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The West Side Boys: military navigation in the Sierra Leone civil war*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2008

Mats Utas  and
Magnus Jörgel
Mats Utas*
Affiliation:
Nordic Africa Institute, PO Box 1703, SE-741 47 Uppsala, Sweden
Magnus Jörgel*
Affiliation:
Nordic Africa Institute, PO Box 1703, SE-741 47 Uppsala, Sweden
*
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The West Side Boys were one of several military actors in the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991–2002). A splinter group of the army, the WSB emerged as a key player in 1999–2000. In most Western media accounts, the WSB appeared as nothing more than renegade, anarchistic bandits, devoid of any trace of long-term goals. By contrast, this article aims to explain how the WSB used well-devised military techniques in the field; how their history and military training within the Sierra Leone army shaped their notion of themselves and their view of what they were trying to accomplish; and, finally, how military commanders and politicians employed the WSB as a tactical instrument in a larger map of military and political strategies. It is in the politics of a military economy that this article is grounded.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 487 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Our sources are largely interviews with the West Side Boys (WSB) commanders and rank and file soldiers, conducted in Freetown during 2005–6. As far as we know, this is one of the very rare occasions when junior and mid-level WSB commanders and some leaders had the chance to tell part of their story in an environment of safety and relative trust. The article has benefited from discussions at the Ethnologisches Seminar, University of Basel, Centre for Development and Security Analysis (CEDSA) in Freetown, Swedish National Defence College, and Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. We thank Danny Hoffman, Morten Böås, Gavin Simpson and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Mats Utas has benefited from generous funding provided by Sida and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

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