Title: Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone, by David Keen. Oxford: James Currey, 2005. 270 pp. £16.95 paperback. ISBN 085255883X (paperback).
Abstract: David Keen has done the international community and the government and people of Sierra Leone a huge service by publishing his new and excellent book Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone at a most opportune moment, just as the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) is drawing to an end its six‐year role as an external peacekeeper. For the first time since 1991, Sierra Leoneans will again be essentially on their own in seeking to rebuild a better society. This small west African country, until late in the day ignored by the international community, is emerging from one of the most grievous and brutal civil wars on the African continent, a war which over the decade of the 1990s left over 50,000 dead, an estimated 300,000–400,000 internally displaced, and tens of thousands permanently maimed by cruel and gratuitous amputations of arms and legs. The scars are not just on the landscape but also on the psyche of the population. The war, as David Keen explains, was not so much a struggle for domination in Freetown and control of the diamond fields — even through these were factors in its duration — as a venting of grievances and a cry from the dispossessed and powerless who could find no other outlet for their anger and rage at their marginalization and exclusion in a dysfunctional society.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-03-10
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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