Abstract
Over the past 20 years scholars have repeatedly highlighted the complex relationship between conflict, peace and economics. It is today accepted that economic factors at the global, regional, national and local levels can promote conflict in various ways and that economic factors are therefore central in establishing a sustainable post-conflict peace. However, while the scholarly literature includes much nuance regarding the precise nature of these complex relationships, practices of peacebuilding are often far less nuanced. Instead there is a tendency to pin the hopes of fragile post-conflict states on establishing a liberalized and supposedly peace-promoting economy and a worrying absence of grounded assessments of the impacts of such policies. This article argues that the resulting lack of clarity regarding the local impacts of such peacebuilding mechanisms contributes to continued unwarranted enthusiasm for marketization among policymakers and practitioners. This issue is addressed directly by exploring the destabilizing and potentially conflict-inducing impacts of one foreign direct investment (FDI) project in rural Sierra Leone. The dominance of liberal approaches to economic policy within peacebuilding has recently combined with a surge in large-scale FDI projects, often labelled as ‘land-grabs’, which can be interpreted as a direct embodiment of the liberal peace paradigm. While the liberal peace assumes that such projects will help by paying taxes, rebuilding state capacity and employing idle young males, the article illustrates that among local populations such projects can be experienced as deeply disruptive and potentially conflict-promoting. It therefore describes four specific mechanisms by which the project in this setting endangers Sierra Leone’s still precarious transition to peace. The article concludes with recommendations for peacebuilding theorists, policy advocates and practitioners trying to navigate the difficult waters of post-conflict peacebuilding by way of large-scale FDI and marketization in general.
Introduction
The term ‘liberal peace’ was originally applied a century ago to theories about conflict and peace between democratic and economically interdependent states (Helbich, 1967–68). While still deployed for this purpose today (Oneal & Russett, 1999, 2001), it is also used in post-conflict peacebuilding literature to refer to the mechanisms of conflict management within states as embodied in the institutions of democracy, free markets and the rule of law (Doyle, 2005). This is not really a break from tradition, as Wilsonian liberal peace assumed a close relationship between domestic political and economic liberalism and international peace and stability (Schmitz, 1987), but it demands more focus on the domestic dynamics of liberal peace and the cultural, social and political impacts of liberal marketization.
In recent literature, debate has raged over the specific function and value of liberal marketization (Oneal & Russett, 1999; Chandler, 2004; Doyle, 2005; Mac Ginty, 2008; Lidén, 2009; Richmond, 2009; Campbell, Chandler & Sabaratnam, 2011; Selby, 2013). While many scholars describe its significant ‘illiberal’ effects (Pugh, 2011; Laffey & Nadarajah, 2012), among policymakers the assumption remains that marketization contributes to sustainable peace (Selby, 2011: 19; Pugh, Cooper & Turner, 2011: 2). This reinforces the problem-solving, technocratic or tool-kit approaches to peacebuilding (De Waal, 2009: 100; Pugh, 2011: 308; Mac Ginty, 2012: 294) wherein projects previously applied in one setting are redeployed repeatedly by ‘expert’ peacebuilders hired for their ‘technical’ instead of their ‘contextual’ knowledge (Autesserre, 2014: 116). Such approaches assume that institutional mechanisms (including marketization) can be planned and administered to catalyze predictable peace-promoting experiences by creating meritocratic systems for the distribution of resources equally accessible to all participants.
However, dozens of studies have empirically illustrated the large disconnect between the expected effects of these interventions and local experiences of them (Richani, 2008; Mac Ginty, 2011; Kaag, Gaye & Kruis, 2011; Schneider, 2011; Burnod, Gingembre & Ratsialonana, 2013; Björkdahl & Höglund, 2013; Millar, van der Lijn & Verkoren, 2013; Menzel, 2015), driving concerns about the lack of ‘local ownership’ and ‘buy-in’ to peacebuilding mechanisms (Shaw, 2005; Franks & Richmond, 2008; Sending, 2009; Donais, 2009; Shaw, Waldorf & Hazan, 2010; Richmond, 2012; Millar, 2010, 2013; Richmond & Mac Ginty, 2013; Theidon, 2013). It has become clear, in short, that many peacebuilding interventions have little salience for local communities (for further discussion of ‘the local’ as a category of analysis, see Millar, 2014b: 82–84), fail to have predictable peace-promoting effects in post-conflict situations, and exacerbate as opposed to alleviating inequalities, and that the complexity of local social, political, economic and cultural dynamics often derail the best intentions of international interveners (De Coning, 2012; van der Lijn, 2013; Millar, 2014a, 2015a). But while scholars have discussed the ‘economics of war’ at macro and micro levels (Arnson & Zartman, 2005), and examined what might be termed the ‘economics of peace’ on the macro level (see contributions to Ballentine & Nitzschke, 2005), there has been little analysis of the economics of peace at the micro level.
The purpose of this article is, therefore, to answer two basic questions: (1) How are policies of marketization experienced in local settings? And (2) Do these policies promote local peace or aggravate local tensions? In short, the article explores the economic, social and political effects of liberal marketization. It does so by describing the experiences of individuals living within a 40,000-hectare bio-energy project negotiated with national and local elites and now empowered with a 50-year lease in the rural north of Sierra Leone. The article contributes empirical evidence regarding the assumption within the dominant peacebuilding approach that free-market reforms are one of the three pillars of peaceful society (Doyle, 2005), by presenting a case study of one of the primary mechanisms of that approach – foreign direct investment (FDI) (Doyle, 2000: 87) – and highlighting specifically its local economic, social and political effects in rural Sierra Leone. The goal is not to evaluate the liberal peace as a whole, to weigh the national impacts against the local, or to make a full assessment of the economic contributions (whether direct or indirect) of the FDI project, but to report the local social tensions that are evidently being exacerbated by the project and, thus, to contribute to the accumulating evidence regarding the negative impacts of the broader liberal peace agenda.
In what follows I will first briefly discuss the ‘war economies’ literature and the problems often identified with marketization policy. This section will also discuss the recent embodiment of the liberal peace in large-scale agricultural FDI projects and the concerns raised by scholars studying these contemporary ‘land grabs’. After this I will briefly explain the past and current situation in Sierra Leone, provide a description of my case study and review my research methodology. I will then present some of the voices of my informants from within the land-lease area of the bio-energy project which describe the various ways marketization has resulted – within the complicated local social, political and cultural dynamics – in increasing social tensions. These tensions are of four kinds: between communities, between the company and the local communities, between local youth left unemployed and youth from outside the land-lease area employed with the company, and between generations. The case clearly illuminates the unpredictable impacts of economic investments in settings with complex social structures, histories, relationships of power and political systems and the danger of assuming that economic investments occur in a vacuum free of such dynamics. Indeed, it illustrates exactly how such dynamics complicate and redirect the impacts of investment. The article concludes with a discussion of these findings and recommendations for theorists, policy advocates and practitioners of the liberal peace.
The economic element of conflict and the liberal peace solution
Over the past two decades, both the outbreak and duration of violent conflict have increasingly been linked to economic factors. At the global level, scholars have highlighted the conflict-promoting effects of access to international markets and new sources of wealth (Reno, 1996, 2002; Duffield, 1998; Keen, 1998; Kaldor, 1999), while at the national level many have studied the conflict-promoting impacts of the ‘resource curse’ (Ross, 2004, 2006; Olson & Fors, 2004; Fearon, 2005; Humphreys, 2005) and of economic as opposed to political motivations (Collier & Hoeffler, 1998; Collier, 2000). At the micro level too, scholars have noted the influence of economics on conflict, showing how the economic situation in local settings, a lack of basic ‘human security’, for example (Owen, 2004), incentivizes participation in violence and can drive individuals towards participation in armed groups (Peters & Richards, 1998; Brett & Specht, 2004; Kalyvas, 2006).
Collectively, this work undermined Cold War era ideas of conflict as purely political or ideological and switched focus onto what became known as ‘war economies’ (Berdal & Malone, 2000; Pugh, Cooper & Goodhand, 2004). Further, this trend coincided with a new focus on ‘failed states’ as sites of ‘fast-moving change’, and of ‘significant exogenous pressure’ (Mac Ginty & Sanghera, 2012: 6; see also Englebert & Tull, 2008; Branch & Cheeseman, 2008; Howard, 2010) in which ‘traumatized, dysfunctional, irrational, immature’ local actors fail to establish peace themselves (Sending, 2009: 14). In this way conceptions of economically motivated warfare merged with ideas of the failed state, and the apparent weakness of the local became justification for external intervention across an array of areas – political (democratization), economic (marketization) and legal (rule of law).
Within this framework marketization assumes that when markets are liberalized, land privatized, investment attracted and formal economic activity increased, the results will be peace- as opposed to conflict-promoting (Nitzschke & Studdard, 2005; Selby, 2011: 18). This is a very powerful argument in cases like Sierra Leone where economic factors and state weakness have been identified as root causes of the past conflict (Peters & Richards, 1998; Fanthorpe, 2001; Ballentine & Sherman, 2003: 10; Keen, 2005; Humphreys & Weinstein, 2008: 439), and where land is supposedly under-utilized and states are desperate to employ rural youth and ensure future tax receipts (Millar, 2015b,d). However, while some scholars have proposed economic reforms that could be sensitive to issues of conflict and peace (Pugh, Cooper & Turner, 2011; Pugh, Cooper & Goodhand, 2004: 226–234), the policies and practices of intervention largely fail to implement such sensitivity. Instead, packaged as one ‘pillar’ of the ‘liberal peace’ (Doyle, 2005), orthodox economic liberalism prevails (Selby, 2011), one of the key mechanisms of which today is large-scale agricultural FDI.
Such projects serve as ideal case studies through which to examine the impact of neo-liberal reform in post-conflict contexts. However, while there is now a large body of literature discussing the contemporary ‘land-grab’ phenomenon (White et al., 2012; Fairhead, Leach & Scoones, 2012; Mehta, Veldwisch & Franco, 2012; Margulis, McKeon & Borras, 2013; Wolford et al., 2013), analyses of the peace- or conflict-promoting effects of such projects are anecdotal and disconnected from the broader peace studies literature (see Peters, 2004; De Schutter, 2011: 269; Margulis, McKeon & Borras, 2013: 12; Oya, 2013: 1536; Porro & Neto, 2014). In short, and echoing Edelman (2013: 494), understanding the peace- or conflict-promoting dynamics of such projects requires an in-depth approach which explores local perceptions, understandings and experiences. The data presented here come from a larger project designed to provide exactly that: to explore beyond the rhetoric and understand the experience of living with a liberal peace project.
War and liberal economic peacebuilding in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone’s conflict was not a classic ‘civil’ war between a consolidated government and an armed rebellion. It was often confused and was generally characterized by the weakness of the state and a great deal of violence towards civilians, including child soldiering, amputations, sexual violation, death and displacement (see Shepler, 2004; Park, 2006; Bolten, 2012). As described above, many have noted the economic factors influencing the conflict, with a particular focus often put on the presence of alluvial diamonds (Hirsch, 2001) and on the poverty experienced by youth which left many with few options but to pick up arms (Peters & Richards, 1998; Shaw, 2010). These economic dynamics combined with and further fuelled complex social, cultural and political factors to initiate, promote and sustain the conflict in Sierra Leone (Richards, 1996; Reno, 1997; Zach-Williams, 1999).
However, while the conflict was sustained in many ways by economic factors, it also created substantial economic problems. Damage wrought to schools, roads, bridges, markets and other infrastructure during the war has had significant macro-economic effects. A generation of young people struggle to finish secondary school while much of the population is illiterate, foreign corporations have left the country and have been slow to return, and the tax receipts of the state have been minimal, resisted both by the informal structure of the remaining economy and by individual workers in the formal economy who see little reason to trust the state. In short, the prewar inequality and wartime poverty have ‘continued unabated since the war ended in 2002’ (Shaw, 2010: 111).
It is because of ongoing economic deprivation that economic needs have often trumped local demands for reconciliation (Millar, 2012), justice (Millar, 2011), or healing (Millar, 2010) and why ‘healing was sought not in therapy but in things. Not through words, but deeds’ (Jackson, 2004: 71). This is also why the current government has prioritized economic development and agriculture to tackle high youth unemployment. As widely recognized, both the current Koroma administration (2007–17) and the prior Kabbah administration (2002–07) have prioritized FDI-led development and implemented robust privatization strategies and pro-business policies to achieve this end (Keili, 2009). A primary goal has been to attract ‘export oriented agribusiness’ (Menzel, 2015: 6) and it is widely assumed that the private sector will play a key role in ‘economic growth, providing jobs, and creating wealth’ (Nnadozie & Abdulmelik, 2009: 150). The FDI project examined here is one example of the government’s successful courtship of foreign capital, and is, therefore, an ideal case study by which to examine the micro-impacts of a liberal peace project.
This project is a 40,000-hectare bio-ethanol plantation in the rural north, including within its land-lease area dozens of villages and approximately 25,000 people, which received over €250 million in funding from development banks and claims to be sensitive to local social, economic and cultural characteristics. For example, while the project has planted 10,000 hectares of sugar cane, at the time of the fieldwork it also planned to contribute $3 million to the local economy annually over the next 50 years. This includes salaries for 2,000 local employees, payments of $3.20 to land-owning families for each acre leased, and $1.80 per acre to be shared among three different government bodies. These amounts were agreed in negotiation with the national Ministry of Agriculture, mirror similar projects in other areas of the country (Menzel, 2015: 12), and did not themselves initially cause problems as local people had little way to evaluate the cash value of their land or the real value of $3.20 (for additional discussion of these issues see Millar, 2015d: 1708–1709). In addition, the company has established a number of targets for improving local education, healthcare, food security and environmental protection, to be assessed by an in-house monitoring programme, as required by the funding arrangements. The company claims, therefore, that its project will have socially, economically and environmentally responsible impacts.
Further, because the company will only be planting sugar cane on one quarter of the land leased, no local villages and almost no residents were forced to relocate. However, as the traditional farming lands of many villages have been affected due to the construction of wide dirt roads, irrigation infrastructure and the ‘pivots’ on which sugar cane will grow, traditional and well-established farming routines have been greatly disrupted. In response the company assists in planting, cultivating and harvesting rice for the first three years of the project and has developed a farmer education program to disseminate more efficient farming practices. After the first three years of the project in the various phased development areas, it is therefore assumed that each village will be able to continue with these new techniques and re-establish its own food security. This particular project is a perfect case study through which to examine the local socio-economic impacts of the liberal peacebuilding approach; it is a private corporation, claiming to have positive social effects, funded by the international community, and attempting to operate in a complex post-conflict environment in West Africa.
I spent from April to September 2012 and November and December 2013 in Sierra Leone examining local people’s perceptions, understandings and experiences of the project and its impacts. In 2012 I first conducted six weeks of participant observation with the company, observing its practices and its interactions with local communities, while assisting with its social and economic monitoring programme. I then conducted 55 semi-structured interviews in 2012 and a further 60 in 2013 in 12 villages, purposefully sampling a diverse range of men and women, young and old, land-owning and non-landowning families. The majority of interviewees were farmers and some were traders, although a handful of the men were employed with the project itself as field hands and security personnel. The vast majority were illiterate and spoke only Temne, while two spoke English and three spoke Krio.
As I have described elsewhere (Millar, 2010, 2014b), extended fieldwork and semi-structured interviews are useful ways to explore these issues among local populations. They allow the interviewee and a trusted research assistant (serving also as translator) to develop a rapport with the elders in each village and to spend time sitting on porches or being shown the village farms, with none of the formality of written surveys or distraction of digital technologies. Interviewees are informed and invited to participate in the project and then have hours or even days to decide whether or not to talk with the interviewer, on their own porch or in their own parlour. This methodology is no more prone to misinformation than surveys or elite interviews – as all data are coded and triangulated during analysis – and so provides equally valid and rigorous research and many substantial advantages as a means to assess and understand local people’s perceptions and experiences. The data collected through interviews, when analysed alongside my field notes and observations, provide great insight into both the interaction of the company with the local people and the various ways that this particular project is contributing to emerging conflict dynamics. In what follows all interviewees are identified by pseudonyms.
Micro-impacts of a liberal peace project
As noted above, many scholars have discussed the divide between the theory and experience of post-conflict peacebuilding. However, while critiques of the ‘marketization’ approach usually highlight its illiberal effects, most research – whether critical or not – tends to study its macro-impacts. This study, alternatively, directly examines the micro-impacts. As with any case study, this demands that the reader have some knowledge of the local environment. It is important to understand, for example, that the economic situation within the project’s land-lease area is extremely precarious. As is true for most of rural Sierra Leone, the villages within the land-lease area are quite poor and survive through subsistence agriculture. There are few signs of wealth and most houses are constructed of mud blocks and thatched roofs, with small round covered huts to the rear of the house serving as kitchens.
Each village occupies a space structured socially, economically and politically by customary patterns of patron–client relationships and balances of reciprocal responsibility, wherein the big-men (the village head-man, the elders, the chief) protect and financially assist their clients, who, in turn, provide labour and support (Shaw, 2002: 256; Jackson, 2004: 47). This patron–client system is supported by the autochthonous system of local power, politics and status, wherein only ‘sons of the soil’ can claim ownership and decision-making authority in the community (Fanthorpe, 2001: 383). Customarily such status can only be claimed by those who are descendants of the original settlers of the village. All others generally remain ‘strangers’, even if in residence for decades or generations (Dorjahn & Fyfe, 1962). However, while land-owning families may receive some small payment from ‘stranger’ families in exchange for land access, these dynamics have not historically led to large distinctions in wealth between families as the reciprocal nature of the patron–client relationship ensured that such payments were minimal or even symbolic.
However, the arrival of the company, and the resources it can bring to bear, have placed new strains on these relationships and on the customary systems of conflict management. In what follows I will describe four different forms of conflict either inspired or aggravated by the arrival of the company: those between families or communities, between the company and the local communities, between unemployed youth from inside the land-lease area and employed youth from elsewhere, and between generations. As I will highlight, the latter two are of great concern for the long-term sustainability of peace in Sierra Leone.
Conflict between families and villages
First, there are new conflicts emerging between families and villages forced to reify previously amorphous land boundaries which now quite suddenly have significant economic, social and political implications. The company demands that all villages participate in mapping the borders of their land and sign an agreement with neighbouring villages. These borders are then used to establish permanent title and determine the value of land-lease payments to each village. This creates a number of complicated problems. The first issue is related to the shifting location and form of authority from the paramount chief as the traditional custodian of the land – holding the memory of all land deals and use rights – to the central government and written deeds, thus highlighting the social and political implications of nominally economic decisions. As the customary land tenure system included the regular renegotiation of land rights between communities, there was previously little reason for conflicts between villages over small parcels of land. However, as the location and form of authority have shifted due to the company’s demand for permanent titling in order to carry out its land-lease contracting and payment system (see Millar, 2015b: 13–14), the malleability of the system has been lost and neighbouring villages are newly incentivized to fight for land that was previously considered marginal. During my research a number of villages were engaged in such intercommunity conflicts, so far nonviolently.
Second, where previously land was largely valued for its use, families and communities now feel that they must defend their claims to this newly monetized resource. When asked if this new valuation of the land would cause land conflicts to increase, for example, John, a 38-year-old member of one of two families with a history of land disputes told us, ‘well, I will say so, because [the company] came and say that the one [family] […] should pull the money from the bank, and if they pull it, the other [family] will not get it. That is where the conflicts increase.’ Similarly, Pa Burehma, a 79-year-old elder and retired farmer, described how people fight over the money, and argued that he himself had been excluded from the payments in his ancestral village; as he said, ‘I have [property] there, but since I am living here, when [the company] bring the money [to his ancestral village], before I leave here and go there […] they have already shared the money’. He had been excluded from the payment because he now lives in another village.
And finally, there is also concern that landowning and ‘stranger’ families will come into conflict. The land-lease payments are distributed to elder males of landowning families, but some villages are populated predominantly by stranger families who have no say in decisions regarding whether to lease the land and receive very little in the way of benefits from the lease. Iba, for example, a 50-year-old farmer and member of a stranger family, noted that ‘we here have no right, we have nothing we can say here’, while Foray, a 41-year-old farmer, argued that ‘we the strangers […] we don’t have a way […] except we sit and watch what they will arrange for us’. Others said that only those who are from landowning families are employed by the company, because jobs too are controlled by the landowning families. Hence, stranger families are generally excluded from the land-lease payments and the employment opportunities brought by the company. Indeed, as described by a 36-year-old ‘stranger’ named Christopher, some entire villages are disempowered in this way. As he said: we are under the people of [a neighbouring village], it is the people of [that village] that have this land […] When they pay the ones over there, they don’t give us their money […] So this is what will bring the problem between we and them.
Conflict between the communities and the company
The next potential conflict-promoting effect emerges between the communities and the company. Already in early 2012 there were deaths on mining properties in the region when police were brought in to quell labour protests. The frustration I witnessed in both 2012 and 2013 made it very clear that such events could soon be repeated within the land-lease area. Dissatisfied with the salaries received from the company, many talked of strikes and protests; ‘if that is the way it will continue,’ said 37-year-old Arama, ‘we will strike, we will sit and we will just not work’. Others spoke openly of the terrible conditions they lived in while trying desperately to get a job with the company, and how disgruntled this made them feel about the entire process.
Indeed, it is indicative of the desperation of youth that even those well aware of the complaints of their compatriots regarding the low pay and bad employment conditions within the company were still hoping to gain any employment possible. Peter, a 26-year-old from the southern town of Bo, described how ‘some men end up selling their trousers, selling their shoes, selling half-half [small] things […] even to eat for the day is not easy, it is not an easy task to survive’. Such young men, scores of whom waited outside the company’s training facility, lived in desperate conditions far away from home, attempting to secure employment with the company. But many argue that if you don’t have sababu in the local community (connections or influence) you have no chance of gaining employment. For the thousands of youth (whether local or not) who will never gain jobs, the project was becoming a focus of aggressive energies. Employment was one of the promises the company made, but it is outside the reach of many who feel they most need it.
Indeed, before the Ebola crisis, patience seemed already to be wearing thin. Many of my interviewees in 2012, including Pa Abu, a 75-year-old elder, were of the opinion that the youth ‘will wait for now’, while the company is still new to the area and is ‘trying for the work’. However, many were concerned about the tension of continually waiting for a better time. When I asked her what the youth would do if the situation did not improve, Fobi, a 65-year-old mother of 13, simply said that ‘if they don’t change […] we know what we will do’, and when I asked her to explain what this meant she said that they would take their land back, ‘because they just rent it to them. They do not sell it to them.’
On one particularly hot day I was interviewing a young man about these issues and his neighbour, sitting on his own porch a few metres away, kept interjecting that the company treated them like slaves, that the South African managers had no respect for Sierra Leoneans, and that the young men would only take so much, highlighting the social as well as economic dynamics at play. While interviewees rarely came out and directly stated that violence was imminent, in these more unguarded moments it became clear that many considered violence against the company a very real possibility. On another such day in 2013, I sat on another porch with a group of 12 or 15 in a village within viewing distance of the company’s new ethanol plant. Similar to the young man above, when I asked about these tensions I was told that plans are being made. If the company does not fulfil its promises, the young men ‘will have their response’.
Throughout the project this opinion was prevalent; if the company did not provide good things to the communities then they would take back the land – but of course, the communities did not legally have that option. Some spoke of outright violence against the company, and between my visits in 2012 and 2013 a number of protests erupted and were subsequently suppressed by police. A few violent attacks had also occurred on company property and in early 2014 at least one pivot was burned and a young man was arrested and sentenced to prison (reportedly for ten years). Again, while these tensions do not always produce violent events, there is little doubt that the project is having conflict-promoting effects as local communities struggle to respond to what they see as abandoned promises.
Conflict between unemployed local youth and employed non-local youth
The third kind of conflict is between local youth left unemployed by the company and youth with more formal education and training employed from outside the area. These conflicts illustrate the emergent nature of the dynamics initiated by the project, as they were not evident during my six months of fieldwork in 2012 but were mentioned frequently by interviewees just 15 months later in 2013. This problem emerged when local dissatisfaction with the employment opportunities provided by the company was exacerbated as the project transitioned from work requiring primarily manual labour (clearing pivots, constructing roads, laying irrigation pipe, etc.) towards work requiring skilled labour (driving vehicles, monitoring stocks and supplies, processing ethanol). Company staff interviewed in 2013 argued that they had to hire from outside the area for such positions as local youth are generally illiterate and experienced only with manual labour while even company drivers and security guards must be able to keep detailed records in logbooks.
During my visit in 2013 there was particular tension regarding the security personnel as the company had hired a firm employing guards from outside the land-lease area for positions local men had earlier been employed to perform around company facilities. But the company claimed that it had experienced unsustainable losses due to theft and that it had evidence that locals were to blame (and had fired a number of men). As a result, the company no longer trusted local men to serve as security guards. They argued that hiring guards from outside the area would decrease theft (particularly of petrol). Local youth I interviewed, however, argued that it was men employed from outside the area who were stealing the fuel and that only those from the local area were incentivized to avoid theft and to support the company because it was to their area that the benefits would accrue. The company, however, believed that local connections and knowledge provided the opportunity for theft, and was attempting to hire guards free of local associations and social pressures.
This dynamic was mirrored to some extent in the case of drivers. Many local youth felt that this was a job they could perform. They understood that working in the company offices required literacy or computer skills, but many had experience as drivers, had trained in the post-conflict period for that profession, or had been taxi drivers in Freetown. But by 2013 the company had turned to youth from outside the area for this service also. Company staff informed me that past drivers were considered primary actors in the theft of fuel and great effort was being put into regulating and disciplining fuel use. As a result, drivers needed not only to be qualified to drive, but to be able to take copious records: who they took where, at what time, for what purpose, and how much fuel was consumed. While the company therefore felt it had no option but to hire youth from outside the area to fill this role, local youth felt heavily aggrieved by what they saw as actions directly counter to their own interests and to promises made by the company.
These social tensions are manifest in incidents of aggression between unemployed village youth and employed youth from outside the project area at locations where the two came into contact, such as on pivots, around villages during lunch breaks, or outside major company facilities where those seeking employment came into regular contact with security guards. There had, by 2013, been little effort to blunt the potential for such interactions to spark violence or to train guards to avoid confrontation, and they acted to enforce order in a manner more reminiscent of plantation colonialism than of an international development project. Security guards regularly detained local people who came onto pivot sites, told local people that they no longer ‘owned the land’ (something I too was told by security guards within the land-lease area), and treated them generally as inferior village people (which is not at all unusual in urban/rural dynamics in Sierra Leone). The ongoing thefts appeared to be producing a siege mentality among project staff, which was in turn incentivizing actions which deepened social divisions and enhanced tensions.
In short, this is another way the intervention of the company and the opportunities it brings are generating unexpected and unpredictable social tensions within the land-lease area. In this case the tension is regularly felt among young males under extreme social pressure to gain employment and to support their families. They believe the company has failed to follow through on promises of employment for local youth and, because of this, their anger is often targeted at those who are accruing what they see as undeserved benefits. On the other side, youth employed from outside the land-lease area seem intent on exhibiting their superiority and conspicuously spending their wages in local communities. They regularly flaunt their status and power in the face of local youth who naturally feel frustration at being excluded.
Conflict between generations
Finally, while a casual reader may not be too concerned about tensions between generations, in the case of Sierra Leone this may be the most worrying dynamic of the four. As has often been described, the war was fostered by the failure of the patron–client system, wherein members of the older generation failed in their traditional responsibility to provide resources to young males who then had no reason to uphold their own responsibilities as clients (Zach-Williams, 1999: 147; Hoffman, 2003: 296; Boersch-Supan, 2012). The result was that youth were forced to find opportunities where they could, participating in pillage, theft and acts of violence in a conflict driven by a complex combination of economic imperatives and ideological motivations (Millar, 2012). The purpose of marketization, as noted earlier, is to settle such dynamics, to ‘rationalize and align individual interests with social interests through markets’ which supposedly ensures ‘that the warlike forces of traditional autocracies will evolve into extinction’ (Doyle, 2012: 8).
But in many ways the sudden influx of money, and particularly the pattern of its distribution within communities, is spurring the conflict-promoting dynamics that free markets are meant to negate (see Millar, 2015d). The land-lease payments, for example, are paid to and controlled by elder males (the senior surviving male family members), and neither women nor young men have influence over decisions regarding that money (for analysis of the gender implications, see Millar, 2015c). Most of the young men I interviewed did not even know how this money was spent. As Alimamy, a 42-year-old trader but not yet an elder in his village, described, ‘they will not give us […] Our elders, our people that are before us […] have not shown us those things.’ Indeed, even in cases where younger men reported that they were given some of this money, by the time it was divided among large extended families the amount provided was marginal. As 35-year-old Alima described: When they bring the money they will share it there. The ones over there [that family] will have their own, and the ones here [our family] will get their own. So the one that they are going to share among themselves here will be 50,000 for a single person. well we are young men, and [the company] went to the elders. So they, the elders, agreed with them […] we the young men, we would not have accepted them, because we know what is going on. But when they met the elders, since they have agreed with them, we just have to stay behind. When they are sharing, the old people say, they are now going [dying], and they are not looking for what is coming later. But our brothers and our husbands are thinking of our future, the young ones, because the old people say they are now on their way to the grave […] so the youths thought they are trying to imprison the future of those that are coming up.
In the worst cases, young men were actually afraid to claim the economic benefits of the project to which they thought themselves entitled. Idrissa, a 26-year-old male member of a landowning family in a village within the land-lease area, a company employee during the summer of 2012, lamented that he had not been given any share of the land payments. His father had died and so Idrissa was now the eldest male, but as he said: I am afraid for my life because if I stand for that [money], if I [fight] for that, I am afraid for my life. They will kill me […] if I talk they will say, ‘this young boy, what is he after?’
Time and time again I heard young people, men and women, argue that the elders had made the decision to accept the project but shared few of the benefits, that the youth have lost their land for 50 years but had no power to affect decisions regarding the company, and that they felt disempowered both by the company and by their own elders. This is of particular concern because exactly such dynamics spurred the decade-long civil war – the youth were excluded from decisionmaking and from the benefits of their own labour. While economic liberalization is supposed to empower individuals and provide market-based solutions to distributional conflict, in the case of this FDI project, implemented and experienced within a complex local social and political context, the result has been compounded inequality. Those who were empowered before the war are those being empowered after the war. The dynamics that fuelled the conflict itself are being recreated, subsidized this time by international development banks.
Conclusion and recommendations
The purpose of this article has been to examine the micro-impacts of a liberal peace project. While the marketization ‘pillar’ of the liberal peace is theorized to contribute to a sustainable peace, the actual impacts of this project in this setting have promoted social conflict at the local level. The bio-energy project examined is causing significant social tensions of four kinds and two of those – between the local unemployed youth and employed youth from outside the area and between the generations – have great potential to lead to violence. Indeed, the latter recreates the social dynamics that fostered the civil war. Further complicating matters is the fact that these four dynamics are interconnected in varying ways, compounding the tensions. Youth who feel sold-out by their elders and angry at the company itself, who are then the subject of some petty bullying by security guards from outside the land-lease area, may respond aggressively and spark violence which may not have happened had any of the three dynamics occurred in isolation.
It is this complexity which seems to have thoroughly escaped the company and its staff. It makes good business sense to establish village boundaries and require formal land-title before agreeing land-lease terms, to engage only with and make payments to the elder males who control the land, and to hire literate drivers who can keep log-books. Each decision is rational in isolation and is defended as such by project staff. But the local impacts of such decisions, interacting fluidly in a complex social context often misunderstood by external actors, have produced troubling effects. These findings echo many others regarding the conflict-promoting effects of liberal economic policies in Brazil (Alston, Libecap & Mueller, 1999), around Africa (Peters, 2004), and in a broader context (Lipschutz, 1998). Similar problems are also found in post-conflict societies specifically, such as in Paris’s (2004) original warnings about rapid liberalizations, as well as recent case studies in Colombia (Richani, 2008), Madagascar (Burnod, Gingembre & Ratsialonana, 2013), Cambodia (Schneider, 2011), Sierra Leone (Menzel, 2015) and Senegal (Kaag, Gaye & Kruis, 2011).
Based on my own findings and these earlier studies, I want to make three recommendations. First, theorists and scholars of the liberal peace, and peacebuilding in general, must take more seriously the responsibility to question their implicit assumptions regarding the processes they advocate. Today peacebuilding processes are administered primarily in societies socially and culturally unlike those in which peacebuilding theory is formulated. As a result, the effects of institutional solutions do not mirror those in Western settings, but instead emerge in the interaction between local sociocultural processes and imported mechanisms; they are hybrid in form and, therefore, largely unpredictable (Millar, 2014a). Recent efforts by scholars to develop more nuanced conceptions of the interaction between the global and local, characterized by the hybridity and friction literatures (Richmond, 2009; Mac Ginty, 2011; Björkdahl & Höglund, 2013; Millar, 2014a; Millar, van der Lijn & Verkoren, 2013; Björkdahl et al., 2016), move us closer to understanding complexity and unpredictability, but must be further developed and move from considering largely hybrid institutions to engage much more forcefully with norms, concepts and ideas – the foundations of local expectations and experiences of peacebuilding interventions.
Further, if we accept that free market economics will not be universally applicable and may even have negative effects, then policymakers and practitioners too must be more open to alternative economic models. This includes local or hybrid economic systems or, at the very least, more recognition that local economic, social and cultural factors will influence local experiences of imported models. Unfortunately, as Jan Selby has argued, the ‘liberal orthodoxy’ is ‘treated as so compellingly commonsensical’ as to be ‘almost beyond the reach of questioning’ (2011: 19). Indeed, even liberal peace advocates recognize that in the post-Cold War period liberal economic policy became the ‘standard prescription of the IMF’ irrespective of context (Doyle, 2000: 86). My findings, however, require that practitioners and policymakers be far more contextually sensitive in project planning; also, funders, such as the UN, World Bank, EU, and USA, should require that contextual as well as technical knowledge be a key requirement for practitioners.
And finally, evaluators and third-party monitors of peacebuilding interventions – those related both to political and economic liberality – must conduct more in-depth evaluations, be far more aware of the local impacts of peacebuilding processes, and be more sensitive to their conflict-promoting potential. This requires evaluators to be contextually knowledgeable and to spend significant time in the setting of intervention, as opposed to conducting evaluations largely based on desk research and very short ‘field trips’ to the project as is today the norm. Peacebuilding as a field, both academic and professional, must fully incorporate a conscious effort to analyze local experiences of international intervention (see Millar, 2014b). Only then can the international community become more aware of its impact on local people and so become more able to secure a sustainable peace.
There are many questions my data cannot answer and which this article has not addressed. I cannot speak directly to the connection between local tensions and national-level political violence, to the balance between those tensions and the potential macro-level benefits of marketization, to the possible indirect or ‘trickle down’ benefits to the local economy, or to the counterfactual: about how these villages would be coping if the FDI project had not come. These are the limitations of an in-depth case study designed specifically to explore local perceptions, understandings and experiences. However, these limitations also point to the need for much more research into exactly these topics, for longitudinal comparative studies of local experiences in post-conflict states, and for more funding and support for ethnographic analyses of peacebuilding interventions. The data here presented are indicative, but they are echoed in dozens of recent studies in complex post-conflict contexts that, together, highlight the questionable claims of the marketization ‘pillar’ of the liberal peace.