Escaping Friction: Practices of Creating Non-Frictional Space in Sierra Leone

Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone is located in a contact zone where friction between the liberal and bureaucratic demands of the UN and local practices play out. Such friction unsettles the liberal mandate of the mission and creates problems for the people tasked to implement it. Zooming in on the spaces in which peacebuilding is negotiated in Sierra Leone this chapter examines how friction arises is in relation to the subjects it targets and how such friction is simultaneously sought avoided by the peacebuilders tasked to implement it. In the contact zone between liberal ideals and an unruly post-conflict setting, the political value of peacebuilding is worked out in practices that vacillate between engaging the Sierra Leoneans and escaping the friction that arises from such encounters. This is revealed in practices where the disruptive parts of civil society are excluded, where international peacebuilders take over the writing of government reports, where non-political peacebuilding projects are given priority and where peacebuilding gets framed in more and more depoliticized and technical terms. In this manner, peacebuilding in Sierra Leone becomes not so much a story of compliance, co-option or resistance, but one of avoiding confrontation between the political values of liberal peacebuilding and local authority structures. This happens by creating non-frictional spaces, where struggles are determined not by politics, but by practicality.