale of setting up the LPPBs, their emergence also responded to an understanding that the “numerical strength of the SLP in terms of coverage is smaller compared to the fast-growing population for the entire nation” (SLP 2011). This statement comes from The Sierra Leone Police Local Policing Partnership Board Constitution, the only formal guidance available to LPPB members until 2013–2014, when a handbook was drawn up and published to accompany the Constitution (SLP 2014).4 The 2011 Constitution expresses the common perception that LPPBs should compensate for the lack of resources within the SLP. In other words, people were to police themselves. An influential body of scholarship regards the rise of institutions like the LPPBs and other civilian policing groups as the product of globalization and transformations in governance associated with deregulation and the outsourcing of services to the market and volunteers (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Goldstein 2012). According to Comaroff and Comaroff (2006:16), the effects of neoliberal deregulation imply that government becomes “less and less an ensemble of bureaucratic institutions, more and more a licensing-andfranchising authority.” However, while the emergence of LPPBs must be understood in relation to the state and shifts in how centrally governed bureaucratic power is configured, their formation in the case of Sierra Leone is not a function of neoliberal dynamics. Following the logic of Asef Bayat (2012) and James Holston (2008), neoliberal exclusion, inequality and state withdrawal do not explain the

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emergence of institutions like the LPPBs. Local forms of order-making are politically productive of individual and collective subjectivities and forms of authority which influence and directly shape national politics, including how state institutions function. As Chapters 3 and 4 outline, Sierra Leone emerged and continues to function as a political entity that has favored personal linkages between rulers and ruled and has resisted – or more accurately never embarked on – bureaucratization. How authority is distributed in Sierra Leone does not easily lend itself to that kind of organization. LPPBs therefore do not constitute an attempt to roll back the state. On the contrary, they reflect an attempt to establish a presence in locations where state institutions such as the SLP ceased to function during the conflict, as well as access locations where they had never had a presence. The LPPB Constitution explains that they are a “much-needed structure to enhance a crime free community” and a “non-partisan, inter-religious, social integration development group” established “to create a peaceful, healthy Police/Community rapport at all levels” (SLP 2011). As such, LPPBs are presented as a neutral and de-politicized institution of equals, where, for instance, the hierarchy of authority emphasizing paramount and lesser chiefs as figures of central authority is muted. The chiefs’ instrumental role in appointing and managing the individuals who become involved in the work of the LPPBs and the support of the LPPBs in reproducing structures of hybrid authority at the local level are not mentioned in the Constitution. The neutral LPPB/community concept expressed in the Constitution, which reflects international policy sensitivities to the personalization of ordermaking institutions that characterize authority and power in Sierra Leone, was also expressed by Mustapha Kambeh. When I initially discussed his policing style with him in Motema, outside Koidu, he noted: Even yesterday, there was a problem, a dispute between two villages in Nimikoro and Kamara chiefdoms. The local partnership board chairman from Kamara Chiefdom, Yusuf Mansaray, was with me, going to both sides to pacify the people and ask them to observe the peace. [The LPPBs are] critical in assisting the police to curb and mediate in conflict within the area [of the police division]. They [police] know that [the LPPBs have that role] because they’re part and parcel of the community and they [the police] listen to them [the LPPBs]. What the partnership board is doing is helping us [do] early warning. [They are an] early response mechanism to conflict, because of the resources given [to the police], and the economic trend in the country, and the whole world. The resources are inadequate if you allow conflict to erupt and grow within your area of responsibility. The sooner we observe that conflict is about to erupt, the quicker we are able to move to curb it in a timely way; it assists us in our resource use. (Kambeh, interview, 2009)

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In the early days of police reform, external advisers, who played a crucial role in re-establishing the SLP from the late 1990s, were uncomfortable engaging with local communities, especially the chiefs. These advisers, including Biddle and Horn, supported the idea that the needs of the community were to be heard by the SLP, and indeed, from their perspective the LPPBs were intended as a consultative, not a quasi-executive, forum. Community policing, together with the notion of intelligence-led policing, has been an important aspect of reform in UK policing, standing for a mechanism to legitimize the relationship between the police and communities (and driven in part by neoliberal policies). It represents an assumed break from bureaucratic styles of policing that emphasize crime control and limited public interaction to policing that works with residents to identify and solve the problems that are priorities for them (Bullock 2013:125).5 The intention behind external support of Local Needs Policing, broadly speaking, was not to reproduce a system of order-making organized by actors other than the SLP. In fact, it was precisely this situation that the UK advisors were in Sierra Leone to reverse, or at least to avoid perpetuating. With Biddle in the lead as IGP in the crucial years of peace-making between 1999 and 2003, external advisers assumed that the role of traditional leaders would diminish in importance and disappear as post-conflict state-building gathered momentum and marginalized or toppled other authorities. Indeed, traditional leaders were considered relics of a past, a token of underdeveloped state institutions (Keith Biddle, interview, 2009/2014). Not surprisingly, given their historical role in governing Sierra Leone, simply ignoring or downplaying the importance of chiefs in order-making did not automatically lead to their marginalization. Making their importance proportional with weak state institutions also proved to be analytically inaccurate as the SLP built up a presence outside Freetown and the Western Area. On the contrary, the position of the chiefs was consolidated through the collaborative approach that defines the LPPBs. Indeed, it has been one of the strengths of the LPPBs – that is, once they gained some traction – that they did not introduce institutional formations that were alien to how authority is generally structured in Sierra Leone (Albrecht et al. 2014). In Motema division, Kambeh clearly understood that the authority to police depended on entertaining close relations with the chiefs: Well, for me to work effectively, you must be in cordial relationship with your traditional leaders in the area you find yourself, because if there is an amicable relationship – I mean, between the police and the paramount chiefs and their section chiefs, town chief, et cetera, et cetera – it will go a long way to ease policing problems in that area. Then there will be a common understanding among the chiefs and the police. They will understand the problems of the police and find ways and means of harmonizing their relationship and make sure that things work effectively to make their areas secure. We have to preserve the peace and public

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tranquility and make sure that the fear of crimes is reduced to a minimum. To achieve this, you must have good relations with the paramount chief. (Kambeh, interview, 2009) The SLP’s room to maneuver is driven by its own capacity to enforce a particular order and the legitimacy of the chiefs, who draw their authority in relation to the police from their legal status and their status as indigenous to the area they rule. The perception among Sierra Leonean police officers is that there are shortages of personnel and equipment within the force, which adds to the importance of entertaining good relations with the local community. However, just like the LPPBs, the community is not constituted by a set of neutrally or evenly distributed interest groups, but by a field of power that centers on the chiefs. This means that, when the involvement of the community is mentioned by police officers, particularly in areas outside district headquarter towns and police divisional headquarters, “community” has tended to mean local authorities, that is, chiefs. In other words, LPPB involvement of the community has not meant involvement of the general population (with a few notable exceptions, for instance, in Mongo police division in northern Sierra Leone (Albrecht et al. 2014)). The equation between community and local authorities is compounded by the fact that LPPBs are not necessarily tribally or socially representative of the locality in which they operate because local authorities commonly are considered “sons of the soil.” The equation has also been compounded by traditionally close working relations between the police and local authorities in rural areas, and certainly the chiefs, like the government, were targeted by the RUF and killed or forced to flee their chiefdoms. To conclude it is a general rule across rural Sierra Leone that the police will be hampered when operating in areas where they do not enjoy close ties with traditional leaders. Indeed, the general scenario at town and village level is that the LPPB representative, if he (or she) exists, is one of the authorities of the town (or represents him or her) and at the same time acts as a police proxy.

Urban LPPBs and their potentially transformative effects This chapter, like the book as a whole, focuses primarily on rural areas. However, it is worth briefly considering urban Sierra Leone, defined here as the district headquarter towns. Size, density, heterogeneity and inequality, as Louis Wirth (1938) of the Chicago School noted, are the defining features of the city. It is precisely these urban characteristics that signify intensified instability, insecurity and unpredictability that in turn have made the need for LPPBs more urgently felt but also more practical (and affordable) because of population densities. This section sets out some of the characteristics of the

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LPPBs in urban settings, where they are more widespread and arguably articulate a transformation in thinking about what the concept of community entails when it comes to defining and addressing security and safety (Albrecht et al. 2014).6 Exploring LPPBs in an urban context, where and for which they were developed initially, reveals their potentially transformative effects. It shows the types of roles they can play locally in densely populated areas and who they might be able to hold to account. The issue of accountability is particularly pertinent, given the lack of separation between LPPBs on the one hand and chiefs and police on the other. This is because LPPBs constitute one attempt among others by the SLP to legitimize the state as the center of authority, a hierarchically superior and coherent, transcendent entity embodying a territorially defined political community (Kyed and Albrecht 2014:5) and endowing the SLP with authority to act in its name. As I argue above, the SLP can only play this state-building role to the extent that setting up LPPBs is accepted and reinforced by the paramount and lesser chiefs. Beyond Freetown, where officially there are no chiefs, this is also the case in Sierra Leone’s towns, yet with a set of important differences. As one LPPB member in Bo West police division explained in 2012,7 “All paramount chiefs [of the LPPB serve] as advisers. They are major stakeholders because they have traditional control over their people. However, they are not members of the [LPPB] executive” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). Indeed, “some people may listen to them more. Even this election [the general elections held on November 17, 2012], when the parties are campaigning, they need to inform the paramount chief because he or she is in charge of the chiefdom, directly representing the head of state here” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). At the same time, as was noted in a group discussion with LPPB members in Tankoro division, covering eastern Kono: “Before, the police would work with the chiefs and not work with the communities.” Hence, while paramount chiefs are involved in the operation of LPPBs by deciding, for instance, who should be put forward for elections, there has also been a general shift on two fronts. The first shift is reflected in the broad range of actors that constitutes the LPPB executive, including teachers, petty traders, businesspeople and others. The second shift has to do with the general change in perceptions of the police and “an understanding of how the police work. In the past people would run away and hide when the police showed up, but with the sensitization that the LPPBs have undertaken, this has changed” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). In other words, the LPPBs can support and have indeed been perceived as supporting a process of integration by expanding the number and broadening the backgrounds of those who are engaged in defining what security means at the local level. For instance, in the survey conducted in 2012–2013 (Albrecht et al. 2014), without exception a women’s leader was considered part of the inner circle of the LPPB, and women often assume leading positions within it. In Daru

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police division, for instance, the Vice Chair and Secretary-General were both women at the time the survey was conducted. The role of women is not reflected in the LPPB Constitution, even though it is generally accepted that women play a unique role in matters of local security, notably with respect to women and children involved in cases of domestic violence. Among those interviewed, there was general consensus that women “are dominated in the community,” as one LPPB member in Kabala put it, and that violence against women and children is common. Being part of a partly state-sanctioned institution like the LPPB was considered beneficial in terms of being in a position to intervene, the Vice Chairlady in Kabala police division noted: Some people beat their wives, some people beat their children. When such things happen, we intervene. When somebody beats his or her child, we will come and advise. We don’t have the right to get involved if they don’t accept our involvement. However, we can advise them that there may be trouble, and that we can call the police – the LPPB gives the opportunity to involve the police. (LPPB member, interview, 2012) Broadly speaking, women were considered to be better equipped than their male counterparts to deal with issues relating to domestic violence. The LPPB has provided an opportunity for women to play a role in order-making in relation to the police and in deciding how security needs are articulated and addressed. Ultimately this is a reconfiguration of authority that may not fundamentally alter or challenge the position of the chiefs. However, it opens up a space for transformations to occur and fosters differentiation and pluralization – hybridization – that allows new forms and organizations to emerge that may have a democratizing effect on how security is experienced and delivered in the long term.

Altruism, business and politics We have seen that the ability of LPPBs to function requires that they be built up around established hierarchies of power, or else they will be resisted or ignored. If this is accepted as the basic tenet of LPPBs, their members, whose authority is shaped by these hierarchies, are motivated by a number of factors. First, and importantly, as one Bo-based LPPB member noted, is a sense of “giving something to my country as a Sierra Leonean” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). In Kailahun, south of Kono on the Liberian border, where the police division covers the entire district, the police chief noted in a conversation outside his station that the LPPB worked because of “the dedication of a few members” (LUC, interview, 2012). Similarly, a generalized, rather than personalized, concern was expressed by those interviewed about the consequences of high levels of crime. The police chief of Bo West noted that,

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“if there is insecurity, your business cannot prosper; we have to look at the security aspect” (LUC, interview, 2012). Similarly, in Bo East, an LPPB member noted that “everybody has their own priorities; there is nothing to derive from the LPPB. We are just satisfied with the fact that we can come to help our people to maintain security and peace” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). Following on from these statements, which are common across Sierra Leone, it should therefore be assumed that one reason why LPPB members engage in community policing efforts is the altruistic belief that they are doing something positive for the community in which they live. As is the case in numerous other settings (see Albrecht and Kyed 2014), LPPBs are inevitably morally ambiguous. In many contexts beyond Sierra Leone, security groups similar to LPPBs use violence in their efforts to make order, which in the eyes of those who draw on their services is considered necessary but also illegitimate. In Sierra Leone, this moral ambiguity becomes outspoken in the sense that LPPBs serve both private interests and the common good, a strategy that seeks local stability and predictability, while at the same time producing specific moral communities (Pratten 2010). For instance, LPPB members who have the means to do so – commonly businesspeople and commonly in urban settings – supply the police with fuel and transportation. They also support the building and painting of police posts: in Kenema, the LPPB started, but did not finish, construction of a police hospital. The LPPB chairman of the LPPB in Bo noted that: “Number one: we are not policemen. We are only supporting the police to be able to police properly. We force them. We pressure them” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). In sum, the LPPB provides support, including logistical support, while at the same time seeking to hold the SLP to account for its actions. Support by individual LPPB members of an under-resourced police force is primarily an urban phenomenon, where the conflation of personal interests and altruism is accentuated. LPPB members derive concrete benefits from their positions. In 2011 the chairman in Kissy, a suburb of Freetown, noted without hesitation that he had wanted to become a chairman in order to secure his business and that his close relationship with the police chief and logistical support of the police station had paid off in this regard (Horn et al. 2011:38). In Kenema and Bo police divisions in 2011, both LPPB chairmen were Lebanese-Sierra Leonean shopkeepers who were using LPPB membership to consolidate their positions of authority with respect to both the police and the communities in which they live. In Waterloo, another suburb of Freetown, the chairman explained that without security his business would run at a loss, “but if there is security and stability in a country, then investors will come, and I will have more contracts. Therefore, my personal interests and those of the LPPB are the same” (LPPB member, interview, 2012). These statements by LPPB members show that individual interests motivate actors to engage in community policing because doing so constitutes a way to defend their positions and the resources they have accumulated or are entitled to. The LPPBs provide a state-sanctioned institution for local elites in

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the urban as well as rural areas of the country to articulate these positions which are in turn rooted in historical processes of authority-making (hybridization).

Organizational structures of the LPPB and their role in order-making An LPPB has been set up in each police division. It has an executive body headed by a Chairman, a Vice Chairman, a Treasurer, a representative of youth and women, and a number of other positions. According to the 2011 Constitution, “Two (2) Traditional Chiefs” may sit on the LPPB as advisers, but in reality section and town chiefs are often executive members. To form the executive membership of the LPPB, five delegates from each section of a chiefdom are put forward for election and are selected for their “reputable character” and according to whether they are “dedicated to the course of security and community development” (SLP 2011). This means that without exception the community, led by the paramount and lesser chiefs, is left to choose the candidates who can run for election to the executive board (SLP 2011:16). In the case of Kailahun District, for instance, because the police chief saw the benefit of involving the public in policing, functioning LPPB structures were established across the five chiefdoms of the division. In March 2012 a message was sent through the paramount and section chiefs to put appropriate candidates forward for elections. In turn, five delegates from each chiefdom came to Kailahun town to take part in the elections to the executive board. This is a common way of forming an LPPB. Only members of the central executive at the police division level, who constitute the highest body of the LPPB organization, are elected every two years. There is no national LPPB coordinating body, although this is being discussed in 2018–2019, and until July 2009 there was no Community Relations Department (CRD) in SLP headquarters in Freetown either. This police function had been decentralized to the divisional level in 2001, following the same rationale as the LPPBs, namely, to close a perceived gap between the police and the public. However, the SLP leadership “saw that community relations are important,” as Elizabeth Turay, the Director of CRD in 2013 said, and the department was therefore re-established in police headquarters: “We went back to our roots” (Turay, interview, 2013). The re-establishment of the CRD may also have reflected the fact that the DfID-funded Access to Security and Justice Programme prioritized community relations, which came with resources. Beyond the executive board of a police division, including sections and towns in the individual chiefdoms, chiefs and elders often play a more direct role in selecting LPPB members. For instance, in Peyima between 2007 and 2011, the LPPB member was initially a central member of the group of elders in the town and was then replaced by a close ally of the town chief. Neither would have been appointed to this position without the town chief ’s direct

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involvement, but their status in the town also indicated the importance of being a LPPB member as essentially the contact point for the police and the first to arrive at a crime scene in the township and investigate. Only if an incident is deemed sufficiently grave by the LPPB member and the chief is it brought to the LPPB head of the chiefdom and/or the nearest police post or station, both of which are located in Tombodu in Kamara Chiefdom. The LPPB Chairman of Kamara had been appointed by the paramount chief as part of a political settlement surrounding paramount chief elections after the war and to ensure a balance of tribal representation in positions of some authority (he was a Mandingo, not a Kono). As a point of departure, the SLP expects the chiefs to deal with matters within their own jurisdiction. While these cases are commonly referred to as minor, there is a notable grey area regarding what they entail, particularly when it comes to domestic violence. In principle murder, sudden deaths, severe beatings (referred to as “blood crimes”), substantial theft and the sexual abuse of children are considered to be “above” the town level and to require police involvement, as much to protect the suspect from mob justice as to investigate and prosecute. Generally, when a criminal act takes place, young men support, as necessary, the LPPB member in making an arrest. These youth groups constitute the physical force of community security. In rural areas, and particularly in a small town like Peyima, they are not considered to be a formal part of the LPPBs and are not recognized as such by the SLP. Rather, the youth groups represent general order-making practices that existed prior to the introduction of community policing in Sierra Leone when interaction with the police was rare, feared and avoided if possible.8 In this regard, LPPBs as an expression of SLP presence, police reform and ultimately SSR have become intertwined with already existing local structures of authority and practice in rural Sierra Leone. They function because they are built up around specific cultural and historical notions of security, authority and order, including particular relationships of interdependence, opposition and appropriation (Kyed 2009) that ultimately center on paramount and lesser chiefs. These are constituted by numerous actors, including the police, chiefs, quasi-vigilante groups, secret societies and others. Indeed, the LPPBs are constituted by representatives from these very groups. By extension, this also means that it is not always evident whether LPPB members are acting in their capacity as LPPB members or as community members of a certain status (Albrecht et al. 2014). This is the transformation that police reform at the local level has encouraged, and it constitutes a merger with ongoing processes of the hybridization of a particular view of police– public relations. It is recognizable as the sort of community policing that is now circulating in policy-making circles globally, but fundamentally shaped by existing patterns of authority. In order to demonstrate how LPPBs have consolidated chiefly authority while implementing a transformed approach to policing, the chapter now

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turns to two examples from Peyima showing how the LPPBs work. Concrete interactions and negotiations over case resolution between the SLP and LPPB members have an important symbolic value in signaling the novel presence of state-sanctioned policing in rural areas and the status this has acquired. It is not the technical dimension of police investigations that is at stake, but the ability of the police as a body representing the central government to make a “final judgment.” The first example revolves around the case of the epileptic boy already described in Chapter 4, who fell into the swamp surrounding Peyima and drowned. While the case was analyzed in that chapter for its cosmologicalancestral significance, there was also a criminal dimension to it that involved both the LPPB and, by extension, the SLP. The second example is a case of theft that involved the LPPB, the SLP never materializing beyond threatening their involvement. The two cases demonstrate the chief ’s control of local order-making, either by proxy through the LPPB member or – if resources are involved – through the chief ’s direct involvement. Making and defining order are distinctly political acts that garner a level of control and by extension determine access to resources. These two cases demonstrate how LPPBs have become integral to this control while still representing the novel presence of the police in rural Sierra Leone.

The death of a boy: its criminal implications An epileptic boy had a seizure as he crossed a narrow path to reach his father’s farm. His death, other disturbing incidents, and the increasing scarcity of diamond finds in the mining pits around Peyima were seen by the villagers as a consequence of dangers and harmful forces having turned against the township’s population. The people believed that their ancestors were punishing them for not paying attention to them and respecting them. Offerings had to be, and were, made. However, while cosmological-ancestral explanations for the boy’s death were found and acted upon, the case was also considered to belong partly “above” the town because of the age of the deceased. Furthermore, there were no witnesses to the accident, which made the case if not suspicious, then extraordinary. Ibrahim Kalilu Kamara, Peyima’s LPPB member when the incident occurred, came to play a central role in dealing with it. Kalilu, who was referred to as a Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the LPPB in Peyima and was a “trusted somebody” to town chief Gborie, came to the scene. Looking stern, much like a police officer whose role he had assumed, he told people that nobody should touch the boy’s body until the SLP had come to look into the matter. As the embodiment of the LPPB, Kalilu represented a combination of the different types of authority that emanate from both the locality of Peyima and extra-local organizations (the SLP). In addition, he represented police reform as this had reached the localities in rural Sierra Leone: mediated,

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distorted and shaped by particular constellations of local authority and manifestations of power. Kalilu referred to the inspector of police as his boss, but he had been appointed to the position of PRO by the town chief, Gborie. In sum, Kalilu embodied the SLP’s negotiated access to Peyima, which was shaped by terms set at the local level that incorporated both chiefly and centrally governed authorities. Kalilu jotted down the course of events on a piece of paper and went to the nearest police post in Tombodu, Kamara Chiefdom’s main town, to report the death and bring back a police officer to verify that a crime had not been committed: So, when reaching Tombodu, the police took a statement from me; then we made radio communication to the head of the police station, the one in Motema [headquarters of the police division]. They asked me some questions about the deceased, whether there is any foul play, I deny; there’s no foul play there. To prove it, they gave me a sergeant, and we came together and observed the corpse that there is no foul play. (Kalilu, interview, 2009) What was important here is the symbolic quality of reporting the death to the police. If Kalilu had not done so, the police may have suspected that a crime had in fact taken place and used that suspicion to demand some kind of (preferably) monetary benefit. Before the war, Kalilu explained, the SLP would not even have come, let alone have been actively summoned by the township inhabitants. Even though their presence would not make a technical difference to investigating the boy’s death, the fact that the SLP did appear closed the case symbolically. Invitations for the police to visit a town are always made reluctantly because the police will demand a “report in fee” and expect to receive “transport money” to travel from Tombodu. This is the micro-economy of policing in rural Sierra Leone, a patrimonial system of redistribution that police reforms have not altered. The exchange of money is institutionalized and therefore expected whenever the police are involved. Arrival of the police is followed by some negotiation, which inadvertently involves acts of boundary making. Kalilu explained to me what he said to the police when they arrived in Peyima: This is community policing that I am doing. I’m not receiving any payment from the government, so you are here to do your job. We are there to represent you, and if there is a case we will pay your transport to come and go, but [apart from that] we don’t have money to give you. (Kalilu, interview, 2009) This act of simultaneous distancing Kalilu from and rapprochement with the SLP, of boundary-making between the locality and the central government,

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constituted a tacit agreement. If it was not abided by, if transport money was not paid, the instruments of the state would come more forcefully into play – at least this is what Kalilu anticipated: If you won’t give them transport money, they won’t satisfy, some of the police will apprehend you, they will move with Land Rovers, take the corpse to the police station to see the doctor pathologist to check whether there is a foul play. They do all of this because they need money. (Kalilu, interview, 2009) Because financial gain is inevitably at stake, Kalilu’s experience was no exception to this rule of engagement. He might have told the police that he was not formally paid for his efforts, which was true, but he did receive money from the family of the deceased to deal with the police on their behalf (also referred to as transport money). It was evident that, notwithstanding the exchange of money, the articulation of authority through state involvement was pivotal in dealing appropriately with the matter. If the body had simply been taken out of the swamp and buried, the police could have reached the conclusion that foul play had occurred, regardless of the fact that no technical evidence was available to make the case for or against. What occurred was the negotiation of authority, not an investigation per se. It was the symbolic quality of making the police report that mattered, not a search for the objective truth about the boy’s death. (In any case, the SLP in Tombodu has no vehicle, nor is a “pathologist” available, as Kalilu noted.) Kalilu’s role was crucial in this regard. As the LPPB member at hand, he both accommodated the police by reporting the case and ensured that the town chief who had appointed him remained in control of the disposition of the case. The police had a presence in Peyima, but this was only possible because the town chief had given his consent. Kalilu stood at the center of and embodied the transformation that had occurred to how order-making could take place, which itself was enabled by Sierra Leone’s police reform. The police arrived a few hours after the boy had drowned. The situation had calmed down, the women had stopped crying and screaming, and the boy’s family was questioned about what had happened, while the sergeant jotted down a few notes on a piece of paper. The parents were scolded for not taking better care of their child, transport money was exchanged, and the police officer said that he would report back to Tombodu and Motema to verify that the child had died in an accident, not by foul play. According to Muslim tradition, the boy was buried on the afternoon of his death near the place where he drowned. He was not spoken of again. The case of the deceased boy demonstrates how and when the concept of the LPPB is operationalized and has an effect in Peyima’s security and justice field, including how its cosmological-ancestral and criminal dimensions are intertwined with one another. It also demonstrates that the town chief played

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an indirect yet central role in managing the case and the effects that police reform has had in rural Sierra Leone. Gborie had appointed Kalilu to the position of PRO, and he was consulted on how and when to engage the police. He also paid a brief visit to the area where the death had taken place. However, the bottom line is that there were no significant resources to be generated from engaging in its resolution. In a resource-scarce environment such as Peyima – and Sierra Leone more broadly – this dimension cannot be underestimated.

A case of theft, and the reproductive effects of the LPPB This case of theft involved 1,000,000 Leones (approximately US$300) that had been stolen from me. It was dealt with by the town chief and Kalilu in his capacity as a LPPB member and never reached the police post in Tombodu or divisional headquarters in Motema. The case exemplifies the negotiated nature of order-making in Peyima, with the LPPB representing a police presence without the (state-sanctioned uniformed) police actually being present – and under chiefly authority. The town leadership threatened to summon the SLP to look into the matter and let the law run its course, but this was not acted upon. However, the fact that the threat was made emphasized the severity of the situation. Despite Kalilu’s involvement in his capacity as the LPPB member, the town leadership in effect chose to deal with the issue “inside themselves,” a common way of saying that police involvement was not necessary, but also a way to confirm chiefly authority. The incident began a few months earlier when I promised Jimmy Sahr, my landlord in Peyima, that I would help him refurbish his house to prepare for the second leg of my fieldwork. I had returned to Denmark and had sent him 1,000,000 Leones through Western Union, the money transfer company. Jimmy Sahr rarely went to Koidu, the headquarters town of Kono, so Fasalie, who had helped me when I first arrived in Kono, went to the bank to get the money. He handed over the money to Isaac, the first person I had met in Peyima when he was Peyima’s LPPB member. While a lot of people were suddenly involved in the money transfer, it became clear that Isaac had kept it for himself. The incident was further complicated by the fact that Isaac had told Jimmy Sahr and the town chief that I had sent the money for small-scale alluvial mining, which, if true, could have put me in an awkward, if not dangerous, position within the town. White men do not mine without proper licenses to do so: as investors, they are the only source of substantial income in an area where cash is in short supply. In addition, there are certain procedures that need to be followed, such as discussing mining opportunities with paramount and lesser chiefs, both to get formal and informal permission to mine, and because the chief and elders will expect monetary reward throughout the mining process. To continue my fieldwork in Peyima, I would need to explain to the town chief why the money had been sent.

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I was summoned to the town chief ’s compound and seated in his Court Barry, a building where he usually held public meetings and local court sessions, surrounded by several elders who are always around when the town chief was in Peyima. Isaac, the last person known to handle the money, was there as well, looking extremely nervous. After an hour of waiting in awkward silence, I was called to the chief ’s house alone and sat down in the front room on a big green Chinese sofa. He proclaimed that he was the chief, meaning that, if I had something to say or give, I should do so now. I said I was a student, meaning I had nothing to hide or give, yet handed Gborie $50 out of respect for his time and position. I stressed that I had not sent the money for mining purposes. If that had been the purpose of my trip, I told him, I would have come straight to him, particularly since, apart from being the town chief, he was also the Mining Chairman of Kamara Chiefdom and signed off on all licenses in the chiefdom on behalf of the government. Isaac and Jimmy Sahr were then asked to come into the room and were seated on each side of me, facing the town chief. At this stage, Kalilu entered the house to hear what the final say in the case would be and to take orders from the town chief. Jimmy Sahr was furious, demanding that the money be found. Isaac, becoming more and more timid, tried to defend himself and appeared surprised, even hurt, that Jimmy Sahr had taken the case to the town authorities. They had grown up in the same house and were close, like brothers. Jimmy Sahr wondered out loud if Isaac did not want the house to be refurbished because it was not his, Isaac’s, property. The town chief intervened, telling Isaac to apologize to Jimmy Sahr. Suddenly, we were interrupted by a group of men from a mining company who appeared to be of Asian descent. They had come to discuss the matter of washing gravel with the town chief, which is part of the mining process. The meeting on my case was over; there were other more pressing matters to deal with and more money to be made. Kalilu now took over my case on behalf of the town chief. We went back to the Court Barry next to the chief ’s house. A public apology had to be given in front of the town elders. Isaac had to admit his wrongdoing, which he did. Kalilu explained the case in Kono, and Isaac apologized in front of the town elders to both Jimmy Sahr and me for what he had done. Kalilu then went on to say that “Mr Peter” had decided to let the case go, that the case was closed and the police would not be involved. The case had been resolved “within themselves.” It had also become the talk of the town, and Isaac had been publicly humiliated, which appeared to be punishment enough. The money was never returned; it had already been “chopped,” that is, spent and gone. As in the case of the deceased boy, Kalilu came to embody a process of hybridization that LPPBs have altered and consolidated simultaneously. He assembled different types of authority by assuming the authority that came with being the PRO, that is, embodying a police presence in Peyima that was a consequence of establishing a police force after the war. However, this role

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could only be assumed genuinely because it was consented to – and exploited – by the town chief. Indeed, he had arbitrated in the case, with Kalilu executing and communicating the decision, which was done in a way that was shaped to fit, rather than disrupt, the chiefly hierarchy. (For a general discussion of this confluence of roles, see Ubink and van Rooij 2011:8.) Kalilu did not involve the police in Tombodu, although he could have and threatened to do so. While he told me on numerous occasions that in his capacity of LPPB member he worked for the police, he also stated that he had rejected their offer of a uniform: “They are not paying me, so why are they asking me to take a uniform? I’m not interested” (Kalilu, interview, 2009). Hybridization breeds contradiction, which Kalilu had to deal with. While he gained social status and minor financial benefits by embodying a (state-based) police presence in Peyima, he would have to do so without compromising the authority of the town chief.

Conclusion One of the objectives of re-establishing the SLP in the late 1990s and early 2000s was to project the imagery of vertical encompassment (Ferguson and Gupta 2002:982–983) that had been shattered during the preceding decade of conflict. While this was not how the police explained the process, the concept articulates the goal of the SLP to establish a police force (the state) as separate from the community yet encompassing and integrated with it. The approach was embedded in the new ethos of the police, Local Needs Policing, which articulated an ideal version of the SLP’s transformation from a regimepreserving police force to a people-centered service provider. The post-war community focus of the SLP did not explicitly seek to change local power structures. Rather, it aimed to re-establish a police presence in rural areas of the country and thereby a policing function that the population would identify as such and consider legitimate. It is also the case, however, that making order and enforcing security have a distinctly political quality that has to do with who has the authority to both define what order is and determine access to resources. Therefore, as community policing evolved in rural Sierra Leone, it became intertwined with existing local structures of authority and practices and corroborated hybridization as a process of authority-making that paramount and lesser chiefs embody and govern. Hybridity has become a central concept in contemporary peace and conflict studies. It represents an important challenge to the failed/fragile state discourse and the binaries through which the modern state is often contrasted with traditional or non-state modes of political ordering in the global South (Albrecht and Moe 2015:1; Millar 2014a:502). Hybridity provides an analytical lens through which to explore in a more nuanced way how international and local practices and norms and institutions interact, merge and transcend universalizing theories to include a plurality of social orders. However, it is crucial to keep in mind that, while LPPBs were certainly established as part of

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broad-based post-conflict peacebuilding efforts in Sierra Leone, they were introduced into an already existing process of hybridization and thus became part of local power dynamics that centered on the paramount and lesser chiefs, who embody a range of sources of authority (see Ray and van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1996:24; van Dijk and van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal 1999). This becomes evident when the practices of community policing are explored, specifically how the LPPBs are set up to deal with local crimes. To operate in rural Sierra Leone, the SLP must entertain good relations with paramount and lesser chiefs if they are to “work effectively,” as noted by Motema’s police chief, Kambeh. By extension, chiefs have played a crucial role in establishing and managing the LPPBs. They sometimes sit on the executive boards of the LPPB and are always involved in appointing the members put forward for election. Below the LPPB executive, the overlap between the chiefly hierarchy and LPPB members is almost complete: the latter are appointed by, coordinate their activities with, and execute the decisions of the former. The exact implications of this are not only important in understanding the role of the chiefs in order-making in contemporary rural Sierra Leone. Understanding local power dynamics is also important in the development and implementation of large-scale police reform programming. Paramount and lesser chiefs (as well as quasi-vigilante groups and secret society members) play a central role in enforcing order and security locally in rural Sierra Leone. They are a fact of political life in the country’s 149 chiefdoms and cannot be ignored; they will inevitably have a say in what security means in their chiefdoms and how it should be delivered. On one level, this is a strength of the LPPBs and explains in part why they are relatively efficient in the many areas across Sierra Leone where they function. They do not simply represent a foreign institutional import, but have been built up around and appropriated by already existing structures of authority locally (Albrecht et al. 2014:59–60). On another level, LPPBs are also problematic because whenever the involvement of the community is mentioned by police officers in a rural setting like Peyima, “community” tends to mean the local authorities – that is, the chiefs – rather than the general population. Thus, control of what order is and should be remains a largely elite affair with the concomitant possibility of the abuse of power (see Ubink and van Rooij 2011:9). This is not necessarily a criticism of the introduction of LPPBs in rural Sierra Leone. Rather, recognizing the possibility of local chiefs abusing their power should inject realism into the process of designing police reform in hybrid political contexts. In rural areas of Sierra Leone, LPPBs have consolidated the (re)formalization of relations between the police and the chiefs, but in the long run they may also lead to more inclusive policing involving broader range of individuals and actors are engaged. Seen from this perspective, the establishment of LPPBs in itself is simply a first step. And certainly,

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as this chapter suggests, continuous incremental change is the best that can be hoped for. In the short term, wholesale transformation is neither feasible nor desirable because attempts to induce abrupt change would either be ignored, wholly resisted, or increase tensions and possibly conflict.

Notes 1 The role of LPPBs is not defined in law. Indeed, no police legislation has been developed since community policing was introduced in Sierra Leone in 2002–2003. Instead, they were developed and implemented at the operational level and have become one of the critical methods used to implement and consolidate Local Needs Policing. International agencies such as DfID hesitated to push for the legislative formalization of LPPBs because they are considered to be an evolving concept that should be given time to be tested and developed further. 2 By 2012–2013, only limited funding, if any, was allocated to operations, and no funding other than salary payments was sent to the police divisions outside the Western Area. This situation was confirmed in an unpublished external review in March 2012 (Astill-Brown et al. 2012). The police’s financial difficulties have been complicated further by Koroma’s populist politics. In 2012, for instance, to bolster his chances of winning the elections, the president announced that all SLP officers, like armed forces personnel, would receive a rice ration. However, the decision was not underpinned by additional budgetary allocations. In 2014, for instance, the SLP spent 26 billion Leones on rice (around $582,000 at the time), amounting to 38 percent of its non-salary budget. Koroma’s decision caused significant problems for the SLP, necessitating cuts in other parts of the organization and increasing the overall percentage spent on salaries and benefits (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:128). 3 A survey conducted in 2012 by Richard Fanthorpe and Emmanuel Gaima, two authorities on rural Sierra Leone, asked respondents for their attitudes toward local justice and security providers. One of the questions asked was which institution – chiefs, local courts or the SLP – local residents prefer to deal with. Respondents, the report notes, expressed a preference for chiefs’ justice because it is “decisive, quick and relatively cheap” (Fanthorpe and Gaima 2012:19). 4 Until the 2011 Constitution, from 2005, a set of Proposed Guidelines and Codes of Conduct for Operations of the Local Policing Partnership Boards of Sierra Leone existed (SLP 2005). The two documents are similar in wording. The Handbook: Local Policing Partnership Boards (SLP 2014) outlines the roles and responsibilities of the LPPB, how their members are expected to behave, and how they should relate to the police, as Francis Allieu Muni, Acha Kamara’s successor, noted in the Handbook’s foreword. 5 Certainly, the pursuit of neoliberal policies by the UK, for instance, has led to an emerging commonality between policing in the global South and North that blurs the boundary “between bureaucratic, rule-based and more personalized and intuitive policing styles” (Albrecht et al. 2017). Weak or collapsed bureaucracies such as Sierra Leone’s in the 1990s will commonly be characterized as lacking administrative and political checks and balances. At the same time, across the global North, bureaucratization – too much of it or the wrong kind – is considered negative and even anti-liberal, as it creates a distance between the public and the police (Albrecht et al. 2017). 6 This section is based on data from 2012–2013 I collected while conducting a survey of LPPBs for the Access to Security and Justice Programme (ASJP). Qualitative interviews were carried out with SLP officers and LPPB members in approximately

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half of Sierra Leone’s then thirty-three police divisions (there are now thirty-six) across the country. 7 Bo is the third largest city after Freetown and Kenema. It has a population of approximately 175,000. The district (including the city of Bo) is divided into two police divisions, Bo West and Bo East. 8 Due to Freetown’s size and continued growth and consequent crime rates across the Western Area, the role of young people in providing security has been structured to a degree that is not the case in the provinces. Community Safety Volunteers (CSVs) have periodically been distributed across police divisions in the Western Area, receiving a small stipend from police headquarters. They work directly with the SLP’s Operations Department and under the leadership of the executive of the LPPB, and they support the night patrols of the police in particular. The CSVs are not elected but are selected from the community by executive members of the LPPB and other local authorities (Albrecht et al. 2014:42–43).

7

Secrets, strangers and order-making

This chapter substantiates some of the elements that produce the hybridized quality of local order in rural Sierra Leone by exploring the order-making functions of the Poro, a central secret society in the country.1 Supported by empirical evidence, the chapter argues that authority is dispersed among a multitude of actors who incorporate disparate rationalities and registers that are produced through ever-evolving processes of hybridization. Using the term “order-making” emphasizes that the practices and actors that make order are embedded in broader social and political relations and networks that are not the prerogative of the state police (Kyed and Albrecht 2014). The term also denotes that it is not possible to separate and compartmentalize security actors that are identified with a bureaucratic center of government from other figures of authority. On the one hand, the chapter demonstrates the Poro’s general political function as a men’s association and shows how it conditions access to and control of resources and generates and resolves conflicts (Albrecht 2016). On the other hand, it explores when and under what conditions the Poro and the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) become intertwined, molded together, and merge with one another in the constitution of local order-making (see Baker 2008b; Bayley and Shearing 2001). As such, Poro–police engagement, interaction and merging constitute an analytically privileged space in which simultaneous processes of homogenization (positive accommodation) and heterogenization (separation) may be identified. The Poro is a male secret society located on the Guinea Coast of West Africa (see Little 1965) which emerged as a defensive mechanism of local leaders against internal and external challenges. Best described as a “total social phenomenon” (Durkheim 1915; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Mauss 1990), it encompasses the economic, political and ideational dimensions of social life. As a core, integrative institution, the Poro remains fundamentally conservative: one of its major functions is to preserve the status quo (cf. Gibbs 1962). All boys can and in principle must be initiated into the Poro (or another secret society2) to become adult men in the locations in which they were born. Indeed, becoming a paramount or lesser chief depends on becoming a member. “Bush schools” are established to teach initiates about

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farming, herbal techniques, hunting, cultural rules and, importantly, structures of authority (see Fulton 1972:1222). Not only does the Poro employ particular rituals, signs, symbols and forms of knowledge that are withheld from non-initiates, but, as Little noted in 1965 (and as still holds true today), “these things are regarded as a special source of power through being kept private” (Little 1965:349). A key dimension of Poro membership in Kamara Chiefdom is that it accentuates the symbolic power that comes with being a “son of the soil,” that is, an autochthon, as opposed to being a “stranger” in a particular locality. The Poro’s importance as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion and how it constitutes a profoundly political order is explored in this chapter. Membership of the Poro conditions access to local positions of power and by extension decision-making on how resources are to be distributed, especially regarding land to farm and mine. Thus, the Poro also has a determining effect on what security means, for whom security is secured, and how it is practiced. In the context of SSR and police reform, the Poro was considered part of a traditional domain that was not relevant to programming. Certainly, if paramount and lesser chiefs were notoriously difficult to engage in SSR and programming on policing, the role of secret societies was rarely even mentioned by external actors except during discussions of circumcision, despite their central role in deciding matters of access to land, for instance, and the conflicts that such decisions give rise to. There is historical precedent for this lack of recognition: “The [colonial] Government’s arrangements for administering the Protectorate [in the 1950s] employed chiefs and headmen, but no serious attempt was made to understand the political function of the secret societies” (Little 1965:351). The chapter begins by emphasizing the Poro’s emergence as a localized bulwark against external interference and pressures. In general, it has been and remains essential in distinguishing between the insiders and outsiders of a given locality – those who are considered sons of the soil and those who are considered strangers. Following an empirically grounded discussion of what constitutes a secret and the ambivalent figure of the stranger and how these categories are produced through the Poro, the chapter explores a case of land dispute in which Poro membership and its lack was central to its resolution. The chapter then presents and discusses how and under what conditions the state police engage in Poro affairs, which illustrates how disparate rationalities are accommodated and separated in acts of order-making.

The Poro and the localization of power In his book West African Secret Societies of 1929, Frederick Butt-Thompson (1929:15) notes that “[i]n the history of anything Pagan, there must always be hesitation in using dates. Suffice it then to say that when [between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries] the Muhammedan invasion of the West Coast took place, the Pagan societies were well-established.” He continues:

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Secrets, strangers and order-making They were instituted to enforce and maintain tribal tradition, customs and beliefs that were in danger of changing or becoming obsolete. The organisers were the champions of the old against the new … They were clever enough to know that prohibition alone was not sufficient foundation for any organisation desiring longevity, and, therefore, made their societies the repositories of the folklore, myths and … wisdom the tribes possessed. (Butt-Thompson 1929:16, emphasis added)

It is important to stress that making a clear-cut distinction between the old and the new is problematic. Apart from reifying the Poro, such a distinction skews the fact that, while secret societies, like any social institution, have an evolving history in Sierra Leone, they are dynamic and have inevitably changed and adapted over time (see Bellman 1984:18). However, Butt-Thompson makes an important point about the Poro’s distinctly political quality, which remains central to how it operates today. It continues to be used as a political instrument in the struggle over who has access to sources of authority that may be translated into rights to land, claims to political office and financial gain. Thus, while the Poro is not an invented tradition in Hobsbawm’s (1983) sense, it is manipulated in the search for influence and authority (Bellman 1984:17). This is a dynamic perspective of the Poro, which sees it as continually transforming and adapting while also enduring political change. Caroline Bledsoe (1984:456) states that no one knows the actual origin of the Poro, but she suggests that it grew out of “early turmoil of political upheaval and migration among Mande-speaking peoples in the Guinea Coast.” Paul Jackson (2007:105) also notes that today secret societies remain somewhat of “a closed door to most researchers, even if their influence is a constant in Sierra Leonean politics” (see also Fulton 1972:1222; Little 1965). Policy-makers and scholars alike are generally restricted with respect to the information they can obtain about secret societies. This is evident in the lack of recent substantive empirical studies of how they operate and their role in local order-making (Højbjerg 2007:21). A plethora of older ethnographic studies does exist, however, focusing on Liberia, the borderlands between Sierra Leone and Guinea, and Nigeria (Bellman 1984; Dennett 1916; Fulton 1972; Gibbs 1962; Morton-Williams 1960). Bledsoe (1984:456–457) suggests that the function of the Poro has been to provide idioms of affiliation for diverse splinter groups of strangers to attach themselves to powerful landowner patrons. In the past, the landowners attempted to secure the allegiance of stranger families by drawing them under the influence and patronage of the local ancestral spirits. The larger settlements often competed with one another to attract traders, yet they would also cooperate in rituals, political and juridical affairs, and mutual defense. Newcomers in Kamara today are still regarded ambivalently – as potential allies, but also as potential subjugators who might be destructive of established authority.

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These brief observations are important in order to understand the political context in which the Poro emerged as a localized expression of defense, its stabilizing effects and its continued relevance. Drawing on histories of autochthony and adjusting to current social dynamics, the Poro continues to reproduce power positions by establishing lines of demarcation between Poro members and non-members. Power in this context is not external to how and where it works, that is, imposed; nor is it necessarily a manifest confrontation between the dominant and the dominated (see Bell 1992:200). The option to act differently and to reject initiation into the Poro is always present and is sometimes chosen. However, as we shall see, doing so has negative consequences for the authority that is then available to lay claims to material resources.

Producing authority in concrete physical space Within the politically decentralized milieu in which the Poro emerged, the construction of community became an exercise in maintaining and continuously producing boundaries. This included the demarcation of physical boundaries between inside and outside, as well as the symbolic production of separation between insiders and outsiders. One of the mechanisms to delineate belonging to a community involved undergoing rites of passage, such as initiation into the Poro. The defensive element of the Poro against the stranger, the danger to cohesion that he embodies as an outsider, and the Poro’s stabilizing function became evident in the society’s organization into locally managed segments. Kenneth Little (1951:244) makes a distinction that remains analytically helpful today, namely, “between the Poro as a society or general institution and a ‘poro’, which is a gathering of Poro members called together for a specific object.” Using the term in the first sense denotes an association that lacks centralization but that comprises a number of segments, each containing society members normally resident in one village with an ancillary “Poro bush.” Little (see also Fulton 1972:1224) refers to these as “lodges” and notes that they are independent in so far as administrative activities are concerned. The relative independence of a lodge serves to harness local articulations of authority, specifically around groups of autochthons, defined literally by being the first to occupy a particular location and establish an inhabitable space. Compared to a stranger, the superior status of being a son of the soil and his ability to make order continues to be non-negotiable to this day, even though it is also clear that in Kamara chiefdom, and Peyima specifically, this position is considered to be under continuous threat. (Greater detail on this issue is provided in the next section.) Jimmy Sahr, a Kono elder in Peyima and someone who could rightfully claim to become a chief based on his lineage, confirmed the importance of secret society membership in defining individual authority: “Why?” he asked as we were discussing the importance of Poro membership:

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Secrets, strangers and order-making It gives you a small right of origin, yeah, it gives you more rights. Like for instance, if you’re not associated with the secret society, you can’t be a chief. Also, if, for instance, I’m told there is any problem within the secret society about a piece of land, you are not able to decide if you’re not associated with them; you are not able to decide that matter. (Jimmy Sahr, interview, 2008)

Here, Jimmy Sahr expresses a close link between autochthony, political advancement, social status, rights to land, and justice that is institutionally expressed in the Poro (see Bledsoe 1984:457). Claiming membership, combined with ancestral association, which in fact supported Jimmy Sahr’s power in Peyima, is transformed into decisions over land tenure and claims to have disputes resolved within the bush, to which non-members have no access. If a person is not initiated into the Poro in the location where a land claim is made, he is physically and symbolically barred from entering the space in which decisions are made, and his case and his access to justice will be limited. In other words, the Poro, like the local justice system overseen by the chiefs, reinforces the social system it is derived from and provides a mechanism for local elites to reinforce and maintain their own power (Jackson and Albrecht 2018:47). The method by which the Poro establishes its authority is reflected in Kris Hardin’s (1993:93) exploration of identity and authority along “spatial lines” rather than “in the temporal plane.” Hardin explains how the individual becomes tied concretely to a particular physical space through initiation practices by locating: individuals in particular spaces by giving them rights, as well as obligations, to others who share those spaces. Where someone is born, where they join Sande [women’s societies] or Poro, where their ancestors are buried, and where they themselves will be buried, work to limit the claims to identity and the rights and statuses available through the descent and kinship system. (1993:93) It is this emphasis on belonging to a concrete physical space (rather than to “the nation” in the abstract) and on being a son of the soil in a literal, localized sense of the term that is confirmed through Poro membership. This is what makes the secret society an obvious mechanism for inclusion and exclusion in Peyima, Kamara Chiefdom and beyond. Thus, at the heart of secret society membership lies the notion of belonging to a place as well as being a stranger in it – that is, a principle of authority that, as we shall see below, directly shapes how the individual experiences the delivery of justice. Peter Geschiere and Stephen Jackson (2006:6) note that autochthony literally implies an origin “of the soil itself, a direct claim to territory.” They suggest that the language around autochthony and fierce

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struggles over belonging are “resurgent” today as a consequence of political liberalization in Africa and the generally “intensifying globalisation.” However, it is also clear, as Carola Lentz (2007:45) argues, that the distinction between sons of the soil and strangers that permeates the autochthon/allochthon discourse is not necessarily the product of capitalist enterprise (see Albrecht 2017b). Discourse on autochthony or indigeneity is not of purely colonial origin: it emanates from transformed pre-colonial configurations of first-comers and late-comers (Lentz 2007:45). As outlined above, the Poro in Sierra Leone, for instance, has a long history of reproducing local hierarchies of power and establishing defensive mechanisms against external interference. As a total social phenomenon, the Poro is thus part of the social order in a place like Kamara Chiefdom, membership in it being central for any individual who is seeking authority within the community (see Richards et al. 2004:8). Endowing some and not others with the secrets of the Poro is an instrument in the struggle over decision-making in Kamara because it is an important marker of inclusion and exclusion. The concept of the stranger signifies a lack of symbolic capital that stems from the stranger’s liminal position as neither fully absorbed in nor fully excluded from the group (Karakayali 2006:313). Furthermore, it indicates a person who originates in a different soil, connoting “non-belonging, alienness, foreignness, non-authenticity, a distinct distance from the soil and a lack of legitimate claim to it, the absence of an intimate relationship with the land” (Jackson 2007:99). The stranger is a potential threat to the group, but he also channels resources into a locality: he is an (ambivalent) member of the community while also remaining detached (Karakayali 2006:313; Simmel 1971; Wood 1934). It is this belief that supports the power of the dominant group, the autochthons, or the Konos in Kamara Chiefdom more specifically – and renders the stranger as both coveted and suspicious. “Knowing the secret” becomes vital, not for what it is or for the content it guards, but for the authority and rights to participate in social life and decision-making over resources that initiation brings with it (see Simmel 1950; Bellman 1984:17). As such, not only are the existence and general purposes of the societies known to every adult, but the wide range of activities that they oversee is known as well, which makes them a dominant social force. In recent years reference to belonging had become more pertinent in Peyima, and in Kamara Chiefdom more broadly, because of a perception among the dominant elders that the number of sons of the soil, i.e., Konos, was diminishing compared to the number of strangers. Korankos, Temnes, Mendes, Limbas and other tribal groups were living in enclaves across town where they were either mining or farming. Kamara chiefdom and Kono District in general have attracted members from a wide cross-section of tribes because of the financial opportunities of diamond-mining (see Reno 1995).3 This influx intensified after Sierra Leone’s civil war that ended in 2002 because of the limited opportunities to make money elsewhere in Sierra

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Leone. In particular, the large number of Temnes relative to Konos had become problematic for the Konos, and the political situation in town was increasingly seen as volatile.

The Temnes and the ubiquitous threat of the Poro During my fieldwork there were a number of clashes between the Temnes – approximately 500 individuals and the largest tribe in Peyima – and the Konos. One of these clashes related to how much community labor the Temnes were obliged to perform. All tribes, including Konos, are expected to do some work for the community, but the Temnes had allegedly refused to clear vegetation along the paths through the town, which spurred Peyima’s elders into action. There was a national party-political dimension to the clashes. Since the APC, a northern-aligned party, came to power in Freetown in 2007, the Temnes, a northern tribe and traditionally supportive of the APC, had become more vocal in the opinion of leaders in Peyima, all Kono, who generally support the SLPP, which was in opposition at the time. The Temnes were seen by many as drawing on forms of authority derived from national politics to create a space of local opposition to Peyima’s leadership by refusing to do the required community labor. However, while considered a threat by the Kono leadership, these articulations of authority by the Temnes could not overrule those drawn from being indigenous. In the end, the Temnes were punished by having some of their farmland confiscated; Peyima’s Kono elders announced that they had taken the decision in the Poro bush. While registers of authority such as autochthony and national politics were articulated as the conflict between the Temnes and Konos unfolded, the issue was addressed as a matter internal to the physical space of Peyima. The innate power of administrative and hierarchical rationalities that provide seemingly ordered links with the political and regulatory apparatus of a central bureaucratic state were never enacted. Thus, while the Temnes were perceived to draw on an extra-local source of authority by affiliating with the APC – indeed, this was one of the main reasons why the Poro was invoked – they accepted the town leadership’s decision. Boundary-making is not only a way to differentiate between the inside and outside in Peyima. In everyday life, efforts to make boundaries within Peyima were vital in order to include and exclude individuals and groups from the authority to make order and by extension to claim access to decision-making and resources within and around Peyima. As part of these acts of boundarymaking, the Poro and the authority that came from being a Poro member was central. It illustrates the wider network of which the Poro is a part through which it incorporates and responds to national-level political dynamics. Sayoh Jalloh, a Koranko residing in Peyima in order to mine, explained the role that the Poro played in articulating these processes of inclusion and exclusion, including its participation in the dispute with the Temnes. Jalloh

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himself was considered a stranger in the township. Even though he had been living in Peyima on and off since 1978 and was raising a family there, he would always be a Koranko born elsewhere. Like many others in Peyima, he was “waiting for his luck” – for that big diamond find – which would allow him to leave the township and move to Freetown as a bomba, a person of money and prestige. One afternoon we were talking about the options available to the Temnes and the fact that, even if they were the largest tribe in Peyima numerically speaking, they could never claim the same rights to the land as the Konos: That won’t happen, the Konos won’t allow it; they won’t allow the Temnes. We have something we call bylaws. No matter how your population is greater than the population of the indigenous, the government and the laws in the country, in the state, won’t allow that. Imposed laws – not laws that are written or accepted in the community – they [i.e., the indigenous] will kick against them. But laws that have been accepted since time immemorial, they can’t kick against them. Like saying: “You people are strangers, you people are this, you people are that, don’t enter into our bushes.” We [strangers] do accept them [the Konos] because we are here to find money, we need their diamonds. So, whatever they bring to us we do accept, you understand? If we refuse, they will enter into their secret bush and come up with their society and each and every one [of the strangers and all women] will enter into the house. It’s part of our tradition. However, even if we have five Konos here and all the inhabitants of Peyima are different tribes from different places, this would not make a difference. The Konos are the owners of this area, because they have a secret society. (Jalloh, interview, 2009, emphasis added) The threat of activating the secret society against strangers is ubiquitous. This is the ritual enactment of boundary-making that has material consequences. It is an act and articulation of authority that does not lend itself to the bureaucratically governed central state in any simple way, but authoritatively separates the inside and outside of the decision-making hierarchy in Peyima. Evidently, it was not the secret itself that was at stake, but rather the authority that flowed from engaging in Poro society activities, of knowing the secret that allowed the Konos to punish the Temnes by taking their land. Whenever the Konos “came up with their society,” as Jalloh put it, this meant that the devil, Bili, had emerged, the whole township would go silent, and all non-initiates were forced to go into their houses and lock their doors. On one level this might be a straightforward communication and enactment of traditional values and beliefs. More importantly, however, it constitutes, in line with Bell’s (1992) analysis, the production and negotiation of power relations, enacting dominance and manhood (non-initiates are locked up in houses with the women, while initiates are outside). The ritual confinement of

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non-initiates commonly occurs when central Poro members die, as well as toward the end of the initiation period during the dry season in December and January. Non-initiates do not necessarily fear the magical powers of the devil, but they are reminded of their inferior status and know that the Konos will take action against them if they leave their houses while society activities occur. The Poro symbolically marks off different levels of authority, not between state institutions and chiefly authorities but between sons of the soil and strangers, which reflects an ongoing and historical dichotomy and struggle in rural Sierra Leone (all non-initiates are considered strangers) (see Fanthorpe 2005). It is the ability of the Konos in Peyima to establish symbolic boundaries between these two categories of actor that makes the Poro crucial to the conditioning of who has access to which types of resources. The enactment of these boundaries between insiders and outsiders is therefore essential to producing the stranger. As the next section shows, however, boundary-making is also vital in establishing a hierarchy between and among secret society members themselves.

Boundaries, violence and land disputes The inclusion–exclusion aspect of the Poro has a direct effect on how acts of violence and land disputes – justice and security – are addressed in rural Sierra Leone. Beryl Bellman (1984:139) rightly notes that there is “more to the expression of membership than simply a dichotomy between those who have knowledge and those who do not.” However, what is relevant in the context of this chapter is how the boundary between those who know and those who do not know produces effects in the justice and security field and sets up boundaries between sons of the soil and strangers. The following case concerns Taylor Kondeh, a young man living in Peyima who had recently been initiated into the Poro. It illustrates that being privy to the secrets of the Poro is not sufficient to claim decision-making power. In short, there are different levels of being an initiate.

Taylor’s search for authority Taylor Kondeh, who was in his early thirties and a key informant during my fieldwork, was not a son of the soil, at least not unequivocally. He had been born and raised in Peyima and therefore could not generate sufficient symbolic capital to lay claim to land and authority in another location. His mother was a Kono and the first cousin of the town chief, Gborie. His father, however, was a Mandingo, which put Taylor on the margins of the chiefly hierarchy, struggling to claim authority in the township. He was therefore forced to find innovative ways to make his voice heard in Peyima. He attempted to do this through politics. Prior to the 2007 general elections in Sierra Leone, it had become evident to Taylor that he would not be able to establish himself in Peyima as someone

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with a central role in local decision-making. He therefore made the rather radical decision to support the APC, which had been in opposition for a decade but ended up winning the elections in 2007. Taylor’s rationale was that supporting the opposition, if they won, would open up a source of authority for him that could eventually be converted into financial gain to support his family. It would provide him with a platform from which he could make his voice heard in Peyima. However, Taylor did not succeed. Even after the APC won in 2007, he continued to struggle to make ends meet, farming instead of mining, driving a motorbike to and from Peyima to transport people and goods, and zealously pursuing a political career. “You know,” he said, “our party here has become the winning party. So, we are expecting jobs, developmental issues that are coming on should lie in our hand, we should be considered greatly. But up to now, you see, the Chief is moving around with the SLPP guys” (Kondeh, interview, 2009). Besides indicating the close link between traditional leaders and national-level politics, it was also clear to Taylor that, not only had he not gained what he had expected by pursuing politics, he had angered Chief Gborie by doing so.

The Poro and the Kondehs’ loss of land As a consequence of his affiliation with the APC, Taylor Kondeh and his family were involved in a land dispute case that was eventually handled as a Poro matter. Taylor’s story describes both the struggle and competition over access to land and how legitimate authority to settle conflicts was manifested in Peyima (see Lund 2008:10). In this regard, while it was a case of one Poro member against another – not a member against a non-member – the Poro served a similar function as in the case of Temnes versus Konos explored above. The land in question had been farmed by the Kondehs since the early 1990s. It was taken away from them by Chief Gborie and subsequently given to Peyima’s SLPP chairwoman. The chief is a central figure in this regard because in part land is taken and given according to one’s allegiance to him. Along with his autochthon status and Poro membership, the chief derives authority from local government law, which stipulates that the chiefly hierarchy holds “land in trust for the people of the Chiefdoms” (Local Government Act, 28. (d)). In line with what Christine Juul and Christian Lund (2002:4–5) have argued in their discussion of land disputes in Africa, what comes into play is the ability of chiefs to negotiate and manipulate land claims and their freedom to deploy a raft of tactics and strategies, which includes invoking the Poro in order to solidify this claim. Inevitably, it was Peyima’s powerful and influential town elders who benefited from the ambiguity of land entitlements, not Taylor. As it turned out, Taylor’s family was subjected to a strategy of exclusion through the Poro, led by the town leadership and the town chief in particular. Taylor explained:

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Secrets, strangers and order-making So when the case reaches a point where you say “now this case is not going to be decided in town, they are going to decide it in a different world.” If the issue is between two [Poro] members, they know how to decide it. Okay, if they know that really, you are right, you have the right on a particular issue, they will foul you by calling the secret society members out. (Kondeh, interview, 2009)

A Poro bylaw stipulates that, when its members are out and about in the town, non-initiates are not allowed to leave their houses, “and you lock yourself inside,” Taylor continued, “while people [Poro members] stay outside and decide the matter. When it is over, they will tell you: ‘I’m sorry, we are sorry, this place is no more yours’” (Kondeh, interview, 2009). Taylor had been initiated into the Poro – unlike his father, a Mandingo – but as a halfKono he was a marginal member and therefore not privy to discussions among the higher-ranking members, including Chief Gborie. Because of this he was not given a voice in deciding about the land. The family’s argument that they had farmed the land for almost two decades did not constitute a sufficient public claim of ownership. Normally, eviction of this kind could not have happened unless the Kondehs had committed a serious crime or without suitable compensation in the form of alternative land. In turn, because of the chief ’s state-recognized role in dealing with decisions over land tenure, it was not a viable option to approach extra-local institutions such as the local government District Council, the police or political parties in order to find support for the Kondeh family’s counter-claim (see Juul and Lund 2002:18). This would lead to further social exclusion in Peyima, and in any case it was not part of the mandate of the police or other institutions of the state to overrule decisions made by the chief. In Peyima, moreover, symbols of the state such as contracts and deeds are not referred to and as a consequence do not figure in local decisions over land distribution. Land deals are consolidated verbally in front of witnesses. Therefore, proof of the right to mine or farm a piece of land has to be reproduced continuously, and challenges to claims are perennial. This leaves room for both double-dealing and continuous reinterpretation of rightful ownership. Time and again Peyima’s residents referred to the Poro as a privileged space in which land decisions could and would be made by initiates. Town Chief Gborie further undermined Taylor’s status in his capacity of “holding the land in trust” and as a hegemonic figure in Peyima. Taylor told me that Gborie had told him that “‘even someone who has property and land here for fifty years, I’m the only one that has the right to take it from a person.’ He said that before going to the swamp [to oversee his farming]. But through our hard work we tried to extend the land, [which was just] the swamp then. And the swamp was not even large at the time” (Kondeh, interview, 2009).

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The rationale was nonetheless fairly simple, as Gborie himself explained: “OK, for an example, Peter, you want to grow rice in this swamp, and Jimmy Sahr allows you to do it, but it does not belong to you. Jimmy Sahr allows you to make the swamp here, you have been developing this swamp for five, ten, fifteen years. Then Jimmy Sahr says ‘my friend, I want to work my land’” (Gborie, interview, 2009). Gborie’s rationale was that Taylor’s family had no argument, and even if Taylor claimed differently, it was his word against Gborie’s. This was a stand-off that Taylor could never win. By involving the Poro, the resolution of Taylor Kondeh’s case was transferred into a parallel space within the justice and security field where public confrontation, discussions and action were somewhat muted because of the hierarchy that exists in the Poro bush. Drawing authority from the realm of the secret society where the decision to take Taylor’s land was made, the chief occupied a position of power that Taylor could never match. His inferior position within the social space of Peyima, and by extension the Poro bush, meant that his affiliation with the ruling party was of little use to him. In fact, it had actively worked against him. The chiefly authority and the Poro are thus both part and parcel of the continuously reproduced hybrid order-making arrangement that is maintained in rural Sierra Leone (see Albrecht 2015). This process, however, is detached from forces that could be cast as “national” or “statutory” in the sense that we understand these terms today, that is, as a centrally governed politico-bureaucratic entity. The handling of justice and land allocations through Poro involvement does not take place in competition with state authorities but fully replaces or, perhaps more accurately, fully complements state functions (see Kyed and Buur 2007:2). In Taylor’s case, these effects at once excluded state intervention and made it irrelevant while at the same time drawing on the role of chiefs in long-term state formation processes through indirect rule, which in turn had real effects for the Kondeh family’s ability to make a living. In the process, Taylor was cut off from seeking alternative means of redress and had to accept that the family’s land had been lost. Justice – how it is articulated and by whom – produces and reproduces power relations that are manifested in unequal access to land. At the heart of the Kondehs’ case lay the fact that the enforcement of order is a field where power was contested, authority was re-configured and constituted, and different interests were at stake over resources and “clients.” These struggles took place on the symbolic boundary between the Poro bush and the township, rather than between inside and outside the chiefdom – indeed, between the inside and the outside of the specific locality of Peyima.

Non-Kono members of the Poro society Poro initiation lies at the heart of becoming a man and of male political advancement and social status in Peyima. Referring to eastern Sierra Leone, Fanthorpe (2001:373) notes that in “this cultural milieu, constructing

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‘community’ is an exercise in crossing boundaries, in undergoing the same rites of passage in the same locale. That process does not exclude newcomers, but requires them to make social connections that establish a local identity.” In the mid-2000s, paramount chiefs across Kono district decided to deny allochthons the right to be initiated into the Poro. This decision indicates that the identity of stranger had become a greater threat to the indigenes in Peyima and elsewhere in the district because of their increased numbers and the perception that they had become a challenge to established Kono leadership. Before and certainly after the war in Sierra Leone ended in 2002, opportunities for making a living across the country were few. Kono District and a diamond-rich location like Peyima have therefore continued to attract a wide cross-section of the country’s tribal identities. Jimmy Sahr, an elder and candidate to become chief, was a particularly vociferous proponent of the rights of the autochthons. He explained the decision to deny allochthons initiation into the Poro: Before, we did initiate the different types of ethnic groups like the Mandingo, the Karanko, the Fullah when they violate the law [e.g., entered the Poro bush as non-initiates]. But later we found out that when you initiate them, they will go and interpret our secret society, expose our secret outside. So we decided not to do it any longer. We saw them violate the law so that they could be initiated, coming in large numbers. (Jimmy Sahr, interview, 2008) Taylor Kondeh had become a Poro member just before the bylaw excluding allochthons came into force. Acknowledging the importance of the institution, he noted: “I didn’t have the right to become a town chief, but as long as I’ve become a society member, it’s one of the identities that will authorize you to become a leader in Kono District as a Kono man” (Kondeh, interview, 2009). Combined with joining the APC, Poro membership was an important component of Taylor’s attempt to bolster his authority in the town. It had always been a general rule that sons of the soil – autochthons – had a birth-given right to become members. However, among autochthon and allochthon initiates alike, access to the inner circle of the Poro society is restricted to a select few individuals who could claim descent from those who founded the town. Because of his mixed tribal heritage, Taylor had struggled to become a member. Although he had now succeeded, it had made little difference to him because “they [Poro members] marginalize me,” he noted. “I told them you are a liar, you have lied. Why do you allow me to enter that forest? The day I entered you told me that I have got the right to become even a paramount chief of this land, and now you are trying to move me out?” (Kondeh, interview, 2009). Taylor’s motivation in becoming a Poro member was not dissimilar to that of many others. On one occasion Kalilu, an aide of Chief Gborie discussed in

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the next section, noted about Taylor: “Kondeh is not a Kono, he’s there because of ambition. He wants power, that’s why he’s going to the secret society” (Kalilu, interview, 2009). Becoming politically active was one way to build authority in Peyima. Seeking secret society membership was another way, but now any authority Taylor had expected to acquire from being a Poro member was being denied him. Although the Poro is intertwined with Sierra Leone’s process of state formation, until this point this chapter has treated the Poro as separate from the state system and as having an ordering effect on locally embedded microstruggles. The next section explores a case of two young Poro members who attempted forcibly to initiate a non-Kono into the Poro. Because forced initiation is a violation of a bylaw passed by the paramount chief, the SLP also became involved. As the case unfolded, the inseparability and intermingling of differing rationalities became evident, confirming the networked quality of order-making.

When the police and the Poro interact Leaders in Peyima explained the Poro to me as a parallel world with its own cabinet. Chief Gborie and Jimmy Sahr, for example, were both Poro members and Kono elders in the township; as such, they had a place in the higher echelons of decision-making both within and outside the Poro bush. Taylor, by contrast, was on the margins of decision-making in both arenas because of his mixed tribal heritage. The public in the Poro bush is established in opposition not only to (external) impositions by the state and its representatives, but also to other tribal groups that claim authority in the township and a stake in local resources. This was the case for individuals (Taylor), groups (Temnes), and allochthons and quasi-autochthons who sought Poro membership and were perceived by the Kono leadership as drawing strength from extra-local political affiliations (for instance, the APC). The final section of this chapter explores how a Poro-related case of violence against a non-member was resolved. The case demonstrates that it is problematic to categorically separate the public of the Poro from that of the township – and even the state itself – as we try to understand how order is perceived, practiced and assembled in Kamara Chiefdom. Indeed, as an interconnected whole, order as a particular configuration and assemblage of authority is constituted by more or less explicitly interlinked networks. These networks are characterized at different times and in different ways by collaboration, competition and mutual enrollment (Abrahamsen and Williams 2007, 2011). Exploring a case of police involvement in Poro affairs provides an analytically privileged space where the dynamic and the inseparability of networked authority become explicit and can be analyzed in practice. In one conversation about the relationship between the police and Poro-related crimes, Ibrahim “Kalilu” Kamara, Peyima’s acting security officer, made it clear why the

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SLP as an institution of the state (on one level at least) had no role to play in the Poro and why this was fully accepted by the police. Like Taylor, Kalilu was in his thirties when I met him and was of mixed descent: his father was a Mandingo, his mother a Kono. Also, like Taylor, Kalilu had recently been initiated into the Poro in order to claim the role of Youth Chairman in Kamara Chiefdom, a position of political significance. He had not been successful in his endeavor: the fact that he was not a full Kono was given as the reason. However, he was a trusted aide of Chief Gborie and had therefore been appointed as the acting security officer in Peyima (for more on Kalilu’s role in local order-making, see Albrecht 2015:624–629). Kalilu explained to me why the SLP neither could nor would play a role in Poro matters: We’ve got the Mendes, the Temnes, and the Konos. They are all secret societal people. So, when you tell them, any one of the police officers, you tell them something against the society, not Kono alone, but also in the north and the south, they will tell you: “My friend, an issue for the society is arranged in the society bush. It’s not our concern.” Except if the matter [is] brought to town, then it will be their concern, but if it’s in the bush, it’s not theirs. (Kalilu, interview, 2008) Kalilu’s statement underlines the fact that the Poro – or secret societies in general – is both a physical and a symbolic space that conditions how the authority to make order is distributed in any given locality. The Poro is respected as a privileged and sacred place where decisions with political and material consequences are made. Therefore boundaries are created in discourse and practice that mostly deny a role for the SLP in the Poro bush. The denial of a police role in the Poro requires further elaboration. First, the SLP has played a relatively limited role in rural Sierra Leone, both before and certainly during and after the war ended in 2002. The SLP all but collapsed during the war and in the early 2000s had only some presence in Sierra Leone’s urban centers. At the same time, the SLP had a dismal reputation among members of the public: it was perceived as a supporter of the corrupt and violent pre-war regime (Denney 2014b:69). The establishment of trust between the police and the public became a central element of Sierra Leone’s peacebuilding process, for instance, through the establishment of community policing forums called Local Policing Partnership Boards (LPPBs) (a detailed analysis is of the LPPBs is presented in Chapter 6).4 This chapter emphasizes that the presence of the SLP in rural Sierra Leone has historically been limited. However, it is not as individual secret society members that a role is denied to police officers – it is because they, as police officers, represent a centrally governed bureaucratic security system. As such, Kalilu’s statement also indicates the networked quality of authority that the

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Poro co-produces, where clear-cut distinctions between inside and outside are dissolved. Indeed, the outside (police) is partially drawn into the inside (Poro), which demonstrates the differing registers of authority that come into play simultaneously in order-making practices. More importantly, it demonstrates the conditions under which this becomes a possibility. As the police become involved in Poro affairs, the Poro’s integrity and status might be affected but are ultimately maintained. The case examined in this section provides empirical evidence of how the physical boundary of the Poro bush may be crossed in bringing a matter “to town,” as Kalilu puts it above. This is indeed the only way that the ordermaking practices of the police can play a role in relation to Poro activities. This case describes what happens when the Poro and police mix and merge to make order, illustrating the networked quality of authority embodied by individuals who are in a position to draw on different registers of authority simultaneously. As we shall see, the Poro and the police were both considered to be central in responding to a crime that had taken place in the name of the former.

The criminal act of forced initiation and its aftermath The case involved three young men living in Tombodu, the headquarters town of Kamara chiefdom located about six miles from Peyima: Osman Suma, Junior Bangura and Tamba Kellie. The details of the case were explained to me by relatives of those involved and by the town authorities. Osman was eighteen years old and a Susu by tribe. Junior and Tamba were around the same age, both Kono, and were attending their last year at Alimadiga Muslim Secondary School in Tombodu. One evening Junior and Tamba, who were Poro members, saw Osman, a non-member, lying on the veranda of his house, which was located on the dirt road leading to the Poro bush. Walking home from a “traditional dance,” as soon as they spotted Osman they demanded that, as a non-Poro member, he should follow the bylaw of Kamara chiefdom and go into his house so that he could not see the secret society’s activities. They called him bikamine, which means a Kono man who is not yet initiated. “Don’t say that,” Osman told them, taking their words as an insult and a threat. “If I am or not, it doesn’t matter, just leave me as you see me. I am a Sierra Leonean, and that’s not my tradition.”5 The young men got into an argument and used abusive language, which is against another bylaw. Junior and Tamba beat Osman with a stick, took out razor blades, and emulated ritual acts of initiation by making cuts on Osman’s back along his spine from the neck to the waistline – symbolizing the teeth marks of the devil. As is normally the case during initiation in the Poro bush, there was a lot of blood. A Mr Foyah, who was passing by, tried unsuccessfully to separate the young men, but Osman was able to free himself from Junior and Tamba and managed to find his way to the police post in Tombodu. Meanwhile, Mr

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Foyah had gone to Yusuf Mansaray, the chairman of the Local Policing Partnership Board in Kamara chiefdom. Yusuf was a Fullah by tribe: “my grandfather came to this place,” he noted one day while we were sitting in his compound discussing the case and how he had become involved in community policing in the first place. Despite having grown up in Tombodu, and despite his work as a businessman, which made him a central figure in the town, he too was a stranger: Some people are not happy with me being the Partnership Board Chairman because I am not part of their custom, I am not a member [of the Poro]. But the Paramount Chief said that he wants people who are active to be members, those who want to serve the community and do the work. The local Partnership Board is not part of the tribe. As long as the person is active and ready to serve the chiefdom he is supposed to be a member. (Mansaray, interview, 2009) When Yusuf arrived at the crime scene, Junior and Tamba had disappeared. As the LPPB chairman, he went straight to the police post in Tombodu, where he met Osman and took him to the government hospital (Osman would remain there for treatment for three weeks). The police and Yusuf subsequently went to search for the two young men, who were nowhere to be found. The next day Yusuf was told that they were hiding in the Poro bush. However, because he was not a Poro member he could not act on this information. Instead, he took the information to the police officer in charge of Kamara chiefdom, who was a Poro member.6 The officer went to the bush, where he arrested Tamba and Junior and brought them to the police station for questioning. They were then sent to the divisional police headquarters in Motema for detention in part because of what they had done and in part because it was unsafe for them to stay in Tombodu. As Kamara chiefdom’s LPPB chairman, Yusuf helped Osman and his family take the matter to the police. The case was considered a blood crime, which would normally be solely a police matter, and the Sumas, Osman’s family, wanted to “refer the matter to [the magistrate’s] court.” Yusuf said, “because the [Paramount] Chief has made it a law that they should not force anybody who is not a Kono to be part of the tradition – they make it a law” (Mansaray, interview, 2009). Thus, Yusuf established a boundary between the bush and the town, as well as between the inside and outside of the chiefdom, since the matter was no longer confined to Tombodu or Kamara. Because the chiefdom’s internal laws (bylaws) had been breached, and because Poro affairs had been taken to town in the first place, a space was opened up for the SLP to play a role in relation to the secret society. However, this space was rapidly closing because the nature of the case revolved around the Poro and because of the autochthonous status of Junior and Tamba.

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As he pursued the case with the state institutions, Yusuf, a Fullah, was pressured by the Konos led by the paramount chief to mediate between the families of Osman, Tamba and Junior in Tombodu. Yusuf considered whether an agreement could be reached between the parties and whether “apologies could be made,” as Yusuf put it, in order to withdraw the case from Motema and avoid a trial in the state-sanctioned court system and its inevitable costs (Mansaray, interview, 2009). A number of boundaries were transgressed and re-established as the case unfolded, which in turn shaped how its resolution took place and order was re-established. The boundary between the Poro bush and the town had been crossed when Osman was attacked, leading to a dislocation within the justice and security field that allowed SLP involvement. However, parallel to this process of boundary-transgression, by bringing the families of the defendant and the accused together in Tombodu, Yusuf sought to counterbalance the effects of bringing Poro matters to town in order to avoid involvement of the police in chiefdom affairs. The fact that it was a Poro matter was central, but the fact that the two perpetrators were sons of the soil also mattered. The case had already been handed over to the police, but in his capacity as the chairman of community policing, Yusuf now sought to withdraw it from the SLP in Motema, a common occurrence in rural Sierra Leone. The combination of Poro membership and autochthonous status underscores the significant pressure that Konos can put on how criminal cases are dealt with in Kamara Chiefdom. In this vein, the decision was indeed made to withdraw the case from Motema. This was agreed with Tamba’s and Junior’s parents and without the knowledge of Osman and his family. “We arranged for some amount [of money] to be sent to Motema station to bail the boys and asked them to stay in Koidu town,” Yusuf told me, “because if they see them here in Tombodu without the consent of the people that took them to the police there will be trouble” (Mansaray, interview, 2009). As resolution of the case progressed, the boundary between the Poro bush and the township was thus re-established, with direct implications for who would ultimately be involved in resolving the matter. The police had been brought in and did indeed play a role in apprehending Tamba and Junior. In this regard, the authority to make order was the result of networked actors and registers of authority, including Poro members, Kamara Chiefdom’s LPPB chairman, the paramount chief, and the police in Tombodu and Motema. However, by withdrawing the case from the police and restoring the boundary between the inside and outside of the social and physical space of the chiefdom, the case also showed where the authority to respond to a crime of this nature was located. It was the decision of Kamara chiefdom’s leadership, working through the LPPB chairman, to deal with the matter. The role of Yusuf and his movement back and forth across boundaries – indeed, his role in reproducing those boundaries – is of key importance and reflected his liminal status as both a stranger because of his Fullah background and an insider because of his family’s long history in Kamara

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chiefdom. As the LPPB chairman, Yusuf constituted the main link between security-related issues in the chiefdom and the police: he personified police involvement as the LPPB chairman even as the police, from whom he withdrew the case, were no longer engaged and as he followed the will of the Kono elders. From initially inspecting the scene of the crime and ensuring that Tamba and Junior were apprehended in the Poro bush to handing them over to the police outside the chiefdom and then withdrawing them from the police, it was Yusuf who led the process. As such, it was he – with the endorsement of the paramount chief in his dealing with criminal matters and effectively embodying a police presence in Kamara chiefdom – who provided insight into the networked nature of how order involving the Poro is enforced in the chiefdom.

The Poro and police reform As noted above, since the late 1990s there has been a dearth of information about and discussion of institutions such as secret societies under the rubric of SSR in Sierra Leone. When they have taken place, especially in policy circles, they have revolved around forced initiations and female circumcision, commonly referred to as female genital mutilation (FGM). Little effort has been made to consider how such secret societies co-establish a particular order that has direct implications for the organization of security and justice. In recent academic literature, the Poro is often mentioned in passing as part and parcel of an “informal justice sphere” as a way of compartmentalizing and partially playing down their importance. Edward Sawyer (2008:393) vaguely refers to them as an “auxiliary mechanism” among several that regulate “certain aspects of moral conduct and certain geographical spaces.” Jackson (2007:105) notes that “critical governance issues” are “decided by the secret societies rather than in the chiefdom councils.” However, neither author analyzes in any detail the kinds of ordering effects that the Poro society has on how justice and security are enforced. For the purposes of this book, however, understanding the Poro is germane to understanding the trajectory of hybridization, which in turn lays the foundations of what constitutes authority in Sierra Leone. There are a number of practical reasons why access to secret societies is limited in Sierra Leone, especially for external policy-makers and practitioners who come with a reform agenda. Little wrote about The Role of the Secret Society in Cultural Specialization in 1949, but his observations still hold true today, namely that “Poro and other society secrets” remain “guarded very jealously” (Little 1949:211). This implies that “discussion of society matters, and Poro ones in particular, even when superficial, with a nonmember and especially a European, is regarded as a serious offence” (Little 1949:211). It may therefore be concluded that, even if there were mechanisms within the state-building framework to discussing, translating and engaging in matters relating to institutions such as secret societies, a limited willingness to

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do so on the part of Poro members remains an important impediment. Certainly they remain part of the order that exists locally and therefore continue to shape processes of the hybridization and distribution of authority. The fact that secret societies fall outside the purview of SSR programming is compounded by the fact that project designs by international agencies are, to paraphrase Mosse (2005:15), “technically expressed” and “politically shaped.” Program designers do not make the effort to incorporate knowledge of ordering practices such as those of secret societies into programs because there is no language in which to discuss their role, nor any technical solution that can incorporate them into a centrally governed political entity. The SSR process of re-establishing the SLP, among other state institutions, that began in the late 1990s appeared to many observers to be based on the assumption that colonial regimes had in fact left behind a bureaucratic framework that sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to perform routine public administration and that could be used as a foundation in the aftermath of the conflict. In addition, a “trickle-down effect” was assumed in the process of state-building, that is, a belief that working to establish a professional police leadership would have direct implications for order-making practices across the country (Albrecht 2010:9). However, this assumption tended to disregard processes of appropriation and translation that would have an effect on the discourse, resources and practices labelled SSR (and police reform) – accountability, democracy and human rights – as they were converted into practice. The Poro was one such institution that directly shaped the effects of police reform in Sierra Leone.

Conclusion Through an ethnographic analysis of the Poro – one of Sierra Leone’s main male secret societies – this chapter has illustrated the networked quality of how order-making occurs in Kamara Chiefdom in Kono district. The analysis challenges categorical dichotomies between states and non-states, for instance, and undermines implicit – and sometimes explicit – tendencies to make analytical comparisons between an institution like the Poro and ideal versions of the liberal-democratic state. Instead, the chapter demonstrates how actors collaborate, compete and enroll one another in acts of order-making. It demonstrates how individuals embody and enact a variety of registers of authority simultaneously, both to bolster their own status and as attempts to straddle different domains of order-making. As such, networked authority is a basic quality of the individual who is enacting order-making. We saw this in Taylor becoming a Poro member and active in national politics (Poro and politics) at the same time, as well as in Yusuf ’s role in resolving a case of Poro-related violence that assumed a security/police function without fully engaging the police (Poro, police and chiefdom). Similarly, we saw this networked quality of authority as the (non-)role of the police in Poro affairs was described and practiced. The Poro bush is seen

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here as a parallel world with its own cabinet and thus as an important space for order-making to which the police had no access. This was an accepted fact within the police, not because officers act in the name of a bureaucratic center in Freetown, but because they are secret society members themselves. They therefore accepted the rules of the game and the fact that they had no legitimate role to play as police officers in Poro matters. It is this networked quality of what order means and how it is produced by a multiplicity of institutions – rather than by a centrally governed bureaucracy – that the chapter sheds light on. Indeed, it demonstrates how individuals embody this multitude/networked quality of authority by drawing on numerous registers of authority simultaneously. By exploring the micro-struggles that are rarely spoken about or acted upon outside the immediate locations in which they occur, we may deepen our understanding of networks of actors (individual, groups and institutions) and of how registers of authority are practiced and the order they constitute. Indeed, a deep understanding of these micro-struggles and how they are structured and institutionalized should be of interest to both scholars and policy-makers seeking to understand the contexts in which they engage. They reveal that transformations can only be incremental when they occur not in the polarity between “native” and police reform discourses and practices, but in the cutting edge of translation and negotiation where new subject positions may be formed. These positions enter into an endless sequence of subject positions that over time and in the long term constitute fundamental change in the relationship between people and the world, which in turn constitutes fundamental aspects of social life. However, the movement from one subject position to the next, or between consecutive movements that occur within a short period of time, will usually never constitute more than a diminutive dislocation. For instance, police reform had deployed an officer to Kamara chiefdom who was able to deal with a case of Poro violence, yet only because he was a Poro member himself. While Yusuf, the LPPB chairman in Kamara chiefdom, was also a manifestation of police reform, his authority as such did not allow him to enter the Poro bush.

Notes 1 While this chapter focuses on one particular rural secret society, the Poro, there are also secret societies in urban settings. They differ in how they originate across the rural–urban divide. Unlike the Odelays, which operate in the cities, Poro societies overlap stringently with ethnic and religious identities (Albrecht 2012; King 2012). In Freetown, secret societies can be divided into “old” and “new.” Those considered old are the Freemasons, which have an international base, and the Yoruba-based secret societies, e.g., the Agugu and Hunters, which emerged in processes of creolization in Freetown and are rooted in esoteric-medicinal mysticism. Yoruba-based societies emerged when Freetown became a settlement of ex-slaves and intended slaves (re-captives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century). The Agugu, the oldest secret society, was formed around 1850 (Peterson 1969:267); it was created in an attempt by early Freetown residents to have a secret society of their own with African roots (King and Albrecht 2014:180).

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2 Associations of this kind are prevalent in southern Nigeria and particularly numerous in the coastal rainforest area in general, including in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and parts of Ghana and Guinea Bissau (Little 1965:349). Apart from the Poro, examples of other societies with an exclusively male membership include Wunde among the Mende and Ragbenle among the Temne (Steady 2006:96–97). 3 Diamond mining began in Kono District in the 1930s (see Keen 2005:12; Reno 1995). 4 For further reading on LPPBs, see Albrecht et al. 2014; Albrecht 2015. 5 Osman, interview, 2009, Tombodu. Interview notes by research assistant Elizabeth Gborie. 6 A similar arrangement was communicated in an interview with the Chairman of the LPPB in Kailahun District. From notes prepared by Ade Gibson, Sergeant in the SLP, during research for a survey on LPPBs across Sierra Leone (see Albrecht et al. 2014): “the police cannot handle secret society matters that have police interest; these are sensitive matters that can be handled in the society bush by traditional men, women, and youths who are representatives in the LPPB.”

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One criticism of hybridity that has emerged in security and peace studies in the last decade is that applications of the concept often draw on the very binaries it seeks to overcome. It is assumed that hybrid orders are produced in the meeting of separate entities, for instance, the (liberal) state and local orders/actors (Hoffmann and Kirk 2013:20–23). Even when operating with a notion of prior hybridized categories, as does Mac Ginty (2011), who notes that all social orders are by definition hybrid or hybridized, the analysis often ends up reproducing dichotomous thinking in discourse, even if unintentionally. This is because of what the point of departure of the analysis is – a peacebuilding encounter.1 One way of overcoming this weakness in the argument is to shift the analytical focus from hybridity as a form to hybridization as an ongoing process of separation and positive accommodation that takes place in subject positions. The analysis of Sierra Leone’s chiefs emerging from this process of hybridization while also embodying it was explored in detail in Chapter 4 as a long-term historical process in which sources of authority and power are mixed and reconverted to adapt to changing resource distribution and political orders. Police reform has constituted such a change in resource distribution, but in a way that has reproduced existing structures of power, which will always be the result of promoting change. This chapter seeks to further unpack and explicate the character and dynamics of hybridization that occur at the micro-level in everyday security and justice practices, which involves separation and positive accommodation among the local, state, international and so forth. These analytical entities are the textual representation of the mixing and merging of actors (and levels of analysis) that in practice draw authority from a multitude of sources. The entities that these processes of separation eventually produce in discourse are usually naturalized and taken for granted, while the underlying process of positive accommodation and the resulting co-constitutive connections between them remain muted. One of the potentials of the concept of hybridization lies precisely in detailing, describing and making this process explicit (Albrecht and Moe 2015).

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These reflections are demonstrated empirically here by exploring a case of diamond theft in Kamara Chiefdom. The case shows how to work analytically with processes of positive accommodation (homogenization) and separation (heterogenization) simultaneously as foundational to hybridization, not just in a long-term historical perspective, but also in everyday practices. By doing so, the chapter effects an analytical shift from interactions between state institutions and non-state authorities (such as traditional leaders) to the enactment and performativity of authority. In this perspective, hybridization is not an interface or event, but a dynamic and permanently evolving process of social change that may appear unchanging, reproductive and indeed static at any one point in time. Through these processes of innumerable instances of social interaction, individuals and groups position themselves to pursue resources and the sources of authority available to them. And in each of these instances, in which resources, practices, things and people are assembled in slightly different constellations, there is a potential for transformation, however minuscule and insignificant to macro-political dynamics it might be. The analytical strength of the concept is that it captures and accentuates this element of dynamism. To show how hybridization unfolds in practice, the subject and the simultaneous quality of how an individual assembles and projects authority is brought into focus throughout the chapter. It is in the subject’s strategies and practices that we clearly see how such processes of hybridization occur, not between state and chief, but as individualized embodiments of the authority to act, demand and enforce (Albrecht and Moe 2015:2; Englund 2004). We shall see how the individual is not simply a police officer or a member of the local community policing group who represents the state directly or by proxy, nor a traditional leader who belongs to a non-state or traditional realm. Legislation passed by parliament, party political agendas, locally bound initiation into secret societies, mining licenses issued by a central government, autochthon status, and chiefly hierarchies are all registers that may be and are drawn upon. They come into play at different moments in different situations and give shape to how subjective authority is in fact the product of everevolving processes of hybridization. No position of authority is more central to this position than the chief ’s. The case of diamond theft explored in this chapter demonstrates how the subject assembles a multiplicity of registers simultaneously in an attempt to engage in its resolution. It began as a dispute between two miners, moved to the veranda of Melvin Ngekia, Kamara Chiefdom’s paramount chief, and eventually ended up at Motema police headquarters with Mustapha Kambeh, the police chief in Motema division, which covers the western part of Kono District. As each step in the case is explored in detail, the process of hybridization is exposed empirically and theoretically, and the mixture of the sources of authority that come into play is analyzed. Individuals with a stake in diamond mining and local order-making sought to improve their positions in order to resolve this case by emphasizing the

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authority that was available to them. They could refer to their community policing role, invoke symbols of statehood or enact their positions within the chiefly hierarchy. A variety of actors who could reasonably expect to gain from resolution of the case – money could be made – thus became involved, including individual villagers, members of political parties, chiefs, community policing members and police officers. This is a detailed analysis of how hybridization manifests itself empirically in order to access resources in rural Sierra Leone.

Unfolding a case of diamond theft I first heard the details of the case of diamond theft from Isaac, the LPPB member in Peyima (he was LPPB member Ibrahim Kalilu’s predecessor). Isaac was one of the only “intellectuals” in town, which meant that he, like Kalilu, could read and write, a rare skill in an area where literacy is considered far less important than mining and the pursuit of quick money.2 Isaac’s authority was not shaped by chiefly descent and autochthon status, which are a central source of authority in rural Sierra Leone. However, he had been adopted by and grew up in the family of the Tankos, which had claims to the position of town chief in Peyima (and section chief in Bondu Section) (Albrecht 2015, 2017a; see Chapter 4). Isaac attended, but did not graduate from, Bo Government Secondary School, a prestigious secondary school in Sierra Leone. Furthermore, as Peyima’s community policing member, he had actively established close links with Mustapha Kambeh, the police chief in Motema, a relationship that was carefully nurtured by frequent meetings and exchanges of information (in fact I first met Isaac in Kambeh’s office). He was also politically active within “the party of the day,” the All People’s Congress (APC), which came to power in the 2007 general elections and was re-elected in 2012, but lost power to the SLPP in the 2018 elections. In other words, Isaac was constantly in the process of renegotiating and legitimizing his authority by invoking those registers that were available to him. Not only did he have to defend his authority, he had to continuously produce and reproduce it – which he did zealously. It was Isaac’s involvement in politics that eventually led to Kalilu taking over the role of LPPB representative in Peyima. Had Isaac been of chiefly descent, the registers of authority available to him would have been wider and deeper. As Chapter 4 explores in detail, chiefs stand at the center of and embody a process of hybridization in rural Sierra Leone and as such are positioned to draw on a wide range of registers of authority (Albrecht 2017a). At the local level chiefly authority is derived from sacred and other customary powers that revolve around kinship, autochthon status and secret society membership (Fanthorpe 1998, 2001, 2005; Hardin 1993). At the same time, Sierra Leone’s 149 chiefdoms are linked to the central government, for instance, by their recognition in the 1991 Constitution. Paramount and lesser chiefs do not merely navigate among these registers as

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if they were external to them, they internalize and embody foundational hybridization. Their authority always already emanates simultaneously from both centrally governed institutions and the micro-histories of settlement in a particular locality. An important explanation of the chiefs’ central position in processes of hybridization can be found in the colonial policies and practices of indirect rule under the British (Conteh-Morgan and Dixon-Fyle 1999; Denney 2014b; Fanthorpe 1998; Tangri 1976). Chiefs are not a direct outcome of the cultural encounter between colonizer and colonized but have been integral to state formation in Sierra Leone before and since independence in 1961 (Berry 1993; Cooper 2002). After the declaration of the country’s independence, Siaka Stevens, who became president of Sierra Leone in 1967, concentrated resources and power in Freetown but did not seek to formally ban traditional leaders, as was the case across much of SubSaharan Africa (Buur and Kyed 2007; Oomen 2005; Englebert 2002). Rather, an administrative distinction was maintained between the Western Area, where the capital Freetown is located, and the rest of the country, where paramount and lesser chiefs govern. Instead of undermining the chiefs, this administrative division consolidated their legal role within the country’s rural governance structures, including, as noted above, their recognition in Sierra Leone’s Constitution (Abraham 1978; Denney 2014b; Fyfe 1962; Tangri 1978). This administrative distinction implies that the “state” and “tradition” do not exist independently of and opposed to one another in a dichotomous relationship. Indeed, it is the simultaneity and mutuality of this relationship and the fact that they cannot be divided into two (or more) pure forms that is constitutive of hybridization and processes of separation and positive accommodation. This is not only because “cross-fertilisation of culture has been endemic to all movements of people,” as Ahmad (1995:18) rightly notes, but also because any analytical entity is always already the product of a prior mixing of peoples, ideas and norms concerning the exercise of power, the distribution of resources and the organization of society (Mac Ginty 2011). Although considered an elder in Peyima, Isaac could not claim chiefly legitimacy, so he actively sought out and became dependent on the authority emanating from his political party, his affiliation with the police, and being in the good books of town chief Gborie. Through his different activities, Isaac was able to establish and maintain a position among Peyima’s leaders specifically and the chiefdom more generally, which allowed him to authoritatively claim a role in the social and political space of Kamara that included the enforcement of order. Indeed, his ability to claim affiliation with the SLP through his community policing activities became significant: it enabled him to play a part in resolving the diamond theft case, potentially also gaining financially from his involvement. It was from this position of authority that Isaac explained the case to me.

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Two miners and a stone A villager from Peyima found a stone in one of the many diamond pits that perforate Kamara chiefdom and much of western Kono. His name was Abraham. He was not sure whether the stone was a diamond, but it looked like a chaf-chaf, a rough diamond. One distinguishes a significant stone by determining if it has “corners.” Some parts of this particular chaf-chaf looked “shiny,” and the color was “candle-like.” Abraham took the stone to a trusted friend, Fasalie, who lived down the road in Nemesedu, the next village toward Tombodu, to ask his opinion. This was where the case of theft began. Fasalie said to Abraham that he would take the stone to one of the diamond dealers in Koidu, Kono’s main town, to verify whether it had any value. Abraham never saw the stone again. Nemesedu was also the home of the person under whose license the stone had been found. The license holder was an old, blind man with milky white eyes.3 The introduction of a mining license holder is crucial to the analytical demonstration of how processes of hybridization occur through the assembling of different registers of authority, as it was to Abraham in the case being discussed. A license is granted by an agency of the central government; unless Abraham could invoke a license holder, he could not openly sell the stone. Nor could he claim (as he would later need to) that the stone had disappeared or been stolen, since it would then be considered officially as an illegitimate find and, if found, confiscated by the paramount chief. There was little doubt that the case would reach both the paramount chief and the police chief, the two main figures of authority in any Sierra Leonean chiefdom, if the stone was even suspected to be of any value. As the case evolved and I spoke to more of those involved in it, it became evident that the blind man was probably not the person under whose license the stone had been found. Isaac explained that Abraham had been mining without a license in the forest between Peyima and Bondu, a neighboring village. However, the fact that a license holder could be identified meant that Abraham would be able to report the case, and the blind man had agreed to act as such. These strategies needed to be put in place in order to circumvent the formal rules of mining while ensuring that those rules were observed symbolically (a man with a license was found), if not in practice (it was not under the blind man’s own license that the chaf-chaf was found). Only if a find is significant will the miners scramble to find a license in order to sell the stone, otherwise it might end up in the informal diamond market located behind the bus station in the center of Koidu, Kono District’s main town. The blind man provided just such an opportunity. He would also be a perfect witness in the case of diamond theft. “When they [the paramount chief and the police chief] see the blind man,” Isaac explained, “they will be very sympathetic – ‘Oh, look at this old blind man.’ So the case will be taken very serious” (interview, Isaac, 2008). Moreover, because he was blind, the man’s role as a witness was limited – he held a license, but literally could not

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claim to have played an active role in finding the stone or a stake in resolving the matter between Abraham and Fasalie.

Involvement of the paramount chief When Fasalie took the stone to Koidu, he had told Abraham that he would find a diamond dealer with a “detector machine” who could verify whether the stone was a diamond. When Fasalie came back to Peyima, he said that he had taken the stone to Alasi Bally, a known diamond exporter, who told Fasalie that, in fact, it was not a diamond. Fasalie then told Abraham that he had left the stone with his brother and returned to Peyima without any formal attestation of the stone’s value. Because no paperwork existed to verify Fasalie’s meeting with the diamond dealer, it never became clear what the value of the stone was, or even if it had any. When Abraham asked if he could have his stone back, Fasalie changed his story. He had not left it in Koidu but in Tombodu, the headquarters town of Kamara chiefdom and the base of Ngekia, the paramount chief. Abraham concluded that the stone had been stolen. It was in Tombodu that Gborie, Peyima’s town chief, heard about the incident. He hurriedly called the man who had found the diamond as well as the license holder, the blind man from Nemesedu, who is normally referred to as the miner’s “supporter” in such cases.4 The chief arranged a meeting with the men in Bondu village, headquarters of the section in which Peyima is located. Chief Gborie arranged this meeting with the support of Isaac, who had been following the case closely and consciously in order to avoid the involvement of Paramount Chief Ngekia. Both Gborie and Isaac had an interest in solving the case as close to home as possible because the higher the case climbed up the chiefly hierarchy, the less they would gain financially from resolving it. If they could get Fasalie to admit that he had in fact stolen and sold the stone, they would be in a position to demand a share in its worth (or Fasalie could try to buy them off). The more people involved and the greater their authority, the less Isaac would gain. No one was more keenly aware of this than he himself because the kind of authority he could mobilize would be considerably diluted by engaging the paramount chief, and even more so if the police in Motema were involved, which would take resolution of the case outside Kamara Chiefdom altogether. After all, Isaac was merely Peyima’s community policing member. Although his authority was shaped by extralocal registers (of the SLP), it only had effect within the boundaries of Kamara Chiefdom, and only because Kamara’s chiefs allowed him to play this role. Isaac worked with what he had, but it was the chiefs, not he, who were in the unique position to combine locally and nationally generated sources of authority (Albrecht 2015:612). Isaac’s ability to “withdraw” the case from the chiefly hierarchy, as he put it, was hindered by the disappearance of the stone and the fact that the

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explanation of the accused, Fasalie, was not consistent. He was perceived to be lying by the growing number of people in Peyima who were becoming engaged in the case. The impression that he had come into sudden money was strengthened when Fasalie began to display acts of conspicuous and suspicious consumption, which is usually done by organizing big parties in and for the local community. “He even bought some sheep!” Isaac noted. “So the boy [Abraham] said, ‘This is my money that you are using to buy these things. The time I was giving you this stone, there was nothing with you. We were all living an average life, but now I’m seeing you living a happy life’” (Isaac, interview, December 2008).5 As a last resort, the case became a matter for the paramount chief to investigate and prosecute further. Isaac summed up his role in the case and the implications of it going to Paramount Chief Ngekia: “So we intervene, we try to interrogate them, investigate – so we find out that the matter is above us, and we took them to the paramount chief. There our own stage of investigation ends, because it’s actually to the higher level” (Isaac, interview, December 2008). It was evident that the authority Isaac could mobilize, drawn in part from his police affiliation and in part from his appointment to that position by the chiefly hierarchy, was insufficient to resolve the case. It also became clear that his mobilization of different registers of authority, simultaneously combining his community policing role with his engagement in politics and his status as an elder in Peyima, was insufficient.

The necessity of hybridization As this case of diamond theft demonstrates, the enactment of hybridization is a restless and uneasy manifestation of authority. It does not involve the explicit fusion of different registers into fixed or permanent (new) categories of authority (see Bhabha 1994: 95). Rather, hybridization as a process allows individuals to draw on different sources of authority when necessary and when possible in the wider context of competing claims to power (Albrecht and Moe 2015:15). This was evident in how and under what circumstances Isaac, Peyima’s town chief Gborie, and eventually Paramount Chief Ngekia engaged in the resolution of the case. Furthermore, as emphasized throughout this book, the notion of hybridization is neither liminal (Shoshana 2011:154) nor an interface (Werbner 2001:81), which would imply that the process was somehow extraordinary or peripheral (see Pieterse 2001:221). On the contrary, hybridization is at the center of how an individual positions him- or herself to construct and defend power, privilege, and authority, ultimately in the pursuit of resources. An encounter, any social encounter, carries with it the possibility of transformation. Across space and time numerous inter-connected encounters accumulate the possibility of change that can be observed at a distance, for instance, in changed (macro-political) government discourse and practice.

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Undistorted transferability is not an option because producing representations that are arrested or fixed and that exhaust the meaning of the original, which requires a non-exposure to time, is not possible. Both the time lag between repetitions and their spatial differentiation opens up a space in which new constellations of discourses, practices and resources are assembled through processes of separation and positive accommodation. It makes no sense to speak of Kamara chiefdom as a non-state space uncontaminated by the symbols and practices of the central government. (For general discussions of this point, see Das and Poole 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2001.)6 The presence of the license holder in the theft case invoked the office of the state-appointed mining chairman of Kamara Chiefdom, who approves all licenses to mine. And the mining chairman of Kamara Chiefdom was Peyima’s Chief Gborie. “Only he can approve the development fee and surface rent, only he can approve the [mining] company,” Isaac noted, “so you cannot mine in Kamara without consulting Chief Gborie” (Isaac, interview, January 2009).7 However, Gborie was appointed to the position of mining chairman for Kamara Chiefdom by the paramount chief precisely because he was Peyima’s town chief and because he had supported Chief Ngekia when he ran for election to become paramount chief in 2003 just after the war ended. As a town chief, Gborie embodied and governed processes of hybridization because of the variety of sources of authority that he was able to draw on and actively use to make his position and his access to resources manifest (Albrecht 2015, 2017a). His authority to take on this position, which is tied to the central government, emanated from his status of autochthon, secret society (Poro) membership (a requirement to become a chief), and from the powers conferred upon him in state legislation (see Chapter 4). In other words, he was only able to take on the role of mining chairman because he enacted the hybrid foundations of his authority, which in turn gave him a central and legitimate role in the enforcement of order in Kamara Chiefdom. Gborie and Ngekia formally represented the lowest and highest level of the chiefly hierarchy in Kamara Chiefdom – in fact, Gborie’s official title was not town chief, but headman. Both men came to embody the process through which different, even seemingly contradictory, sources of authority were internalized and enacted. They did not navigate among different sources of authority that were external to them, which would have implied a conscious choice and a distance between the enactment of authority and the chiefs. Rather, they embodied these sources, which are constitutive of their subjectivities as authority figures. This condition is not adequately captured by referring to them as “traditional leaders” because it indicates that they stand at a distance from power, when in fact they are in the middle of it. While a specific source of authority may be invoked to legitimize actions or make claims, it is the chiefs’ hybridized foundation that allows them to act as a figure of authority at all (Albrecht and Moe 2015).

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The varied sources of authority that are constitutive of foundational hybridity encounter one another and are assembled within the subject due to the simultaneous processes of separation and positive accommodation that reflect countless partial transformations, which allow them to co-exist and yet be analytically distinguishable and separated. They do not merge into an even or stable (permanent) hybrid order. People draw on and enact numerous sources of authority simultaneously: sources that are always already interconnected also have distinguishable if not distinct origins (Albrecht and Moe 2015:7; see also Young 1995:24). As such, the concept of hybridization permits a dynamic perspective of the authority of Sierra Leone’s chiefs, as well as of the innumerable possibilities for transformation that each instance of social interaction gives rise to because they constitute slightly different constellations of discourses, practices and resources.

The paramount chief as gatekeeper: ritualizing chiefly power When the case of theft arrived on the doorstep of Paramount Chief Ngekia, it had reached the center of authority in Kamara – the chiefdom’s gatekeeper. His authority was mobilized in a final attempt by the local authorities to resolve the case “within” themselves in Kamara chiefdom. Paramount Chief Ngekia put on public display the multi-sourced powers he embodied in deciding whether the case should be resolved inside or outside the chiefdom – that is, whether the case should be handed over to the police or not. This was a decision that only he could make. As such, he embodied and reproduced a process of hybridization that exposed him as the formal center of decisionmaking in Kamara chiefdom. He personified a total social phenomenon, to paraphrase Mauss (1990), simultaneously representing economic, judicial, political and ideational decision-making on social life. To solve the case, a meeting, or rather a courtroom scenario, was staged one Sunday morning on the veranda of the Paramount Chief Ngekia’s house in Tombodu. By law every chiefdom in Sierra Leone must have between one and four Local Courts presided over by a Court Chairman, a Court Clerk, and a panel of elders known as members (GOSL 1963, 2011). At the time of my fieldwork in 2008–2009, the Court Chairman was nominated by the Chiefdom Council8 for a three-year term with the final approval of the Ministry of Local Government.9 However, no Court Chairman was present at the hearing of Abraham and Fasalie’s diamond theft case that Sunday morning. While he had been appointed to oversee exactly such proceedings, the Court Chairman himself told me one day, as he was passing through Peyima, that he could not dedicate any time to the position because he was not being paid. And so Ngekia acted as the judge, interrogated the parties, made the ruling, and decided what to do next based on what Abraham and Fasalie had to say. As the case unfolded that day it turned into a secular ritual, a socio-cultural construct of the configuration and distribution of power within Kamara chiefdom on public display. Moore and Myerhoff (1977:4) argue that rituals,

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sacred or secular, endow “authority and legitimacy to the positions of particular persons, organizations, occasions, moral values, views of the world” and “structure the way people think about social life.” In the context of this chapter this ritual performance rendered visible the enactment of hybridization and provided a sense of the power configurations that are involved in the production and reproduction of that process (see Werbner 2001:137). The ritual practice was not a tangible instrument of Paramount Chief Ngekia, it was itself constitutive of the production and negotiation of power relations (Bell 1992:196). The courtroom scenario as an enactment of authority was also shaped by the construction of a boundary between the chiefdom and the outside world: The chief consolidated his own turf and that of the police while projecting the inseparability of these two figures of authority – chief and police – in dealing with the matter. The chief blurred his own base of hybrid authority by separating the chiefdom from the outside world, but this boundary-making exercise collapsed when the practice of dealing with the case was scrutinized, particularly since the chief was involved behind the scenes even after the case had been handed over formally and publicly to the police. The enactment of hybridization thus became evident inside and outside the individual subject, with both positive accommodation and separation being integral to the process, creating distance and difference, similarity and commonality, simultaneously. That Sunday morning, Paramount Chief Ngekia was dressed in his pyjamas and sitting rather inconspicuously at the far right of the veranda, almost inappropriate in his appearance – to me, at least – though no one else seemed to take any notice. He had been suffering from a heart condition for a while now: he came across that morning as heavily medicated, moving and speaking slowly and at times incoherently. His house is situated on a hillside overlooking Tombodu and is encircled by old mango trees. The veranda itself is elevated two or three meters off the ground, which allows the chief to look down on the people standing in front of it. During the meeting – or de facto courtroom hearing – the accused, Fasalie, and the defendant, Abraham, were seated to the left of the paramount chief on the veranda. Fasalie had arrived on his own, while Abraham had brought a support group. Isaac, Peyima’s community policing member and soon-to-be Deputy Chairman of the APC, the ruling party in Kamara Chiefdom, was present in support of Abraham. Also present were Peyima’s Youth Chairman and the APC Youth Chairman of the constituency, who had worked with Isaac to resolve the matter before the case reached the paramount chief. (The significance of the presence of youth representatives at the hearing is worth emphasizing. They play a vital role in providing the physical aspects of security, such as the apprehension of criminals in most places outside district and chiefdom headquarters towns and usually operate under the leadership of an elder.) The old blind man alleged to be the license holder also arrived at the meeting, assisted by one of his younger relatives.

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The paramount chief opened the meeting by emphasizing that he would prefer those present settled the matter among themselves so they did not have to take it to the police. As I had observed on several other occasions in rural areas and in Kamara Chiefdom specifically, the involvement of the police was presented as a threat and a last resort, something to be ashamed of – an indication that the chiefdom was unable to handle its own matters. This demonstrated the articulation of relationality between the chiefdom governed by the paramount chief and outside authorities such as the SLP: while the chiefs’ powers over outside powers are incomplete, they can nevertheless be substantial. Relationality can be equated with attempts to draw boundaries between chiefs and police, for instance, which serve to exclude some and include others in order-making and to demarcate lines of symbolic authority among police and chiefs, but not along the lines of distinct binary categories of state versus non-state (see Parnell and Kane 2003; Lund 2006). What is being played out here in the acts of boundary-making is the ability to draw on sources of authority to construct and defend power and authority, and also, when necessary, to demolish boundaries between inside and outside a locality. The result is a “plurality of power centres” (Bierschenk and de Sardan 2014:16) and “partial sovereignties” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006:35) that are continuously formed and reformed (Kyed and Albrecht 2014:2). Paramount Chief Ngekia might have produced a dichotomy in public discourse and instrumentalized the distinction between the inside and the outside of Kamara Chiefdom, i.e., between the chiefdom and the SLP (state and not-state). However, Police Chief Kambeh and Paramount Chief Ngekia remained closely involved even when Fasalie was transferred to police headquarters at Motema and temporarily incarcerated. (This issue is explored in greater detail below.) Political rhetoric and official representations of crime, authority and boundary-making have symbolic weight and practical effects with real consequences. Even if there was no absolute separation between the chiefdom (paramount chief) and the state (police) in the hybrid order enacted in the diamond theft case, the threat of “letting the law take its course” could only work if categorical boundaries were maintained – in words if not in practice (see Lund 2006). “Boundary fetishism,” as Pieterse (2001:221, 224) notes, is what allows reification of the nation, but also the local, as pure categories (see Hutnyk 2005:83). However, this book suggests that the restless and uneasy mixing and permutations that occur in cultural exchanges should be seen as an ever-evolving process of hybridization that has no set beginning or end. Indeed, it is because of the continuity of this process that it is possible to speak of boundary fetishism in the first place (Albrecht and Moe 2015:12). Paramount Chief Ngekia had to demonstrate to Abraham, his followers from Peyima, and the general population in Kamara that he had done what he could to solve the matter within the chiefdom. Making a public separation between inside and outside the chiefdom enabled him to both maintain authority over the residents of the chiefdom and to appease them. Ngekia had

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to make the seemingly contradictory move of publicly announcing discursively that he was handing over the case to the police, and yet remain engaged in practice in resolving the case behind the scenes to gain financially from the stone if it was recovered and found to be a diamond.

Visualizing hybridity: from Kamara to Motema At the hearing on the veranda, Chief Ngekia asked Fasalie and Abraham to tell their versions of what had occurred. Fasalie, who was not particularly forthcoming, maintained that the stone had not been a diamond. Speaking in a whisper, his official story was that he had gone to Koidu and that he had thrown the stone away when he found out it had no value. What mattered at the hearing was that he was unable to produce the stone and return it to its rightful owner, Abraham. Abraham said little: he looked puzzled, almost hurt by Fasalie’s alleged betrayal. His case had already been made for him: a license holder had been found, and his story had been told and reiterated numerous times. As the case reached the top tier of the chiefly hierarchy within Kamara, it appeared evident that a resolution was not possible: it was one man’s word against another’s, and a decision had to be made as to whether the case was to leave Kamara. After some interrogation, Paramount Chief Ngekia quietly but firmly urged Fasalie to “speak the truth.” Ngekia soon decided that the hearing was not leading to the desired outcome and asked one of his staff to go down to the police post in Tombodu, find a police officer, and bring him back to the meeting. However, there was no officer at the police post – it was Sunday, a slow day in Tombodu. Ngekia’s staff member was then sent to “Number 11,” an inactive industrial mining site on the dirt road to Koidu, where a police post had been set up. Fifteen minutes later, the police inspector turned up with Yusuf Mansaray, chairman of the community policing board in Kamara chiefdom. They were not invited to sit on the veranda: dressed in civilian clothes, they stood in front of the house and looked up hesitantly at the paramount chief on the veranda, awaiting his orders. The atmosphere was not hostile, but there was some doubt about what would happen next and whether Fasalie would indeed be handed over to the police. The physical separation at the paramount chief ’s home, where the villagers from Kamara Chiefdom sat up on the veranda, and the outside world, represented by the police, stood below in front of the house, constituted the symbolic separation of analytically distinguishable registers of authority. In practice, the boundaries between his chiefdom and the state that Chief Ngekia was at pains to set up discursively contradicted his hybrid status and the processes of hybridization he embodied and reproduced. In fact, legislation passed by parliament, Ngekia’s engagement in selecting of community policing board members and directing the SLP inside the chiefdom, the embodiment of locally bound initiation into secret societies, and chiefly

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descent were all constitutive of Ngekia’s authority that positioned him to make the final judgment over Fasalie. The police officer did not arrive in a vehicle or wear a uniform, both of which are important symbols representing the central government (and are a central component of the support that the SLP received from the international community after Sierra Leone’s war between 1991 and 2002) (see Albrecht and Jackson 2009, 2014b; Denney 2014b; Krogstad 2012). This was equally true of the community policing chairman, who represented a link between the police and the community. However, the fact that the police could be summoned and used by the paramount chief was a real threat to Fasalie. It served to establish a clear discursive boundary with practical consequences between the safety and familiarity of the chiefdom and the uncertainty he might face at Motema police headquarters. This was the threat of activating the formal justice system, which, once it became involved, could be costly and time-consuming, and for that reason was rarely a desired option. While the SLP may have been resurrected after experiencing a definitive collapse during Sierra Leone’s civil war of the 1990s and returned to Kamara Chiefdom, police reform did not fundamentally alter hierarchical relations within the chiefdom. It did not establish vertical encompassment – the central and unequivocal idea of the state as an institution above and in opposition to civil society, community and family while at the same time encompassing them. However, the collaborative and negotiated approach to reform did ultimately transform registers of authority and how they were assembled in the justice and security field by reintroducing state-sanctioned policing across the country (Albrecht 2015). This opened up new avenues for how hybridization could occur, yet in a way that confirmed chiefly power and authority (Albrecht 2015). The paramount chief concluded the meeting and addressed the police inspector who was standing in front of his house: “He [Fasalie] is very arrogant and he lies. He’s trying to take this chiefdom for a ride, so let the law take its course. Invite the two parties to the station to make statements.” The public display of interrogation and case resolution concluded with Fasalie leaving the safety of the veranda to be taken to Motema police headquarters. The police inspector did not go up the stairs to make an arrest: he waited for Fasalie to come down quietly and took him away. Quite literally, Paramount Chief Ngekia displayed his authority by structuring the movement of Fasalie from one location to another, a physical movement that also indicated that the case was being transferred from one set of actors to another within a single integrated system of power centers. Drawing on the authority of both his historical position and legal status – the basis of his legitimacy – the chief enacted a boundary in discourse and practice between the chiefdom and the police. In this respect, he was not only seeking financial gain, which was his primary and most immediate reason for engaging in resolution of the case. He was also engaging in the production of his own power center, of his own authority and legitimacy while also, in a

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double pull, reproducing the authority of the police by giving them a role to play in resolving the case. This did not in practice delineate a boundary between the chief and the police. Rather, the handover was followed seamlessly by the paramount chief ’s re-possession of the matter. It became evident that the two figures of authority, the chief and the police inspector, could not act independently of one another. Indeed, they depended on each other’s positions in the justice and security field to project authority (if they were to ensure financial gain) and to confirm their positions of power by resolving the case.

The aftermath The hybridized figures of power who engaged in the diamond theft case drew on each other’s authority to make order and access resources. In the process, they engaged in simultaneous articulations of numerous registers of authority. It was this momentary concentration and assembling of different types of authority, coupled with the strength of their articulation, that moved resolution of the case forward (or more accurately, in a particular direction). Such processes of hybridization are not chaotic because we can say with some certainty what constitutes the authority of a chief and the tactics that he (or she) might deploy in response to such cases (see Albrecht 2017a; Chapter 4). However, the exact way in which these processes evolve is restless, uneasy, interstitial and characterized by a degree of unpredictability. In this respect, we are indeed in – and witnessing – a permanently dynamic and evolving process of social change (see Young 1995:25). While this dynamism is a general quality of social life, in the context of this discussion it is also the dynamism of hybridization, fueled by the emergence, and sometimes re-emergence, of sources of authority, that intensifies these processes. Externally funded investments in Sierra Leone’s security sector, including the police, following the ending of civil war have had this effect. In short, it is precisely because of the chief ’s historic centrality as a figure of authority that the presence of the police in a Sierra Leonean chiefdom like Kamara bolstered rather than weakened Ngekia’s and Gborie’s authority (see Albrecht 2015, 2017a). They performed a distinct role in Ngekia’s enactment of authority but ultimately did not challenge him. A few days after the trial I met Isaac, who explained to me what had happened when Abraham, Fasalie and the rest of Kamara’s villagers left the veranda, why Fasalie had not told the truth, and why he had not appeared to fear the consequences. He also explained why the paramount chief had left the case with the SLP. Isaac had “interrogated,” as he put it, those people in Koidu who had been mentioned at the chiefdom level, the diamond dealer in particular, who told Isaac that he had returned the stone to Fasalie. In his capacity as Peyima’s community policing member, Isaac had then sought to withdraw the case from the police and return it to be resolved within the chiefdom (a common occurrence in a wide range of cases; see, for

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instance, Albrecht 2018a). This was his responsibility: “The police partners now have to intervene,” he said; “if they can call all interested parties, the people can encourage them to speak the truth.” The fact that the accused had already been taken to the station to make a statement was not important to Isaac: “That’s just paperwork; it’s my right to investigate and take a statement from the accused” (Isaac, interview, December 2009). But since the case had left the chiefdom to become a police matter in Motema, the authorities from Bondu and Peyima had limited leverage, if any. Given how the SLP and the paramount chief cooperated, and despite the authority that was available to Isaac as a community policing member, the type of authority he held did not extend to Motema police headquarters. Because the authority that Isaac assembled had been granted to him by the chief, Isaac could not challenge the latter. The same was true for the police chief, Kambeh. His authority was drawn from his affiliation with a state system that was still in the process of being re-established after war ended in 2002 that had endowed him with the symbols and status of statehood (Albrecht 2015; Albrecht and Jackson 2014b). If Isaac and other villagers in Bondu section were to gain from a settlement, Isaac would have to use whatever ad hoc strategy he could devise to withdraw Fasalie from the hands of the police. Isaac was not successful. However, the fact that he saw it as legitimate for him to attempt to withdraw the case from the police reflected a process of hybridization at work, including the productive aspects of police reform and the introduction of community policing in rural areas of Sierra Leone. His failure to withdraw the case did not particularly disappoint him – it was simply a lost opportunity to make a few Leones. Others would come.

The rule of hybridization through the interlocking of authority Parallel to Isaac’s lack of success in withdrawing the case from the police and how it was dealt with in Kamara chiefdom, the case had run its course in Motema and Koidu. Formal resolution in Tombodu had ended with Fasalie’s “invitation” to Motema, where he testified that what Abraham had given him was a simple stone, not a gem. This was the official report that went back to the Paramount Chief Ngeika, who subsequently “demanded that Fasalie should be released from prison,” Isaac said (Isaac, interview, December 2008). However, this was not the end of interaction between the police and the paramount chief. Relations of power between these two figures are ubiquitous and continuously re-negotiated. As such, social situations of opposition – acts of subversion or compliance, evasion or confirmation, transgression or inculcation – became ways of negotiating order (see Lund 2006). The paramount chief and the police chief in the diamond theft case were collaborating but also competing over a resource in order to improve their own livelihoods. At the same time, the paramount chief exhibited the hybrid basis of his

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authority – the sheer breadth of sources of authority that he could draw on – by engaging in and leading the resolution of the case. In practice, this worked out as a process of reciprocal transfers between the two figures of authority that continuously shifted between secrecy and public display as they engaged in the case. While a formal transfer of the case to the SLP had taken place that morning on Paramount Chief Ngekia’s veranda, the chief had not in fact disengaged from it. Abass, a seasonal alluvial miner who often came to Kono during the mining season, explained: Even if the police interfered into the matter, the paramount chief has a right to go and tell the police that I have an interest in this matter; and they [the police] will look, pay respect to him, and then hand over the matter to him. While maybe for me as the local man to see the police chief is not going to be easy. The paramount chief, maybe he will just be sitting at his home, then call: “Hello: I have interest, I have interest in the matter. So please, I will be there at 10 am so I want to get a special talk with you. Then in fact I have a package for you [money]”. “OK, OK sir” [the police replies], “you will see the police.” The police encourage corruption in this country – not even this country, all over the world. (Abass, interview, January 2009) Abass also stressed the hierarchy between police and chief: So the police have the problem, yeah. So the paramount chief is an authority, he has a right as a dignitary to even stay at his home and call the police chief, then the police chief will report to him. Let me tell you one thing about the Kono paramount chiefs. All the police chiefs that are working in Kono District, they love Kono. Because when you come to Kono you make it up quick because criminal cases are so much higher in Kono. But if you come as a police chief and you don’t cooperate with them [the paramount chiefs], they will play another gun game; you will move out of the district. They transfer you another where. (Abass, interview, January 2009) The police chief and the paramount chief had certainly collaborated in an attempt to resolve the case. However, even though the chief is considered more powerful than the police chief, this did not put the paramount chief in an all-powerful position, as the next section on the role of the diamond dealer illustrates.

The diamond dealer According to Abass, the diamond dealer would have told Fasalie to deny any knowledge of where the diamond had ended up and that he, Fasalie, would be rewarded for his acquiescence, which indeed he probably had been, given

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his sudden acts of conspicuous consumption. As the case unfolded, it became more and more evident that the diamond dealer sat at the top of the food chain, as it were – “because he has money,” Abass explained: When somebody has a diamond, he will go to the [diamond] dealer. So in times of problems, if there is any problem, the dealer can settle the matter because he has money. He can settle the matter. Because of the way they are doing things, that is why all the dealers have a license. There are also agent licenses, who are running under the dealers. Each dealer has three agent licenses. Agents cannot buy diamonds, but they can encourage someone to go to the diamond dealer. And even if you as an agent buy a diamond, you can put it under the name of the dealers. As soon as problems arrive, when they go to the police they will just mention the dealer’s name so that the dealer will answer for the diamond – all receipts are given under their name. As soon as he gets the diamond, he’ll book the diamond under the dealer’s name. Then, as soon as the agent books it, he contacts the dealers: “I have some diamonds here.” But it is still a problem diamond. So the dealer just says: “Come with it here, if there is any problem just put it under my receipt.” If the agent gets a problem diamond, as soon as the dealer takes over the matter, there will not be much problem, because the government empower him. That’s why they are paying a lot of money to get the license. (Abass, interview, March 2009) According to Isaac, the diamond dealer had told Fasalie: “When the chief or the police come to you, whatever they say, deny, I’ll fight the matter for you” (Isaac, interview, December 2008). The first thing the diamond dealer would have done after having spoken to Fasalie, according to Isaac, was to go straight to the police chief and pay him off and prepare him for the probability that the case might be coming his way. “That’s why the boy acted the way he did – he cannot respect elders, chiefs. Whenever the chief calls, he rejects” (Isaac, interview, December 2008). Involvement of the police had become a strict necessity to resolve the case or at least to put it to rest, something that the paramount chief was not able to do in front of the villagers that Sunday morning on his veranda. Monetary gain from the case was now restricted on more than one level. Isaac explained: Normally, when you steal a diamond, if you are caught, then you will go and show where you sold the diamond. The price you sold it for will be revealed, but if the dealer has a license he will only pay 500,000 Leones, regardless of how much the diamond is worth. If they see any diamond, they can buy it. (Isaac, interview, March 2009)

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And with a license to buy diamonds, regardless of how or where it was found, the dealer was in a position to simply state: “Yes, yeah, they sold it to me. I’m not here to buy gun or buy their palm wine – I am here to buy diamonds, look at my license, I bought it and I have paid them.” In other words, Isaac continued: The issue of diamond cases here, if you are having your diamond stolen, you have lost already, because the issue is money, money, money. It starts to cost money when it comes to Motema. If it arrives in Motema, the diamond chairman, the police, the magistrate – they all need money. They will call the paramount chief and he will be paid off. So there are three [sets of] percentages. One will go to the person in the village, two to handle the case. When you have money, you have justice. If the paramount chief, the police chief, the diamond dealer, and the chairman are all involved, who will you next go to? (Isaac, interview, December 2008) So, the case of diamond theft ends with a question that remains unanswered: Who will you go to next? In the battle for resources, it was the hybrid power figures that were in a position to assemble a wide range of registers of authority that stood a chance to gain from engaging in resolution of the case. What was at stake was the ability to draw on available sources of authority to construct and defend power and authority and ultimately to access resources. It was certainly the case that, in the face of the three most powerful figures of authority in Kamara chiefdom – paramount chief, police chief and diamond dealer – neither Abraham nor Isaac was able to claim a large share in the stone’s value, assuming that it had any.

Conclusion What did order-making look like in rural Sierra Leone after a decade of police reform? This chapter has explored this question by means of an ethnographic thick description of a case of diamond theft. In the context of Peyima and Kamara chiefdom, there was nothing spectacular about the order-making put on display: such cases occur on a regular basis in areas of Sierra Leone where alluvial mining is common. Indeed, it represents something of a paradigmatic case with respect to diamond theft at the local level in a place like Kamara chiefdom. One villager stole a stone from another villager. The stone subsequently disappeared, and different actors claiming a stake in the justice and security field entered the struggle to solve the crime. In the course of this process of hybridization, the authority to participate in the resolution of the case was drawn from sources emanating from a range of registers with different origins and histories. These include legislation, indigenous status, chiefly descent, membership in political parties, official paperwork related to mining, police affiliation, and so forth. None of these registers

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exist or were drawn on in isolation or consecutively; they were assembled simultaneously, shaped by the position of the subject in local hierarchies of power. This indicates the importance of approaching hybridity as a process – as hybridization – rather than as a condition or end-state. For instance, talking about hybridity as an interface (Werbner 2001), contact point (Hutnyk 2005) or the meeting, merging and consolidation of local and international (temporary) new orders (Boege et al. 2008; Richmond 2011; Mac Ginty 2011) suggests an encounter between entities that produces new forms (see Bhabha 1994). However, approaching hybridity in this way is the very reason why the concept has been criticized for reproducing the dichotomies that it purports to overcome. It negates the notion of permanently evolving processes of hybridization and the element of social change that is inherent in them (see Young 1995:25). Rather, the analytical focus should be on the process of hybridization, which constitutes an important part of how social processes evolve, and which external resources, practices and discourses, such as those introduced by police reform and broader SSR, enter into, become part of, shape and are shaped by. Separation and positive accommodation are assembled in the subject to establish configurations of authority that allow a given actor to respond to events, which in turn depends on the position of that subject in local hierarchies of power. It could be argued that the subject constitutes yet another entity, but this chapter argues that focusing on how he or she assembles and enacts different sources of authority frames how the tension between sameness and difference is constitutive of processes of authority-making. It becomes impossible to reduce the subject to a traditional leader or a state official as if these two figures belonged to separate domains. In sum, how the subject enacts authority becomes essential to our understanding of the way that processes of hybridization occur (Albrecht and Moe 2015). It makes a difference, both practically and analytically, whether the registers of authority that are drawn on to enact order are derived from the imagery of tradition – including sacred and customary powers, kinship and secret society membership – or from the imagery of an operative decision-making center of government, bureaucracy and legislation. It matters whether an individual refers to legislation or embodies ancestral ties to a particular locality and is able to use these registers of authority in the pursuit of resources in practice. It should therefore also matter and be clearly articulated in the analysis. These registers do not, however, constitute separate entities; in the case at hand, they do not constitute a clear distinction between traditional leader, police officer and diamond dealer. All three of these actors assembled and articulated different kinds of authority simultaneously, reflecting the fact that authority is always already drawn from multiple registers. It was the embodiment and projection of a multitude of local and extra-local registers of authority that positioned the paramount chief at the center of Kamara’s field

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of power as the figure who decides when and how the attempt to resolve a case must be handed over to the police.

Notes 1 Mac Ginty (2011:72) notes elsewhere that “both entities [in short, the international and the local] are likely to be the product of significant prior mixing of peoples, ideas, and norms concerning the exercise of power, the distribution of resources and the organization of society.” The weakness of this argument is that his focus is on the junction between local and international actors in the context of peace-building. 2 Important insights into alluvial mining and livelihood provisioning in rural Sierra Leone can be found in Pijpers 2011. Additional information on the history of alluvial mining can be found in Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010. 3 He had not always been blind, but suffered from “river blindness” caused by a worm that breeds in fast-flowing rivers – a common condition for divers who find diamonds in the Bafi riverbed. 4 The “supporter” is distinct from the “investor.” The supporter operates at the local level with a license to do alluvial mining in a specific demarcated area. Investors deal with capital-intensive mining, which is still alluvial but performed with help of “caterpillar” machines that cost US$1,000 per day to rent (see Fanthorpe and Maconachie 2010:262). 5 Generally, as Taylor Kondeh explained, sudden changes in a person’s consumption patterns is a good indication of whether a person has found a diamond: “OK, now this man is going to Koidu, he never used to go to Koidu. So, people are studying his movement now. Then, when he goes to Koidu, he might, if it is true that he found a diamond, he might buy some new materials. People will observe his wife and children, this man got something, because I know him yesterday, they didn’t cook, then today, he’s eating meat, rice, bread, sugar, oh, this man has something.” 6 This problematization of the state and its other is also found in Hansen and Stepputat (2001, 2005), who reject the concept of the state as an ahistorical entity that has certain assumed core functions (Hansen and Stepputat 2001:1). One of their sources of inspiration is the Marxist-inspired thinking of Gramsci and his reflections on the logic how the state operates. Gramsci rejects the notion that specific governmental institutions that comprise “the State” are the effective instruments of a “dominant group” (Gramsci 1971:182): “[T]he state is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria … between the interest of fundamental [i.e., dominant] and those of the subordinate group.” 7 Similarly, as the LPPB representative in Peyima, Isaac was tied to the SLP, gaining authority from that connection and being authorized by town chief Gborie to play a direct role in dealing with the case of theft. 8 The Chiefdom Council consists of councillors, each of whom represents twenty local taxpayers in a chiefdom. Paramount chiefs are elected by the councillors of the chiefdom. 9 Under the Local Court Act of 1963, the Minister of Internal Affairs was responsible for appointing the Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson of the Local Court, the only institution with lawful authority to adjudicate cases governed by customary law. The 2011 Local Court Act transferred the powers to appoint, promote, transfer, suspend, and dismiss any local court officer to the Chief Justice, with advice from the Judicial and Legal Service Commission and the newly constituted Local Court Service Committee.

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It is not possible to separate how SSR evolved in Sierra Leone from the initial circumstances under which the UK intervened militarily in the country around the turn of the millennium. SSR occurred in an unexpected and relatively unplanned manner, with the UK and the UN involved in both significant fighting and re-establishing functioning security services. At the time of this international intervention, the Sierra Leonean state as a centrally governed set of institutions no longer existed, and the security services had fragmented into disparate warring factions that acted as both rebels and soldiers. In Freetown and the countryside, the institutions of government and much of the infrastructure had in practice disappeared. One of the core challenges for the international intervention under these circumstances was the re-establishment of external and internal security actors to replace the chaos of war with the order of stable government (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:95). While there was an immediate logic to this point of departure, the political entity that was taken as a model for the delivery of security and justice reflected external actors’ experiences of what order means and how it should be constituted. The implication was that the advisers who supported and at times drove state-building forward adopted by default a reductionist approach in applying their logic in Sierra Leone (Albrecht 2012). They were under great pressure based on their own experiences of other failed states and their convictions that clearly reflected their outlook on the world and what they intuitively deemed to be the right thing to do. The direction they chose was equally shaped by the headquarters that had sent them. While officials at headquarters may not have been physically present in Sierra Leone, they intuitively felt they knew what Sierra Leone needed. This reductionism can be seen in the attempts by the UK and the Sierra Leonean government to attribute legitimacy in the provision of security and justice to a small number of institutions that could be identified as a centrally governed state entity. From the perspective of the external adviser-cumobserver, at least, other institutions that played a role in order-making were simply to be ignored, marginalized or, if possible, excluded as SSR progressed. In effect this approach dismissed the considerably more composite

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reality that prevails in many political entities that are referred to as fragile or failing, of which Sierra Leone was a prime example in the post-Cold War world. As SSR in Sierra Leone progressed, it became increasingly clear that the history, tradition and logic of chiefly authority and the role of secret societies in conditioning and shaping access to security were not to be considered part of the envisioned order any more than more obvious adversaries, such as former rebels and the elements in the army who had staged two coups during the 1990s. State-building reflected a belief that the failure of government to achieve its objective should be overcome by establishing governance strategies that would succeed in concentrating the monopoly of violence in Freetown, and more importantly, build the ability to administer that monopoly democratically and accountably. The first part of that process – concentration of the monopoly of violence at the state level – was a success and was hailed as such time and again internationally. However, while the second part of this process – administering the monopoly democratically and accountably – was acknowledged as important and was worked on, it remained strangely ill-defined and vague. The question was not whether the aims of the state-building project were achievable or how comprehensive state-building should be. The question was, and still is in discussions among donors, how to make security programming more efficient in order to move one step closer to functioning institutions that are democratic, accountable and driven by bureaucratic logic. What is clear is that the vague, normative and uncompromising attempts to establish a state that resembled, or could be likened to, the liberal-democratic model meant that SSR failed according to its own objectives in Sierra Leone. A comprehensive understanding of the practical effects of SSR, beyond ideal notions of how a state should behave or what the vision of an alternative and acceptable monopoly of violence might be, was given limited consideration, if any, by those who designed and implemented programming rollout. For instance, precisely what the police would or should look like and how they should operate in practice was couched in vague, if wellintentioned, terms. At the same time, as argued elsewhere, perhaps the attempt to export a Western understanding of statehood through international intervention, however vague it might be, is the best that can be hoped for. Evidence from Sierra Leone and elsewhere suggests that one cannot expect external advisers to develop and implement models of political order they are utterly unfamiliar with. If this is accepted, assessments of what can be achieved through state-building need to be improved, and there needs to be a better understanding of what “less-than-perfect” in the eyes of the intervener entails (Albrecht and Jackson 2014b:178). There was no language in SSR discourse and ancillary practices with which to articulate that alternative. What did become increasingly important as SSR progressed, especially in the context of policing, was the question of national (government) and local (popular) ownership of the process. The question that followed was how intervention driven by external actors should incorporate

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local actors and institutions that might operate outside the boundaries of what international advisers recognize as state institutions, but still play a considerable role as local centers of power in relation to the general population. Paramount and lesser chiefs that represent this stratum of Sierra Leonean governance structures were always the weak point, or, more accurately, a point of confusion in Sierra Leone’s SSR programming, in particular when it came to the SLP. It was also never addressed in a way that incorporated the police into the center of the process. The conundrum of the chiefs raises questions about how local definitions of and approaches to security and justice provision should be used in the definition and execution of programming. These definitions tend to be far more subjective and, more importantly in the eyes of the donor community, contravene international best practices. Certainly, most international resources during the course of Sierra Leone’s initial SSR activities were invested in the reform of formal institutions based on a liberal-democratic, state-centric model of law and bureaucracy. This book shows empirically that this narrow outlook limited donors’ ability to engage with diverse sets of organizations or with alternative notions and practices of security. Indeed, it appears that donors were unable to come up with, or accept, an alternative vision.

Opening up the conundrum: hybridization This book has dislocated discussions of state entities as either failed or fragile because such terms provide limited insight into how a place like Sierra Leone functioned in the late 1990s onward. As discussed in Chapter 7, applying this perspective does not help us understand how secret societies condition order-making practices locally in Sierra Leone. As discussed in Chapters 6 and 8, it does not help us appreciate the structured way in which policing is organized in locations where the state, embodied by the SLP, does not enforce security or even have the unequivocal legitimacy or right to do so in the view of the population. To understand the implications of SSR beyond the ministries, departments and agencies in Freetown, a framework is required for analyzing the principles whereby authority within Sierra Leone is produced and distributed in order to shape access to resources. Only by understanding how authority is organized and how it conditions order-making locally may we truly appreciate how SSR has shaped security actors in Sierra Leone and how those elements that might fall under the SSR label reached the local level and were integrated into existing systems of authority. As such, understanding how SSR shaped post-war Sierra Leone requires first of all an appreciation of how local order-making is organized; only then may we truly appreciate what can logically be achieved through a reform process that ultimately seeks to challenge the distribution of authority and of the practices of order-making. To establish this analytical framework, the concept of hybridity as developed in cultural studies and more recently in peace and security studies is a

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good starting point. As the Introduction of this book argues, the strength of the concept of hybridity is that it does not privilege the state or its antithesis, the non-state as the liberal-democratic state’s “other,” as archaic and illunderstood by the external observer. Indeed, hybridity inspires us to move from an ontology of entities that produce particular forms of order to an ontology of relationships and the performativity of authority that dissolves the dichotomies that separate the inseparable. Police reform as one of the primary emphases of this book occurred in, contributed to, shaped and was fundamentally shaped by the processes of entanglement and mixing that constitute hybridity. As such, the concept of hybridity is a useful analytical tool to understand how authority is constructed in Sierra Leone, and how chiefs, for instance, produce and defend their positions of power that give them access to coveted resources, in particular, land for farming and mining. SSR at the national level and elements of it that reached localities across the country became part of these constellations of authority but never fundamentally altered them. The book suggests that we talk about hybridization rather than hybridity. Analyzing the initial stages of SSR in Freetown or how a town chief in Peyima engages in and disengages from order-making through Local Policing Partnership Board members is not an analysis of how a new condition takes shape. It is the practical expression of ongoing processes of mixing and merging that elements of police reform contributed to, shaped and were shaped by. The analysis in this book captures moments in a continuous process of transformation (hybridization) and the practices, discourses and objects that are assembled at a particular point in time. Seen through this lens, hybridization becomes a historical and political process with no set beginning or end ultimately shaping the distribution, and thereby access to and control, of resources. The implication of exploring process (hybridization) rather than the condition (hybridity) is that to understand the productive effects of SSR, we must take seriously the logic of SSR as a set of programs that consist of innumerable interactions at an endless number of locations during which effects and new meanings are produced. Behaviors and ways of talking about security are always already undergoing permanent change, and even though this might only be the case in a very incremental manner, change is relentless and inevitable. It is also inevitable that the authority and power to make decisions transform resources, discourses and practices that are introduced as part of any moment of interaction. Hybridization emphasizes an ongoing process of negotiation in which some symbols and meanings of authority are maintained, but also, as a basic premise of the encounter, redefined through alienating strategies of repetition. In brief, the same object, discourse or practice placed (or repeated) in a different context acquires new meanings while echoing historical ones. This makes hybridization relentless and partially unconscious because it may appear monotonous and repetitive and also disturbing and interruptive. In turn,

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authority is ambivalent and uncertain, it has no sharp edges, and it is also disturbing and interruptive. Authority, however it may be expressed, must be reproduced continuously, and yet the figure of the chief and the secret societies described in this book have persisted as central to how authority is manifested in practice in Sierra Leone. Pinpointing how hybridization works in practice, the book emphasizes that it not only occurs across analytical entities, but also within subject positions that accommodate multiple sources of authority and identity that are enacted simultaneously in practices of order-making. Subjects, and subject positions like chiefs, embody historical processes, as I explore in Chapter 4. They are the sum of long-term processes of hybridization that are not reducible to any one source of authority with a clearly defined origin. Understanding how subjects embody and enact hybridization in order to claim and defend resources and how they have evolved over time is critical if we want to understand how order is continuously produced and reproduced. Subjects are the vehicle of that process: they stand at the very center of hybridized articulations and enactments. This makes understanding chiefs’ strategies and practices in order-making essential for two reasons. First, we need to understand how processes of hybridization occur, which is essential for understanding the second point: in what way elements of SSR became part of the process through acts of translation and appropriation.

Paramount and lesser chiefs The chiefs embody post-independence politics as much as pre-colonial constellations of authority and the effects of colonial administration, including policies of indirect rule. Despite what many scholars have argued, as noted in Chapter 4, colonial policies of indirect rule did not produce or “ignite” hybridization. However, indirect rule – that is, colonialism on the cheap – certainly shaped in fundamental ways how authority would be distributed across rural areas of the country. This was the colonial state’s attempt to identify and fix interlocutors between a miniscule number of colonial administrators and the general population in the hinterland. In Sierra Leone, as across much of colonial Africa, this approach led to the emergence of semiautonomous chieftaincies, which became and remain the historical focus of the struggle for political control in the countryside and also in the capital. Any resources, discourses or practices that enter the chieftaincy will enter into and be shaped by that struggle. Contemporary chiefs are produced in the language of state discourses such as legislation, including the 1992 Constitution and the 2004 Local Government Act. They remain integral to the system and idea of the state, both of which, in the case of Sierra Leone, are the partial products of chiefly authority. This is not a tautology. It merely emphasizes a point that is often underappreciated in literature on traditional leaders: while state institutions generate legislation and policies that articulate and define the authority of the

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chiefs, the very institutions that do so have been partially shaped by individuals whose authority is derived from chiefly descent. At the same time, while the chiefs and the Sierra Leonean state are mutually constitutive, the chiefs are also important protagonists of what Fanthorpe (2001:372) refers to as “extreme localism.” This circumstance of rural political life is constituted by constellations of discourse, practices and resources around, inter alia, autochthon status in the locality where an individual is born and is initiated into a secret society. Autochthony and secret society membership establish categorical distinctions between natives and strangers (newcomers) of a locality. As such, they constitute a critical division between insiders and outsiders that in turn plays directly into practices of order-making. Claims to secret society membership combined with ancestral associations metamorphose into decisions over land tenure that have implications for a person’s access to farming and mining and to claims to justice. For instance, if a person is not initiated into a secret society in the place where he seeks redress and cannot articulate the authority that comes with this, his chances of obtaining a decision in his favor are limited, if not non-existent. A rightful claim to land is articulated and reproduced through the same rites of passage in the same locations. They constitute a defensive mechanism of particular ways of making order from extra-local challenges, be they from the state, other tribes, or SSR programs that are discussed and implemented far away from any one locality but are expected to have effects in such very localities. In this regard, Poro membership and autochthon status are central to ongoing processes of hybridization: they will directly and indirectly shape any initiative that external actors take, whether the government in Freetown or international organizations. This is particularly the case if these initiatives have implications for the local distribution of authority, and they will be resisted – or ignored – at the local level if they weaken local positions of authority, such as that of the chief. A persistent focus in SSR discourse on a central government as the ideal and primary partner in the provision of security disregards the fundamental micro-struggles that “extremely localized” claims to authority constitute and the sources of authority that enable them. Indeed, minimal efforts were made during and after the colonial period to establish bureaucratic practices outside Freetown that would marginalize the chiefs’ importance in consolidating hierarchies of power. However, successive post-colonial governments chose to incorporate chiefs as integral to political party formation in Freetown while maintaining their role as primary gatekeepers to external pressures on the localities – the chiefdoms – over which they rule. This was true before the conflict that dominated the 1990s and continued to be the case after.

Hybridization, chiefs and the implications for SSR The rationale of hybridization is expressed in a continuous process of integrating different articulations of authority. The book has shown that in the case of Sierra Leone the resources, discourses and practices of SSR became

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part of, shaped and were shaped by this process. As I explore in Chapter 3, internationally led efforts to reconstitute a context that was considered chaotic and anarchic began with a military intervention to end the civil war. It continued with the arrest of perceived war criminals and SSR programs to create a vaguely defined liberal-democratic state-centric structure to manage security (and justice). The narrow view of state-building was evident both symbolically and in practice from the very outset of international attempts, primarily by the UK, to reorganize order-making. To support the government of Sierra Leone in fighting the war against the RUF, the UK supported the establishment of what at the time was referred to as the “Unholy Alliance.” This loose coalition of warring factions, which included former soldiers, traditional hunters and rebel fighters, became the basis of the new army and its state after the war. The initial focus of state-building was to contain the armed forces that had staged two coups in 1992 and 1997. While Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, then president of Sierra Leone, disbanded the army altogether, it was swiftly reconstituted out of the numerous inter-related force elements of the Unholy Alliance. A military re-integration program led by the UK assumed that 3,000 fighters from outside what was considered to be the state-sanctioned army would enter the new Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces. Parallel to these efforts to contain and overhaul the army, police reform became the centerpiece of SSR from the late 1990s onward. The intention behind police reform was to establish and consolidate the split between state and society that would situate the former as sitting above other levels of authority and containing localities across the territorially defined space of the Sierra Leonean state (vertical encompassment). In the first phase of police reform, which began while open conflict was still going on in the late 1990s, efforts were made to eliminate or marginalize the paramount and lesser chiefs by establishing and consolidating a role for the SLP, first in Freetown and, after the war was officially over in 2002, in the countryside. In the second and third phases of police reform and SSR more broadly, from the mid-2000s onward, the approach to the paramount and lesser chiefs was changed. External advisers and officials now argued for the incorporation of all actors engaged in local-level order-making into one interlinked state system. Thus, while the reformers had become more sensitive to the central role of the paramount and lesser chiefs as important actors who should not be marginalized, donors became and still are engaged in the long-term aim of establishing a centrally governed state entity. However, this attempt to disentangle, compartmentalize and work on particular aspects of the state proved futile because it implied – without this ever being stated explicitly – a fundamental but impossible reorganization of how the authority to make order should be structured and thus how resources were to be distributed. For instance, the great majority of advisers’ lack of understanding of extremely local sources of authority-making such as autochthon status and secret society membership was not going to eliminate or even fundamentally alter

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the order they are co-constitutive of. In short, chiefs and other authoritative figures will interpret any resource that is presented to them in terms of how it maintains the local structures of authority and hierarchies they benefit from. Certainly, in some places, and Peyima is a good example, to some in the township the town chief was responsible for their sense of insecurity. The logic of hybridization is particularly noticeable in police reform, as it was the SLP, rather than the army or intelligence agencies, that would interact with the population on a daily basis. In particular, as I suggest in Chapters 5 and 6, this logic is illustrated by the emergence of Local Policing Partnership Boards (LPPBs), community policing forums that were set up with support from the UK. LPPBs were formally established by the Sierra Leone government, and certainly in international policy discourse were presented as a neutral and depoliticized institution of equals in which the hierarchy of authority that emphasized the paramount and lesser chiefs as figures of central authority was muted. However, the chiefs’ instrumental role in appointing and managing the individuals who become involved in the LPPBs challenges this neutral characterization of LPPBs. In Peyima, the LPPB member was the only permanent indicator of a police presence who both represented an effect of SSR and embodied hybridization. LPPB representatives may have referred to the police as their boss, but it was impossible to be appointed to that role without being a person of significant authority or a close ally of the town chief – and preferably both. Blindness to the implications for order-making of autochthony and secret society membership leads to a misrecognition of what security means in any given locality across Sierra Leone. By extension, this means that the principles of ordermaking are fundamentally misunderstood and that the productive effects of police reform, for instance, cannot be assessed. A failure to understand and engage the sources of authority that are not necessarily articulated in conjunction with state resources and practices almost certainly leads to a misrecognition of how security and justice are organized. What follows is a misinterpretation of how authority in Sierra Leone, and concretely in Peyima, inevitably shapes order-making overall. The way in which hybridization has unfolded as a historical process and how it shapes what order means in Sierra Leone does not allow vertical encompassment as a potential outcome. There is limited political will to effectuate this in Freetown and no acceptance in localities across the country for the state to play that role in people’s lives. It cannot be assumed that the paramount and lesser chiefs, who are often presented by international policymakers and in some academic literature as little more than relics or products of a colonial past, will wither away. We are better served both theoretically and in policy-making and programming by striving to understand how hybridization conditions authority. Doing so will not only help us predict how order is made, it may also introduce a dose of realism into what can be expected from the external injection of resources into state spaces that are emerging from conflict.

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Index

9/11 terrorist attacks 24, 42 Abass 173–174 Abidjan Peace Accords 52 Abiew, Francis K. 26 Abraham 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172 Abrahamsen, Rita 7 Access to Security and Justice Programme (ASJP) 18, 108–111, 125, 134n6 ACPP (Africa Conflict Prevention Pool) 31–32, 64 Afghanistan 24, 29, 30, 42 AFRC (Armed Forces Revolutionary Council) 34, 52, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 91n11 Africa Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP) 31–32, 64 Ahmad, Aijaz 161 Ali, Papa 56 allochthons 79, 141, 148, 149 al-Qaeda 43n1 altruism, and LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) 123–124 ancestral spirits see belief systems and rituals Andersen, Louise Riis 29, 57 Anwyl, T.C. 73 APC (All People’s Congress) 51, 76, 80, 90n4, 101, 102, 142, 160 armed conflict: scale of since World War II 26–27 armed forces: coups, 1992 and 1997 3; and SSR 3 armed forces and SSR, Sierra Leone 1, 2 Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) 34, 52, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 91n11

Ashington-Pickett, Robert 33, 34 ASJP (Access to Security and Justice Programme) 18, 108–111, 125, 134n6 atrocities, during Sierra Leone’s civil war 47–48 autochthony/autochthon status 2, 4, 14, 71, 86, 89, 103, 114, 137, 139–141, 142, 145, 148, 149, 152, 153, 159, 160, 165, 183, 184–185; see also “natives,” and “strangers”; sons of the soil Baker, Bruce 6, 105 Bally, Asali 163 Bangura, Junior 151–154 Bayat, Asef 118–119 belief systems and rituals 82–85, 86; see also secret societies Bell, Catherine 143 Bellman, Beryl 144 Berry, Sara 70, 72 Bhabha, Homi 7, 10, 13, 14, 71 Biddle, Keith 33–34, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62–63, 94, 96–98, 99, 100, 101, 102–103, 116, 120 “black magic” 84 black women writers 16 Blair, Tony 43n5, 53–54 Bledsoe, Caroline 138 Bo East police district 124 Bo police division 124 Bo West police district 123–124 Bormula 2 Botswana 72 Brown, Gordon 31 Bush administration 29 Bush, George W. 43n1 “bush schools” 136–138 business interests, and LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) 124–125

204

Index

Butt-Thompson, Frederick 137–138 CCSSP (Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Project) 95–96, 98, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 108, 109 CDF (Civil Defence Force) 55, 58, 60, 64, 65, 67, 79 CDU (Civil Defense Units) 56 Charley, Chris 101 Chiefdom Council 74 Chiefdom Governance Reform Programme, 2000–2002, 87 Chiefdom Police 112n4 Chiefdom Security Committees (CHISECs) 113n5 Chiefdom Treasuries Act (1938), Sierra Leone 76 chiefs 1, 2–3, 4–5, 14, 20, 180, 182–183; belief systems and rituals 82–85, 86; “caretaker chiefs” 87; civil war period 86–87; colonial period 8, 72–73, 85, 161; emergence of 71–73; and hybridization 70–71, 73–75, 85–86, 88–89, 114, 158, 159, 161, 172–173, 183–185; and justice and security sector reform 100; legal status of 76–77, 160–161; and LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) 115, 118–121, 125, 126–133; and Peyima 77–82; and police reform 93, 94, 98–99, 102–106, 111, 114, 118–121; post-civil war period 87–88; post-colonial period 8, 9, 14, 49, 51, 75–76; pre-colonial period 71–72; and security committees 107; as “syncretic leaders” 16 Chieftaincy Act (1971), Ghana 76–77 Chieftaincy Act (2009), Sierra Leone 76 CHISECs (Chiefdom Security Committees) 113n5 Civil Defence Force (CDF) 55, 58, 60, 64, 65, 67, 79 Civil Defense Units (CDU) 56 civil liberties, erosion of in post-9/11 US 29 civil war period in Sierra Leone 21, 45, 46, 52–53, 54–57 Clausewitz, Carl von 47 Clifford, James 10 Coletta, Damon 27 Colony, the 72, 73 Comaroff, Jean 118 Comaroff, John L. 118

Commonwealth Community Safety and Security Project (CCSSP) 95–96, 98, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 108, 109 Commonwealth Police Development Taskforce to Sierra Leone (CPDTF) 66, 92 community policing 4, 18–19, 20–21, 34; see also LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) Community Relations Department (CRD), SLP 125 Community Safety Volunteers (CSV) 135n8 conservatism in Sierra Leone 101–102 Constitution of Ghana (1992) 76–77 Constitution of Sierra Leone (1991) 4, 52, 76–77, 160, 161 Constitution of Sierra Leone (1992) 182 Conteh, Kellie 38, 56–57, 107 Cook, Robin 53, 54 Cooper, Frederick 74 CPDTF (Commonwealth Police Development Taskforce to Sierra Leone) 66, 92 CR (Conciliation Resources) 87, 98–99 CRD (Community Relations Department), SLP 125 criminal justice system 36–37 CSV (Community Safety Volunteers) 135n8 cultural studies 10–11 dark forces 84–85 Daru police division 122–123 Denney, Lisa 78 Dent, Mike 54–55, 57 Department for International Development, UK see DfID (Department for International Development), UK Department of Defense, US 29 Department of State, US 29 development agencies 24 development, and security 7, 27–29, 46 DfID (Department for International Development), UK 1, 3, 9, 19, 24, 25, 30, 36; ASJP (Access to Security and Justice Programme) 18, 108–111, 125, 134n6; justice and security system reform 100–101, 110; role in development of SSR 31–32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 42; turf wars within 37 diamond industry 18, 51

Index diamond theft case, Kamara Chiefdom 21–22, 159–177; hybridization 164–166 difference 67; and positive accommodation 16, 17 DISECs (District Security Committees) 113n5 District Commissioners 72 District Councils 77 District Officers 49 domestic violence 122–123, 126 donors 25, 26, 27, 35, 36; justice and security system reform 105, 106 donsos 79 Donsos 58 doubling 13 Douzinas, Costas 26 DynCorp 43n4 Ebola crisis 111 ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 91n11 ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) 63, 69n8 effective visible policing 20, 92 Eliminating World Poverty: Building Our Common Future (DfID) 108 “Enhancing the Delivery of Justice and Security” (OECD) 40, 41 epileptic boy, death of 83–84, 115, 127–130 Eriksson, Mikael 26 Executive Outcomes 52 extreme localization 76, 77, 78, 104, 115, 183 failing/fragile states 6–7, 9, 11, 23, 24–25, 27, 93 Fanthorpe, Richard 71, 76, 78, 85, 88, 134n3, 147–148, 183 Fasalie 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173–174 FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), UK 31, 35, 37 feminist literary criticism 16 FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) 113n4, 154 force, state’s legitimate use of 8 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), UK 31, 35, 37 fragile/failing states 6–7, 9, 11, 23, 24–25, 27, 93

205

Gaima, Emmanuel 134n3 Gbetes 58 Gborie, town chief of Peyima 18, 80–81, 82, 83, 87, 127, 128, 129–130, 130–131, 144, 145, 146–147, 148, 149, 150; diamond theft case 161, 163, 164, 165, 171 GCPP (Global Conflict Prevention Pool) 31–32 Germany 37–38 Geschiere, Peter 140–141 Ghana 72, 73, 75, 76–77 Global Conflict Prevention Pool (GCPP) 31–32 Goldstone, Jack A. 20 Greene, Graham 47 “Handbook on Security System Reform” (OECD) 38–39, 40 Hardin, Kris 78, 140 Harris, David 101 Henderson, Mae 16 heterogenization see separation (heterogenization) Hobsbawm, Eric 138 Holston, James 118–119 homogenization see positive accommodation (homogenization) Horn, Adrian 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 120 Howlett-Bolton, Anthony 101, 104 Hughes, Charlie 86 Human Development Report, UNDP 27 human rights 26 Human Rights Watch 47–48 human security paradigm 27–28 Hurrell, Andrew 6 hybridity 5, 9–12, 93, 132, 158, 176, 181 hybridization 2, 5, 10–11, 12, 158, 180–182; and chiefs 70–71, 73–75, 85–86, 88–89, 114, 158, 159, 161, 172–173, 183–185; diamond theft case 164–166, 172–173, 176–177; and police reform 92–94, 108–111; productive effects of 9–12; and SSR (security sector reform) in Sierra Leone 4, 5–6; as transformation 13–15 IMATT (International Military Assistance Training Team) 64 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 50, 52 international relations, “local turn” in 10 Iraq 24, 29, 30, 42

206

Index

Isaac 130, 131; diamond theft case 160, 161, 162, 163–164, 167, 171–172, 174, 175 ISU (Internal Security Unit) 52 Jackson, Paul 138, 154 Jackson, Stephen 140–141 Jaima-Bongor chiefdom 59 Jakobsen, Peter V. 27 Jalloh, Sayoh 142–143 Jetley, Vijay 53 JSDP (Justice Sector Development Programme) 100–101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108–109, 110 justice and security system: holistic approach to 99–102; see also police reform Justice Sector Reform Strategy and Investment Plan 103 Juul, Christine 145 Kabbah, Ahmad Tejan 3, 34–35, 45, 46, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 87, 184; and police reform 66, 94–95, 97–98 Kailahun District 124, 125 Kainkordu, Kono District 78 Kalilu, Ibrahim 79, 127–129, 130, 131–132, 148–149, 149–150, 160 kamajors 58, 59 Kamara, Benjamin 87–88 Kamara, Brima Acha 99–100, 102, 104, 116–117 Kamara Chiefdom 21, 80, 115, 139–140, 141, 164, 165; see also diamond theft case, Kamara Chiefdom Kambeh, Mustapha 117, 119, 120–121, 159, 160, 168, 172 Kant, Immanuel 22n2 Kaplan, Robert D. 47–48 Kapras 58 Keating, Tom 26 Keen, David 73–74 Kellie, Tamba 151–154 Kenema police division 124 Kissy, Freetown 117, 124 Koidu, Kono District 18, 102–103 Kondeh, Taylor 144–147, 148–149, 150, 177n5 Kongue, Pa 80, 83, 81082 Kono District 4, 21, 71, 76, 77, 79, 87, 115, 148 Kono ethnic group 18, 141–142, 144, 150 Koranko ethnic group 51, 141, 142–143

Koroma, Ernest Bai 65, 90n4, 101, 102 Koroma, Johnny Paul 59, 60, 62, 65, 93 Kuranko ethnic group 18 land disputes 144, 145; Taylor Kondeh case 144–147, 148–149, 150 Law Development Programme 100 Lederach, John P. 27 Lentz, Carola 141 lesser chiefs 1, 2, 4–5, 9, 14, 20, 49, 51, 70, 73, 76, 87, 88, 89, 160–161, 180, 182–183; Kamara Chiefdom 86; and LPPBs 122, 125, 126, 133; and police reform 93, 94, 103, 104, 114; and the Poro secret society 136, 137 liberal peace thesis 22n2, 26 liberal-democratic political structures 20, 26, 28, 54 Liberia 43n4, 69n8 Libra Advisory Group 109–110 Limba ethnic group 18, 52, 141 Little, Kenneth 137, 139, 154 LNP (Local Needs Policing) 98, 106, 114, 118, 120, 132 Local Command Units, SLP 115 Local Court Act (1963) 177n9 Local Court Act (2011) 104, 177n9 Local Courts 103, 104, 105, 166 Local Government Act (2004) 76, 77, 182 Local Needs Policing (LNP) 98, 106, 114, 118, 120, 132 Local Policing Partnership Boards see LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) “local turn” in international relations 10 Lomé Peace Accord 53, 56, 61, 62 LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) 20–21, 106, 109, 110, 114–115, 132–134, 181, 185; and chiefs 115, 118–121, 125, 126–133; death of epileptic boy case 115, 127–130; motivation for involvement in 123–125; organizational structure and role in order-making 125–127; origins of 116–118; theft case 115, 130–132; in urban areas 121–123; women’s role in 122–123; see also SLP (Sierra Leone Police) Lund, Christian 145 Mac Ginty, Roger 10, 74, 85, 158 Malthus, Thomas 47 Mandingo ethnic group 18

Index Mannah, Amadu 106 Mansaray, Yusuf 152–154, 155, 156, 169 Margai, Milton 45, 75 Margais 49 Mehler, Andreas 53 Members of Parliament 77 Mende ethnic group 18, 51, 58, 68n2, 141, 150 MI6 43n6 mineral resources 49 Ministry of Defence, Sierra Leone 1, 3, 54, 55, 64–65, 67 Ministry of Defence (MOD), UK 19, 31, 35, 37 Ministry of Internal Affairs 100 Ministry of Justice 104 Ministry of Local Government 104 MOD (Ministry of Defence), UK 19, 31, 35, 37 Momoh, Joseph Saidu 3, 49, 50, 52, 101 Moore, Sally F. 166–167 Mosse, David 155 Motema police division 117, 119, 120–121, 159, 170, 172 Moyamba District 105, 106 multi-layered approach 25, 39–41, 42 Munu, Francis 102 Myerhoff, Barbara G. 166–167 National Council of Paramount Chiefs 77 National Diamond Mining Company (NDMC) 51 National Policy Framework for the Justice Sector in Sierra Leone 103 National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) 47, 52 National Security and Central Intelligence Act (2002) 113n5 national security and intelligence organizations, Sierra Leone 1, 3, 4, 64 National Security Council 107 Native Administration Scheme, 1937 74 “natives,” and “strangers” 78–79, 137, 139, 141; see also autochthony/ autochthon status NDMC (National Diamond Mining Company) 51 NEO (non-combatant evacuation operation) 62 neoliberal deregulation 118 Netherlands, the 37–38 Ngandi, Hindowa 91n13 Ngekia, Aiah Melvin II 91n13

207

Ngekia, Melvin, Paramount Chief 80, 82; diamond theft case 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168–171, 172–173, 176–177 Nigeria 72, 75 non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO) 62 non-state actors: and the multi-layered approach 39–41; “non-state justice and security actors” 20, 94 Norman, Samuel Hinga 58–59, 60, 65, 67, 92, 117 NPRC (National Provisional Ruling Council) 47, 52 ODA (Overseas Development Assistance) 34, 35 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) 25, 43; OECD-DAC (OECD Development Assistance Committee) 35–36, 37–38 ONS (Office of National Security) 1, 33, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 113n5 Operation Palliser 61–63 Operation Phoenix 66 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development see OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) Organization of African Unity 50 OSD 106 Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) 34, 35 paralegals 109, 110 paramount chiefs 1, 2, 4–5, 9, 14, 20, 49, 51, 70, 73, 76, 77, 80, 85, 87, 88, 89, 160–161, 180, 182–183; as gatekeepers 166–167; Kamara Chiefdom 18, 86; and LPPBs 122, 125, 126, 133; and police reform 93, 94, 103, 104, 106, 114; and the Poro secret society 136, 137; recording of as Ruling Houses in the Government Gazette 79–80, 81; and security committees 107 Paris, Roland 26 peace and security studies: fragile/failed state discourse 6–7, 9, 11; hybridity in 9–10 Penfold, Peter 34–35, 59, 69n7, 97, 112n4 Peters, Krijn 48, 49, 86–87, 89 Peyima, Kamara Chiefdom, Kono District 18, 21, 22, 71; chieftaincy and

208

Index

authority in 79–82; death of epileptic boy case 115, 127–130; demography of 18, 141–142; history of 81–82; LPPB 115, 125–126, 185; “natives and strangers” 79; theft case 115, 127, 130–132 Pieterse, Jan 12, 168 police reform 4, 20–21, 68, 92–99, 111–112, 158, 180, 181, 184, 185; and chiefs 93, 94, 98–99, 102–106, 111, 114, 118–121; and the Poro secret society 154–155; see also SLP (Sierra Leone Police) political interests, and LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) 124–125 Poro secret society 21, 136–139, 155–156, 183; forced initiation crime 151–154; non-Kono members 147–149; and physical space 139–142; and the police 149–151; and police reform 154–155; Taylor Kondeh land dispute 144–147, 148–149, 150; and the Temnes 142–144 positive accommodation (homogenization) 5–6, 15, 16, 17, 93, 158; diamond theft case, Kamara Chiefdom 159, 176; and difference 16, 17; and police reform 94, 95, 106–108, 112 post-colonial studies 10–11 PROSECs (Provincial Security Committees) 113n5 Protectorate, the 72, 73, 74, 112n4 Ray, Donald I. 73 Reno, William 49–50, 51 repetition 13 Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) 64, 184 Revolutionary United Front see RUF (Revolutionary United Front) Richards, David 53, 61, 62 Richards, Paul 49, 78, 86–87, 88 Richmond, Oliver 74 Room, Arei van 96 RSLAF(Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces) 64, 184 RUF (Revolutionary United Front) 2, 46, 47, 49, 50, 54, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 86, 91n11, 184; aims of 52–53; corruption of the SLP 3; and illicit diamond mining 53; and Kono District 87; military reintegration 64; and Peyima 18, 79

rule of law 3 Ruling Houses 77 Sahr, Jimmy 130, 131, 139–140, 147, 149 Sandline affair 44n9, 53 Sankoh, Foday 46, 54, 59–60, 61, 62, 67, 97, 111, 117 SAP (structural adjustment program), IMF 50 Sawyer, Edward 154 Sayer, W. G. 96 secret societies 4, 79, 137–138, 154–155, 156n1, 180, 183; see also belief systems and rituals; Poro secret society security, and development 7, 27–29, 46 security sector reform see SSR (security sector reform) “Security System Reform and Governance” (OECD) 38 separation (heterogenization) 5–6, 15, 16, 67, 93, 158; diamond theft case, Kamara Chiefdom 159, 176; and police reform 94, 95, 106–108, 112 Sesay, Issa 62–63 Sesay, Max 88 Sesay, Mohamed C. 86 Shaw, Rosalind 88 Sherman, Jake 29 Short, Clare 30, 31–33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 42, 46, 54, 60, 95, 96 Short-Term Training Team UK 62 Sierra Leone 66–68; civil war period 21, 45, 46, 52–53, 54–57; colonial period 8, 72–73; military intervention in 30, 60, 61–63; post-civil war period 57–61, 63–66; post-colonial period 45, 46, 48– 50, 75–76; state collapse 19, 47–48, 50–52; see also SSR (security sector reform) in Sierra Leone Sierra Leone Army (SLA) 55, 58, 61, 62 Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) 52, 59, 75, 80 Sierra Leone Police see SLP (Sierra Leone Police) Sierra Leone Police Local Policing Partnership Board Constitution (2011) 118, 119, 125 SILSEP (Sierra Leone Security Sector Program) 33 simultaneity of discourse and practice 15–17 SLA (Sierra Leone Army) 55, 58, 61, 62 slave trade, West Africa 78–79

Index SLP (Sierra Leone Police) 1, 2, 3, 4, 20–21, 34, 61, 66, 95, 100, 101–102, 106, 108, 184, 185; civil war period 55, 56; community policing 4, 18–19, 20–21; corruption by the RUF 3; CRD (Community Relations Department) 125; and the diamond theft case 169, 170, 171, 172–173; Local Command Units 115; Operation Phoenix 66; and the Poro secret society 21, 136, 149–151; quasi-privatization of 101–102; “transport money” 128, 129; see also LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards); police reform SLPP (Sierra Leone People’s Party) 52, 59, 75, 80 Sollenberg, Margareta 26 sons of the soil 21, 77, 79–80, 82–83, 121, 137, 139, 140–141, 144, 148, 153; see also autochthony/autochthon status Special Court 59 Spicer, Tim 53 SSD (Special Security Division) 52, 55 SSR (security sector reform) 1, 41–43; emergence of 19, 23–27; and fragile/ failed states 7; impact of US policy post 9/11 29–31; institutional turf wars 34, 36–37; international spread of 37–39; military expenditure debates 35–36; multi-layered approach 39–41, 42; security/development relationship 27–29; Sierra Leone’s role in shaping of 32–35; UK role in development of 31–32 SSR (security sector reform) in Sierra Leone 1–4, 5–6, 19, 24, 31–32, 37, 45–46, 67–68, 178–180; hybridization in 64–66; as state-building 63–66 state actors: and the multi-layered approach 39–41 state sovereignty 8 state, the 23; and legitimate use of force 8; modern concept of 7–8 state-building 2, 24, 184; discourse of 6–9; SSR in Sierra Leone as 63–66 Stevens, Siaka Probyn 3, 49, 50, 51–52, 76, 101, 161 “strangers,” and “natives” 78–79, 137, 139, 141 Strasser, Valentine 52 structural adjustment program (SAP), IMF 50

209

Sugden, Jennifer 37 Suma, Osama 151–154 Tamaboras 58 Tankoro police division 122 Tankos 80–81, 82, 160 Taylor, Charles 59 Temne ethnic group 18, 51, 58, 141, 150; and the Poro 142–144 “third space” 10, 71 Tieh, Sumana 91n13 Tombodu, Tamara Chiefdom 18, 126, 128 Town Councils 77 train-and-equip programmes 20, 24, 28–29, 36, 42 “transport money” 128, 129 TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) 3, 45, 86, 88 Tribal Authorities (Amendment) Act (1964), Sierra Leone 76 Tribal Authorities Ordinance (1938), Sierra Leone 76 Tribal Authority 74 Tull, Denis 53 Turay, Elizabeth 125 turf wars, institutional 34, 36–37 UK, role in development of SSR 31–32, 38 UK support to Sierra Leone 9, 18, 19, 46, 53–54, 57–58, 64, 67, 178; justice and security system reform 100–101; military intervention 60, 61–63; police reform 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 111–112; purpose of 2–3 UN peacekeeping forces 53, 61 UNAMSIL (United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone) 62, 68n6 UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 113n5; Human Development Report 27 Unholy Alliance 62, 63, 64, 184 United States: counter-terrorism policy 29, 30; security policy 2001–2008, 29, 42–43 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 29 Wallenstein, Peter 26 war criminals 46, 111 War on Terror 25, 30 warrior chiefs 72

210

Index

Weber, Max 8, 48, 58, 91n9 West Africa, slave trade 78–79 “White Man’s Grave,” Sierra Leone as 90n2 Whitehall Africa Group 102 Wirth, Louis 121 witch doctors 84

women, role in LPPBs (Local Policing Partnership Boards) 122–123 Yalunkas ethnic group 51 youth groups, and community policing 126 Zack-Williams, Alfred 51