ABSTRACT
Civil wars in Africa have generally been interpreted by some media commentators and political analysts as ethnic or tribal wars, such as the wars in Somalia, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Liberia. This chapter explores how strategic policy failures and the use of Sierra Leone’s territory as a military base for ECOWAS Cease-fire Monitoring Group’s (ECOMOG) peacekeeping operations in Liberia provided the spark that ignited the fundamental causes of the outbreak of the civil war. The brutal violence in civil wars such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda and Somalia have been interpreted by some analysts as ‘new barbarism’ i.e. ‘violence driven by environmental and cultural imperatives’. The political economy of violence and the ‘falamakata’ sociology to some extent provide an understanding of the irrationality of the horrifying acts of brutality for which the civil war in Sierra Leone has become internationally infamous.
