ABSTRACT
This quote comes from a discussion with unemployed men in the town of Waterloo near Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown. It presents just one of a multitude of possible examples of the problem of employability as it has been experienced in Sierra Leone since the early 2010s ‒ while hopes for future socio-economic improvement rapidly shifted in focus and direction: from the humanitarian aid and peacebuilding industry to private-sector foreign investment in export-oriented industrial mining and agriculture (see e.g. The Oakland Institute 2011; ALLAT 2013). In the quote above, the humanitarian aid and peacebuilding industry is represented in the remark about tailors and carpenters. The quote refers to past donor-funded vocational training programmes in the context of post-war peacebuilding after Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war (1991-2002). In order to provide alternative, that is, non-violent livelihood options, these fast-track programmes offered training for ex-combatants and other unemployed and presumably violence-prone people (mostly men) in only a few professions, most prominently tailoring and carpentry. The consequence has been a heavy oversupply of certain tradespeople who have met no matching amount of job opportunities and whose skills tend to lack far behind local standards, due to the brevity and theoretical rather than practical orientation of most donor-funded training courses (see e.g. Coulter 2009, 186-191; Peeters et al. 2009, 98-101). Furthermore, recent foreign direct investment (FDI) in export-oriented
industrial mining and agriculture has also failed to bring gainful formal
sector employment that would even come close to satisfying the demand for job opportunities: ‘Indeed, a few years down the line, concerns are emerging over the relatively limited number of jobs that directly accrue from these investments’ (Batmanglich and Enria 2014, 14). Although recent FDI inflows rendered Sierra Leone one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies in 2013 (in terms of gross domestic product, or GDP, growth)1 some estimates still see the country’s overall unemployment rate at about 70 per cent (see e.g. UNDP 2014). This number is shocking and also somewhat misleading. It clearly includes large numbers of people who are self-employed (such as traders, home-cooked food sellers, hairdressers, motorcycle-taxi drivers, car-wash boys, etc.) and/or those who labour without monetary pay (see also Peeters et al. 2009, 6; Batmanglich and Enria 2014, 10). The problem, as Sierra Leoneans often put it, is not a lack of work, but that a ‘real’ job is extremely hard to get – a ‘real’ job meaning formal employment with a regular and sufficient salary, possibly even health benefits, and, in consequence, some degree of material security. It remains far from certain that FDI will eventually deliver development
benefits to most Sierra Leoneans – and this uncertainty is by no means mainly a consequence of the recent Ebola epidemic, which can certainly be expected to scare off investors.2 Even well before Ebola, concerns were raised that environmental and social damages likely outweigh any potential benefits; that (paramilitary) police violence directed at protesters in FDI-affected communities was getting vastly out of proportion; and that this violence served to deter the articulation of legitimate grievances related to the consequences of large-scale land deals with foreign investors and to working conditions provided by foreign investors (see e.g. The Oakland Institute 2011; Welthungerhilfe 2012; Medico International et al. 2013; ALLAT 2013; Human Rights Watch 2014). The main concerns of this chapter, however, are neither FDI’s uncertain
development benefits nor intimidation and violence (see e.g. Millar 2015; Menzel 2015). Here, my aim is to draw attention to ideas and practices pertaining to (un)employment in Sierra Leone that appear to have undergone some significant changes over the last few years: from employment having to be provided, not least in order to keep dangerous young men – ex-combatants and the like – occupied and in check, to employment being a matter that each and every upstanding Sierra Leonean needs to become ready for, in order to partake in development and contribute to the country’s overall progress. While I strongly suspect that these changes are broadly felt across social and gender categories (though individual experiences certainly vary depending on one’s status and material circumstances), my experiences of them have mostly been with young urban men who desperately seek to escape socio-economic marginalization. This is the very class that used to be the focus of post-war peacebuilding
concerns. Based on data gathered during fieldwork in 2009, 2013 and 2014, it appears that there has been a noticeable shift from a more supply-oriented understanding of employment to demand-oriented employability. This shift is
reflected in the way marginalized young men approach their hopes and chances for individual socio-economic improvement. While this shift is certainly linked to FDI-related market demands, I expect that neither has it been ‘automatic’, without efforts made by interested actors, nor does it indicate inevitable evolutionary processes of ‘catching up’ to globalized trends and standards. Instead, I suggest that the shift from (un)employment to employability can be understood in terms of a localization of neoliberal norms that has been pushed by the Sierra Leone government as a component of its ‘politics of proper progress’ (my term). This specific type of development politics has provided the Sierra Leone government with opportunities to squarely place the blame for persistent disappointments on the ‘failure’ of common Sierra Leoneans to become ready for FDI-driven development. This contribution aims to begin making sense of the shift from (un)employment
to employability in Sierra Leone, by connecting it with the global diffusion of neoliberal policies across the Global North and South (see e.g. Brenner et al., 2010; Springer 2010). In light of the moral imperatives inherent in the shift to employability, I am particularly interested in the norms that accompany ‘neoliberalization’ (Brenner et al., 2010, 184) – or in the travels of neoliberal norms, for lack of a better term. However, as neoliberalism has become more a term of ‘disapprobation than of analysis’ (Dean 2010, 261), I need to be more precise. By ‘neoliberal norms’ I mean moral imperatives of individual responsibility, self-reliance and market-oriented self-optimization. In order to be able to imagine the travelling of neoliberal norms, I draw on
one particular idea of how transnational norm diffusion occurs: namely on Amitav Acharya’s influential concept of ‘localization’.3 The concept was introduced to correct prominent tendencies in the field of international relations (IR) that have depicted non-Western local actors, at national and subnational levels, as passive students of international norms brought to them by international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Alternatively, non-Western local actors have sometimes appeared as mute elements of a domestic environment into which transnational norms – such as respect for human rights and the natural environment, for example – become absorbed with higher or lower degrees of ease and acceptance (see Acharya 2004, 242-243). In a recent piece for International Studies Quarterly that called for no less than a new global IR agenda, Acharya emphatically affirmed the necessity of rethinking the mechanisms of norm diffusion. His concept of localization is meant to restore to local actors their oft-denied agency:
Though materially weak, these [local] actors cannot simply be dismissed as norm takers. Their pre-existing local ideas and norms do not entirely disappear because of some ‘civilizing’ impact of foreign norms, but are enmeshed into a broader hybrid normative matrix. They adapt and create norms in accordance with or to give expression to their own beliefs, values, and aspirations. They may do so to challenge their exclusion or
marginalization from the norm making processes at higher levels. They defend norms which are threatened by the hypocrisy of the major powers or the incompetence of global institutions.
