Rebel greed and postcolonial governance: neoliberal accountings of the past within transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone

Emerging from recent academic debates, the ‘neoliberal critique’ of human rights demonstrates that the rise of contemporary human rights movement is tangled up with the global turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s. Advocates of this critique argue, albeit in different ways, that the movement’s focus on the bodily integrity rights of individuals has superseded a more expansive conception of social injustice with a moral economy suited to the neoliberalism’s own market individualism. The movement’s focus on suffering bodies, the critique goes, has often diverted critical attentions away from the structural violences of neoliberalism and the role in war, violence and conflict. By exploring transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone, this paper complicates this picture. Rather than simply excluding socioeconomic issues in their accountings of the past, both the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) did draw on ‘economic’ discourses, variously using the concepts of ‘greed’, ‘corruption’ and ‘governance’ to explain the broader context of the violations they were concerned with. Nevertheless, by critically tracing how these discourses were mobilised, this paper shows that by turning to ‘greed’ and ‘governance’ neither the SLTRC nor the SCSL challenged the neoliberal vision of human rights. Rather, each process produced a narrative about Sierra Leone’s civil war that not only effaced the deleterious role of neoliberal policies in the conflict but also reproduced neoliberal ideas both about conflict and the economy. Reflecting on this problem, I suggest that if the human rights movement hopes to escape from its neoliberal constraints, the Sierra Leonean case demonstrates that it is not enough to simply ‘include’ socioeconomic issues within human rights processes; more attention needs to be paid to how the broader context of violence is conceived. Being more alive to the socio-political perspectives from which knowledge about the past is constructed, I conclude, will be critical if the movement is to adequately respond to the neoliberal critique.<p></p>