Lansana Gberie's book should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in Sierra Leone's 1991–2001 war, which killed about 50,000 citizens and displaced almost half of the population. Those familiar with writing on Sierra Leone's war know that this event can be an intellectual Rashomon, in which one sees what one wishes. Scholars, diplomats and relief agency workers refer to youth rebellion, the grievances of marginalised people or spectacles of violence, to explain RUF's destructive behaviour. Gberie sets a different stage. Student radicals, the initiators of most of the continent's other anti-colonial rebellions, were a spent force in Sierra Leone by the late 1980s. This was partly due to the corrupt regime's use of youth gangs and thugs as political muscle. This and terrible economic conditions created a sub-culture of delinquency and violence that overwhelmed political organisers. Those who sought the rewards of politician-sanctioned anti-social behaviour became the main organisers and foot-soldiers of RUF's violence.

Gberie shows, however, that Sierra Leone's war was an invasion from Liberia and not a mass uprising. He argues that RUF head, Foday Sankoh, and Liberia's Charles Taylor, his political patron and arms supplier, were obsessed with power and money. The war began after Taylor, a former insider in Liberia's corrupt Doe regime, teamed up with Sankoh. Together they looted Sierra Leone to support Taylor's position in Liberia and to put Sankoh into power in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone's army offered ineffective resistance. Recruitment of unemployed and often violent youth who were more interested in looting than in defending citizens only added to the country's troubles.

Gberie's evidence comes from credible sources and his own observations. He combines the skills of his career as a journalist and then a scholar and analyst. It should be noted that his reporting and research played a positive role in the international effort to end the trade in ‘conflict diamonds’ that was centred on Charles Taylor's support for the RUF. Only after 1999 did diplomats take this link seriously. Moreover, Gberie shows the depths of RUF's unpopularity, which provided a further clash between popular opinion in Sierra Leone and the foreign diplomats who initially wanted to include the RUF in a post-conflict government.

Gberie's attention to the Liberian element and the social context of Sierra Leone's conflict is the book's strength. He shows how the collapse of law and order empowered the minority who were inclined to become violently predatory when given the opportunity. Here he treads similar ground to the sociologist Ibrahim Abdullah, whose work shows how Sierra Leone's political economy helped to mobilise violent youth over the old style ideologues and reformers who led many of Africa's other armed struggles.

Gberie points out that some communities successfully resisted this politics and organised their own armed units to protect local people. Also drawing from among impoverished youth, these communities enforced their own rule of law. Clearly social context counts. Many societies experience problems of public violence and have an abundance of social delinquents and outcasts. Few experience such a loss of social control over their behaviour, and thankfully few have wars like Sierra Leone's. Perhaps Gberie's delinquent rebels might have been more products of an exceptionally bad political system, rather than being bad people. Gberie acknowledges both; the question remains as to what extent one or the other shaped this especially dirty war. In any event, Gberie's book sets the standard for analysing Sierra Leone's war. This book should attract readers beyond Sierra Leone or West Africa specialists, since Gberie offers such a useful framework for explaining the behaviour of armed groups in wars in other corrupt states.