Gendering Conflict and Peace-Building in Sierra Leone

Abstract

On 23 March 1991 Sierra Leone entered into one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked the country from its bases in neighbouring Liberia.1 There were several factions in this conflict: the RUF, the West Side Boys, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council military junta, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Sierra Leone, the Special Forces from the Liberian warlord, Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (on loan to the RUF) and the Civil Defence Forces (a collection of ethnic-based anti-RUF local militia groups).2 Most of these factions had substantial number of women, both combatants and captive camp workers, who, like their male counterparts, were responsible for the perpetration of various forms of war crimes and crimes against humanity.3 Apart from the maimings, mass killings and indiscriminate destruction of properties that occurred, societal gender relations and the thought processes that regulated them were also compromised. The participation of women in the conflict had raised troubling questions. How different were the roles of women in the rebel factions? Where are these former women combatants positioned in the post-conflict peace-building processes? How are they being analysed and understood within the Sierra Leonean society, and in the competing theorization of gender, conflict and peace-building? After a decade of relative peace in the country, women of all classes and wartime identities are still struggling to create an alternative framework for the stabilization of gender relations in peace-building.