Hybridization, Intervention and Authority

Security Beyond Conflict in Sierra Leone

Peter Albrecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351590907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Libertà politica

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.

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 state-building 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 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 state-building (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 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 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 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 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

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) a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1      Introduction
• 2      The rise and fall of security sector reform in development
• 3      Collapse, chaos and resurrection
• 4      Hybridization and the authority of chiefs
• 5      The interplay of police reform and hybridization
• 6      The chiefs of community policing
• 7      Secrets, strangers and order-making
• 8      Hybridization in a case of diamond theft
• 9      Conclusion
• References
• Index