Alex Neads: Accountability, cohesion and reforming the military institution in Sierra Leone

Following Sierra Leone’s brutal Rebel War, the British government embarked upon a comprehensive programme of Security Sector Reform in Sierra Leone. Central to this was the British-led International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT), which sought to transform Sierra Leone’s rag-tag, predatory and coup-prone collection of militias into a cohesive, capable, and accountable armed force. This process sought to address a fundamental tension between civilian control and military potency which lies at the heart of democratic civil-military relations. Scholarly approaches to democratic civil-military relations have accounted for this tension variously; through reference to military demographics, professionalization and training, or direct political control of the armed forces. Instead, this paper argues that by focusing on the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces (RSLAF) as a bureaucratic institution, IMATT attempted to underpin both democratic accountability and sustainable military cohesion as mutually supporting facets of the military institution. Yet while the end result may have been a relatively accountable and cohesive armed force, this process fell short of professionalization in the western sense; indeed the process of institutional consolidation in the RSLAF proved to be inherently political.