African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on September 17, 2008
African Affairs 2008 107(429):515-539; doi:10.1093/afraf/adn057
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Mercenaries of democracy: The ‘Politricks’ of remobilized combatants in the 2007 general elections, Sierra Leone
Maya Christensen (maya.christensen{at}anthro.ku.dk) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Mats Utas [mats.utas{at}nai.uu.se] is a researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Both have conducted long-term fieldwork in Freetown among the ex-combatants who came to be remobilized during the 2007 elections. Together they covered the election period from May to September and the previous phases of early political mobilization in 2006. The research project has been generously funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. We want to thank Moses Massa, Mathias Krüger, and the journal's anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier draft.
The 2007 general elections in Sierra Leone marked a decisive moment in the country's post-war recovery. In this article we show how political parties strategically remobilized ex-combatants into ‘security squads’ in order both to protect themselves and to mobilize votes. We look at the tactical and strategic motives behind ex-combatants’ choice to join the political campaigning and the alternatives (such as ‘watermelon politics’), and we also examine the deep distrust between politicians and ex-combatants. Focusing on politics as the domestication of violence, we shed light on the continuation of pre-war and war-time mobilization of youth into politics and demonstrate how electoral moments can legitimize violence. In hindsight, the 2007 elections strengthened the democratic process in Sierra Leone, but this article shows on what fragile ground this success was built.