Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how police reform in Sierra Leone was pursued as a technical state-building process, and how it by extension ignored the fundamentally hybrid and deeply political process that transforming a justice and security field is. Therefore, a hybrid order was reproduced, not eradicated.

Paper long abstract:

At the heart of international support to building legitimacy of the Sierra Leone state in the late 1990s was the intention 'for the police to resume primacy in maintaining law and order'. Sierra Leone was emerging from war and in the minds of international supporters of state-building this meant building police stations, writing codes of conduct and training police officers. However, while police reform was cast in technical terms, it was a fundamentally political project that entailed re-composing the justice and security field and the distribution of authority within it. Because this political dimension was misrecognized, police reform reproduced rather than over-turned the powers of traditional leaders in rural Sierra Leone that are drawn from their autochthon status and secret society membership as well as legal status in the country's constitution. It was in this capacity that they came to play a key role in appropriating and at times rejecting police reform components, thereby stifling the state-building effort. The political powers of traditional leaders were not fully recognized to be important factors in reform efforts, and therefore the hybrid order that they embody was reproduced. This argument is explored by comparing how police reform is constituted to how order is conceptualized and enforced in Motema Division of Eastern Kono, Sierra Leone. The paper explores the key community policing institution of the reform effort, namely Local Policing Partnership Boards. It shows how the introduction of Partnership Boards consolidated the position of chiefs who became the main interlocutors in their establishment.