Sierra Leone: the global-local politics of state collapse and attempted reconstruction

Introduction: the global-local politics of African statehood African states, like those in much of the non-European world, may be regarded in the broadest perspective as the product of the combination of global and local influences that resulted from the attempt to replicate European-style state systems throughout the world. Initially, this goal was achieved through colonial conquest and administration, coupled with the co-optation into the global community of states of a number of existing Asian and African states – China, Ethiopia, Iran, Japan, Thailand – that generally met the requirements for statehood expected by the dominant states of the global order, and were powerful or diplomatically adept enough to avoid conquest. Subsequently, as the costs of direct colonialism became too great for the colonising powers to bear, it required the conversion into formally sovereign independent states of areas that had previously been identified only as local administrative regions under overall imperial control – a process which, obviously enough, substantially increased the local element in their composition and management. The division of the world and its peoples between at least nominally sovereign states has become so universally accepted a feature of the global order that it is helpful to remember that it is essentially the product only of the last forty or fifty years. Prior to the twentieth century in much of Africa and parts of other continents, and prior to the nineteenth century even in Europe itself, there were considerable areas in which nothing corresponding to a sovereign state could be identified. It is as well to remind ourselves how recent is the global state structure that is now coming under threat. In practice, moreover, the idea that the whole world is actually controlled by states has never been anything but a reassuring fiction, classically expressed by the demarcation of maps in solid blocks of colour, corresponding to the territories of designated states. Even during the heyday of imperial rule, which constituted the most thoroughgoing attempt on the part of core states to impose control over the rest of the planet, there remained areas (such as the northwest and northeast frontier regions of India) in which little more than a pretence of order could be maintained. Colonial rule in Africa, despite the reassuring impression of solidity that the rulers were anxious to convey, consisted in many areas of little more than the thinnest imperial overlay, which could be maintained only by …