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The Chiefs of Community Policing in Rural Sierra Leone*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2015

Peter Albrecht
Peter Albrecht*
Affiliation:
Danish Institute for International Studies, Østbanegade 117, 2100 København Ø, Denmark
*
Email: paa@diis.dk
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Abstract

This paper argues that when police reform in Sierra Leone was instituted to consolidate a state system after the country's civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a hybrid order instead that is embodied by Sierra Leone's primary local leaders: paramount and lesser chiefs. In this sense, policing has a distinctly political quality to it because those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources. The hybrid authority of Sierra Leone's chiefs emanates from multiple state-based and localised sources simultaneously and comes into play as policing takes place and police reform moves forward. This argument is substantiated by an ethnographic exploration of how and with what implications community policing has been introduced in Peyima, a small town in Kono District, and focuses on one of its primary institutional expressions, Local Policing Partnership Boards.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 611 - 635
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Thank you to Anna Leander, Helene Maria Kyed, Bruce Baker, Lisa Denney and Susan Michael for their critical input and to the two anonymous reviewers who made clear and useful comments that helped to sharpen the argument of this paper.

References

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