ABSTRACT
Security sector reform (SSR) occurred in an unexpected and relatively unplanned manner, with the UK and the UN involved in both significant fighting and re-establishing functioning security services. It is not possible to separate how SSR evolved in Sierra Leone from the initial circumstances under which the UK intervened militarily in the country around the turn of the millennium. The implication of exploring process (hybridization) rather than the condition (hybridity) is that to understand the productive effects of SSR, we must take seriously the logic of SSR as a set of programs that consist of innumerable interactions at an endless number of locations during which effects and new meanings are produced. A persistent focus in SSR discourse on a central government as the ideal and primary partner in the provision of security disregards the fundamental micro-struggles that “extremely localized” claims to authority constitute and the sources of authority that enable them.
