Sierra Leone’s current political settlement is highly influenced by the externally imposed peace agreement that ended the civil war in 2001. Prior to this, there had been several unsuccessful attempts at establishing a new political settlement between the country’s various elites. Following the attacks by Revolutionary United Front (RUF) soldiers on UN peacekeeping forces in May 2000, British troops were sent in to stabilise the situation. Sierra Leone became a de facto UN protectorate. As a result, the political settlement in Sierra Leone was essentially driven by a donor agenda led by the United Kingdom.
This agenda focused on two key areas. One was security and justice, and was dealt with by the setting up of the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme, the Security Sector Reform programme, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Truth and Reconciliation programme. The second was political and governance reforms, namely decentralisation, including the restoration of both local councils and the institution of chieftaincy, with the aim of tackling the root causes of the war. Donors believed that the country’s instability was due to a broken governance pact where society on the fringes (both geographical and political) was marginalised, and decentralisation would therefore give more power to the margins. Any new political settlement had to address this alienation of the countryside by the centre.
Policy recommendations
The way in which elite-coalition political settlements are shaping patterns and processes of economic development is central to developing an understanding about building peaceful states and societies. This is not a question of trade-off between peaceful states (traditional security concerns) and peaceful societies (human security concerns) but rather of the extent to which negotiated political settlement will enable state–society relations to evolve into an acceptable and sustainable solution both for the elites and for society.
Considering that there is always a real possibility of relapse into, or the continuation of, violence in other forms after the end of an internal armed conflict, violence mitigation efforts should focus on adopting a longer-term approach to transforming the political settlement into pro-development state–society relations, geared towards implementing far-reaching governance and other political and socioeconomic reforms. This will necessarily be a gradual, difficult and open-ended process, which is contingent on the capacity and willingness of dominant domestic elites and their international partners to advance it. However, the case of Sierra Leone highlights the fact that the international community has no clear pathways for transforming a political settlement that is geared towards stability and control towards more inclusive state-society relations based on liberal governance and inclusive participation. More often than not, the activities of international peace-builders around political settlement have contributed to an order where coercion, inequality and violence remain central.
To mitigate the growing intensity and frequency of violence in Sierra Leone, international donors and the Government of Sierra Leone should:
- Focus on the proliferation of small arms by: investing in programmes to develop the capacity to control and limit the possession, trading and use of small arms; and developing alternative livelihood initiatives as incentives for artisan blacksmiths to stop producing small arms.
- Enforce codes of practice for resource extraction (such as the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative), make multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in Sierra Leone accountable for their business ethics and support the creation of domestic natural resource-governance initiatives with a view to promoting transparency, accountability and fair use and allocation of proceeds from natural resources.
- Emphasise, as a key priority for their poverty-reduction strategies, the reintegration into economic and social life of demobilised militants in peri-urban and rural areas, with a particular focus on job creation and vocational training for youth.