International records / OpenAlex research

A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the destruction of Sierra Leone, by Lansana Gberie

Recently, there has been a string of publications seeking to explain the cause of the 11-year-long bloody civil war in Sierra Leone. A number of the authors and contributors are Sierra Leoneans who, as insiders, bring ‘a nationalist perspective’. While this constitutes an invaluable contribution to the debate of state, conflict and conflict resolution, it can (in some cases) produce a problem of ‘mechanistic praxis’: we were there, so we (alone) have the knowledge to chronicle the course of events. Methodologically, this approach fails to accede to the caveat of Robert Merton about the potenti…