Trembling city: Policing Freetown’s war-peace transition
| Author | Peter Albrecht,Maya Mynster Christensen |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211068876 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211068876
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(4) 478 –495
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367211068876
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Trembling city: Policing
Freetown’s war-peace
transition
Peter Albrecht and
Maya Mynster Christensen
Abstract
While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions,
the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize
this notion of urban space to capture Freetown’s war-peace transition in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies
from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sierra Leone Police (SLP)
re-emerged with external support, seeking to compartmentalize and fixate Freetown through
a combination of force and negotiation. We use borders and bordering to understand policing
as attempts by both ex-combatants and the SLP to border in as well as out; defensively against
external interference and offensively to make territorial claims. By extension, it is tensions in
these practices between attempts to defend and harden borders, and at the same time, expand
and soften them that trigger a tremble. The city tremble was a reminder of the possibility of
war that Freetown very easily could return to. It also became a more general and inconspicuous
condition of the city as an inhabited space, where multiple and often incompatible and conflictual
spatial logics, strategies, and practices of policing clashed, overlapped and co-existed uneasily.
Keywords
ex-combatants, police, policing, borders, Sierra Leone, spatial strategies, transitions, urban
The co-existence of war and peace is accentuated in transitions out of long-term conflict
when violence is concentrated in specific sites and stability becomes more prevalent
(Björkdahl and Buckley-Ziestel, 2016: 2). This is especially noticeable in cities that are
integral to state consolidation, transformation, and erosion (Beall et al., 2013: 2065).
Their continued growth in size, density and inequality makes them spaces of evermore
Corresponding author:
Peter Albrecht, Danish Institute for International Studies, Østbanegade 117, 2100 Copenhagen Ø,
Denmark.
Email: paa@diis.dk
1068876CAC0010.1177/00108367211068876Cooperation and ConflictAlbrecht and Christensen
research-article2022
Article
Albrecht and Christensen 479
concentrated political and economic activity, as they encompass multiple actors with
competing visions of order and how to enforce it (Büscher, 2018: 194; Hills, 2014).
These dynamics are magnified and inherently spatial in war-peace transitions. What we
term ‘the trembling city’ emerges as different conflict parties settle in and try to control
and organize city spaces that they consider critical to their self-preservation and survival
(Elfversson et al., 2019: 83).
To understand how spatial strategies unfold in cities during war-peace transitions,
Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, provides important insight into tensions between (de)
territorialization and (de)stabilization that produce the trembling city through diverging
attempts to compartmentalize and fixate urban space. Freetown, a former British Crown
Colony, was shaped by considerable violence with different attempts to assert control
over and govern it during Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991–2002). These tensions became
increasingly prominent in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the city transitioned from an
environment ruined by violence and combat to precarious peace – a highly ambiguous
state of transition and transformation characterized by radical alterations in the position-
ing of security actors and by an increased blurring of war-peace divisions.
This article explores the clash of diverging strategies to order, govern and fixate the
space of Freetown during the war-peace transition.1 Exploring Freetown at this point in
time, before an unchallenged peace had been established, our aim is to unfold how dif-
ferent, often opposing, logics of making and managing order play out in urban space, that
is, policing understood as authoritative practices that establish order by distributing
places, names and functions (Ranciére, 1994: 173). As has been documented comprehen-
sively through ethnographic research during the last two decades, policing is exercised
by numerous actors, including state-sanctioned police forces as well as private and com-
munal groups such as vigilantes, ex-combatants, private security firms and traditional
leaders (Albrecht and Kyed, 2015; Buur and Jensen, 2004; Pratten and Sen, 2007).
Moreover, policing is relational and forms part of networks that collaborate and enrol
one another to constitute specific types of spatial organization and authority through
violent and non-violent means (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009). Building on these
insights, we analyse policing practices by international advisers, state security personnel
of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) and ex-combatants in the war-peace transition between
violent conflict entering the city in the late 1990s and the never fully realizable attempt
by any of these actors to monopolize the authority to enact their version of order.
With this analysis, we contribute to a growing body of scholarship on how conflict
dynamics and urban space intertwine and constitute one another (Björkdahl and
Buckley-Zistel, 2016; Elfversson et al., 2019). Established divisions within post-war
cities (Gusic, 2019), how the liberal peace travels and transforms as it is applied in post-
conflict spaces (Björkdahl and Gusic, 2013), and the organization and conduct of urban
warfare (Kaldor and Sassen, 2020) are among the themes covered. Based on these
debates on how urban space and war are mutually constituted, we contribute to better
understanding the dynamics of urban organization at the particularly volatile and
ambiguous moment of the war-peace transition. Combatants and emergent state institu-
tions sought to manifest themselves as authorities in a context of multiple claims to
monopolize, organize and govern the city’s spatial layout. A tremble emerged in this
transitory condition, as combatants settled to find shelter and make a living while the
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