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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Ransoming the State: Elite Origins of Subaltern Terror in Sierra Leone
Author:Kandeh, Jimmy D.ISNI
Year:1999
Periodical:Review of African Political Economy
Volume:26
Issue:81
Period:September
Pages:349-366
Language:English
Geographic term:Sierra Leone
Subjects:violence
political elite
Politics and Government
Law, Human Rights and Violence
External links:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03056249908704398
http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4F7B9791E24EB6CDB445
Abstract:This article highlights the role of politicians, or the established political class, in creating the conditions that allowed military subalterns to usurp power and terrorize society in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The centrality of violence and thuggery in Sierra Leone politics can be traced to the exclusionary, repressive mode of exercising power by incumbent political elites. While the focus on lumpen culture and violence provides useful insights into the social background of leaders of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), it fails to address the issue of how lumpen violence moved from the fringes of society to engulf State and society. Problematizing this extension of the social parameters of subaltern violence is critical to understanding why and how armed subalterns were able to ransom the State. 'Sobelisation' of the national army, or the transformation of army regulars into brigands and armed robbers, can be traced to the mode of recruitment. How political elites accumulated wealth and exercised power helped shape the dynamics of AFRC/RUF terror. Subaltern appropriation of elite modes of accumulation resulted in the transformation of violence from a tool of political domination to a means of criminal accumulation by State agents. Bibliogr., sum.
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