Content area
Full text
INTRODUCTION
At the heart of international support to strengthen the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Sierra Leone state in the late 1990s was the 'intention to introduce effective visible policing' and 'for the police to resume primacy in maintaining law and order' (CPDTF 1999). Sierra Leone was emerging from a war that only ended officially in 2002. In this context, the introduction of 'effective visible policing' initially meant building police stations, writing codes of conduct and training and equipping police officers. This was a political endeavour that entailed recomposing the justice and security field as a set of structured relations among actors who enforce order and redistribute the resources that they draw upon and generate during the course of that process (see Vandenberghe 1999: 42). At the centre of this project was the Sierra Leone Police (SLP), which was to (re)monopolise the enforcement of order (Baker 2005, 2008; Denney 2011, 2014; Krogstad 2012).
This paper argues that rather than establishing a consolidated state system, police reform reproduced a hybrid political order that Sierra Leone's primary local leaders - paramount and lesser chiefs - embody and govern. The hybrid authority of the chiefs emanates from multiple sources simultaneously, and challenges analytical approaches that are built up around binaries between, for instance, state (police) and non-state (chiefs). Chiefs invoke sacred and other customary powers at the local level that revolve around kinship, autochthon status and secret society membership (Hardin 1993; Fanthorpe 1998, 2001, 2005). At the same time, Sierra Leone's 149 chiefdoms are linked to the national level through an operative centre of government, bureaucracy and legislation, including their recognition in the 1991 Constitution. Unlike the SLP, whose power base and source of legitimacy depend more substantially on the central government, chiefs are in a unique position to combine locally and nationally generated sources of authority.
In order to substantiate this argument, the paper explores one dimension of police reform in Sierra Leone: how and with what implications community policing has been introduced at the local level. The focus is on the primary institutional expression of community policing, Local Policing Partnership Boards (LPPBs), which were established to ensure stakeholder participation in policing. Insight is provided on how community policing is practiced and how LPPBs have been operationalised,...