War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone (The International African Library)

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The armed conflict in Sierra Leone and the extreme violence of the main rebel faction - the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) - have challenged scholars and members of the international community to come up with explanations. Up to this point, though, conclusions about the nature of the war are mainly drawn from accounts of civilian victims and commentators who had access to only one side of the war. The present study addresses this currently incomplete understanding of the conflict by focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of protagonists, paying special attention to the hitherto neglected, and often underage, cadres of the RUF. The data presented challenges the widely canvassed notion of the Sierra Leone conflict as a war motivated by 'greed, not grievance'. Rather, it points to a rural crisis expressed in terms of unresolved tensions between landowners and marginalized rural youth, further reinforced and triggered by a collapsing patrimonial state.

War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone (The International African Library) Review

According to Google scholar, far and away Krijn Peters̵7; most frequently cited work is the 1998 article “’Why We Fight’: Voices of Youth Combatants in Sierra Leone,̶1; co-authored with Paul Richards and published in the journal Africa. His recent book, War and the Crisis of Youth in Sierra Leone, is essentially a continuation of that excellent early work with Richards, a plea to try to understand war by listening to the voices of the young men carrying it out. The key methodological message is to listen to the combatants. The key theoretical contribution is that problems of rural youth are vital to understanding the causes of the war.

It helps to think of Peters as Richards217; student, since there are many deep connections between their work, mainly the insistence on what they call a neo-Durkheimian approach. The first chapter, in particular, repeats Richards’ typology of explanations of civil war as spelled out in No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (2005, James Currey). Over a decade on, analyses of the war can now generally be placed into one of three camps. The first camp is the “greed not grievance221; camp, which the author quickly discards. The second camp (personified by Richards) tries to understand the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels on their own terms. The third camp, represented by Ibrahim Abdullah and other Sierra Leonean intellectuals, refuses to acknowledge any redeeming features in the RUF, and would balk at the description of RUF camps as offering “an alternative society, centred on meritocratic rather than gerontocratic or patrimonial principles” (17).

The main goal of the book, and it is an important one, is to try to understand the war in Sierra Leone from the combatants’ perspective, 220;focusing on the direct experiences and interpretations of the protagonists of war, and paying special attention to the hitherto neglected cadres of the RUF [rebels]” (10). Peters goes on, “the purpose of focusing on ex-combatants here is not to ‘give the voiceless a voice,’; but to gain a better understanding of why so many young people proved to be vulnerable to militia conscription in general” (11).

I like the description of his methodology as “simplicity itself—go there, listen, report, examine critically, and then try to understand” (12) (as opposed to the sometimes over-romanticized danger described by some others). Peters was one of the very few people interviewing combatants during the war and ex-combatants immediately after the war; and he is right that combatants’ stories have changed somewhat since that time due to the passage of a decade, as well as the effects of massive international intervention and the presence of many researchers. This makes his detailed ethnographic work from the late nineties all the more valuable today.

By now it is not surprising to students of the war in Sierra Leone that all factions, both volunteers and the forcibly recruited, agree about the causes of the outbreak of the war: 220;lack of education and jobs, and the failure or unwillingness of a ruling elite … to help and include, rather than exploit and exclude, the vulnerable and needy, in particular the young” (13). Peters is intervening in the R20;crisis of youth” literature, pointing to the structures of youth exclusion and exploitation endemic in Sierra Leone. What sets Peters apart from the rest is his singular focus on rural youth. Personally, I take issue with the central contention that the war is best understood with respect to rural issues. I believe he overstates the importance of customary courts and their manipulation to extract labour and financial means from a rural underclass. The rural argument is a needed corrective to an excessive urban focus, but in my experience forced labour for chiefs was over before the war, and access to education was not the issue so much as it was the quality of the education accessed. Chiefs’ control of forced labour had eroded significantly decades before the onset of the conflict, and we are left wondering why the war happened when it did.

The later chapters of the book discuss, in turn, the functioning of the RUF, their “strategies of bonding,” and the sources of their “homespun political philosophyR21; (214); contending explanations for RUF atrocities; post-war disarmament and reintegration programs; and the need for agrarian focused reintegration packages for former combatants. Peters takes on the Abdullah camp and their “lumpens” theory directly in the concluding chapter.

For those knowledgeable about the large literature on the war in Sierra Leone, the book covers familiar territory. For those interested more broadly in conflict in Africa, this book is a well-written summary of the debates surrounding the causes of conflict in Sierra Leone, and is a wonderfully rich representative of one camp in the debate

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