Sierra Leone, a West African country, experienced a brutal civil war between 1991 and 2002, which saw the death of more than 50,000 people and the displacement of 2.5 million people. Against this backdrop, Britain—as the former colonial power with long-standing historical ties to Sierra Leone—saw an opportunity to reassert its geopolitical and strategic influence through military intervention, security reform, and state-building initiatives to bring about a peaceful resolution and development. Although these efforts were widely credited as humanitarian commitments to ending the war and restoring stability, they also reflected broader strategic ambitions to reassert Britain’s position as a significant actor in Africa and to influence the postwar trajectory of its former colony.
Divided into six chapters, Scott’s Britain and the Responsibility to Protect makes an important contribution to the scholarship on peace and security, particularly responsibility to protect (R2P), postconflict reconstruction, security sector reform (SSR), and peace consolidation in Sierra Leone. In Chapter One, Scott provides conceptual clarification and operational understanding of the key theory that guided British intervention in Sierra Leone. Also, she carefully discusses the methodological approach, explaining that, as a qualitative research design, the findings draw on interview responses from twenty-five participants to investigate their micro-level perceptual experiences in the (post)conflict context in relation to the British military intervention.
Scott’s main argument situates the intervention within the evolution of R2P, arguing that humanitarian intervention should be understood beyond the legal and normative debates evident in the peace and security scholarship. She argues that despite significant scholarly progress in comprehending the Sierra Leone civil war, there has been minimal engagement with the lived experiences of combined local and foreign combatants and civilians in a postwar context. This is especially true for former colonial powers, such as Britain, during and after its military interventions in Sierra Leone.
Chapter Two provides a more detailed explanation of the lived reality of the British intervention by highlighting the blurred relationship between security and development, as encapsulated in the intervention’s stated aims on paper and its actual outcomes in practice. This shows the clear disjuncture that is often evident in the interaction between theory and praxis. In its intent, the intervention, while deemed successful by its relative standards in postcolonial Africa, is perceived as a key component of state-building and development.
However, local experiences expose important differences between official narratives and reveal perspectives that both support and complicate the dominant narrative of interventional success. Scott argues that there are important differences between official British accounts and the lived realities experienced by Sierra Leoneans. As such, perceptions reveal the colonial underpinnings of peace and security efforts, as well as the practicality of R2P. For example, the perceptual contrast between the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) military intervention and the British intervention in Sierra Leone demonstrates the postcolonial power matrix and the racial nature of R2P, evident in the very understanding, acceptability, and development of external peace and security initiatives and activities in Africa. While the local participants viewed “whiteness” of the British interveners as positive and a representation of “not only peace but also development, thereby providing a further incentive for the cessation of violence” (32), United Nations and regional efforts, such as ECOMOG, were questioned for their credibility in ensuring the demobilization of rebels, engagement in human rights violations, and corrupt practices.
In Chapter Three, the legacy of the British intervention and security sector reform initiatives, such as the International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT) and the International Security Advisory Team (ISAT), was discussed. Despite its altruistic goals of ensuring peace and stability and strengthening the civilian-led government, its implementation mirrored a colonial-style relationship between the British intervener and the recipient Sierra Leonean government, military, and civilians. As distrust among “local enemies” of the war lurks within society, the book illustrates the “frustrated echoes of the colonial period” in how practical security reforms within the broader IMATT and ISAT, such as reintegration and downsizing, were implemented to reduce waste in military structures. Hence, the enduring legacy is more complex than conventional success narratives suggest, as it involves unresolved tensions regarding accountability and local ownership.
With regards to the intervention’s impact on British foreign policy, Chapter Four shows how the intervention positioned Britain as an important humanitarian and R2P actor within the international society of states. This newfound self-image in Britain reinforced the idea of an ethical foreign policy, where perceptions of success reinforced narratives of British exceptionalism while simultaneously influencing its bilateral relationship with Sierra Leone and its broader international role. Chapter Five then assesses how locals affected by such intervention understood what R2P entails in practice, often in a way disconnected from its theoretical and academic interpretations. As Scott points out, R2P should shift from a responsibility to protect to a responsibility to understand local turns and dynamics, given the enduring legacies it leaves behind in post-conflict environments. The concluding chapter calls for intervention research and policymaking to place greater emphasis on micro-level experiences.
A critical point to keep in mind from this book is the tension that sometimes arose between Sierra Leonean military personnel and British officers during the execution of a task, thereby recreating an image of a colonial administrative hierarchy of domination in a postcolonial context. Experiences such as when a senior Sierra Leone officer was ordered by a low-ranking British officer highlight how R2P and intervention, in practice in a postcolonial environment, reveal the persistence of colonial administrative structures and the question of local ownership required for legitimacy and long-term sustainability. In addition, the fraught and patrimonial relationship between British troops and the Sierra Leonean military often, in practice, negates the notion of a “true” partnership among sovereign states that the SSR aimed to achieve.
Furthermore, the British-Sierra Leone experience in this book illustrates dependence in peace and security, as indicated by scholarship and practice in Africa. The acute resource shortage faced by the Sierra Leone army during and after the war is not easily remedied by externally engineered reforms. Rather, R2P and SSR reflect broader patterns of dependence of the Global South on foreign aid from the Global North. A pattern in continuity with contemporary geopolitical reality.
However, Britain and the Responsibility to Protect is an important book not only because it breaks with the tradition of highlighting the benevolent, theory-replete importance of intervention, but also because of its treatment of the role of individual memory and perception in peace processes in Africa. The effect of conflict remembrance, rooted in memories of injuries, casualties, and property destruction, cannot be discounted in forecasting and preventing future conflicts on the continent.
