Between Democracy and Terror is a valuable anthology of essays on Sierra Leone's civil war, written by some of Sierra Leone's most eminent intellectuals. The book is divided into three sections. In Part I, ‘Context and actors’, Yusuf Bangura discusses the political centralisation, destruction of civil opposition, urban bias and use of state violence that formed the backdrop to insurgency. Ibrahim Abdullah and Ismail Rashid, meanwhile, tell a fascinating story of how the Revolutionary United Front and the NPRC military regime had their origins in the ‘rebellious youth culture’ of Freetown's East End, in which unemployed youth, school and university students met to discuss radical politics, smoke marijuana and listen to reggae music, articulating a ‘bland pan-Africanism’ rather than a ‘concrete emancipatory programme’. The resulting anti-establishment culture led to violent clashes between students, youth and the state, and eventually gave birth, via Ghana and Libya, to the RUF. Events such as these, concludes Rashid, reflected ‘the potency as well as the glaring limitations of radical student/youth politics’. In the final chapter to this section, historian Arthur Abraham discusses the way the popular NPRC regime, of which he was temporarily a member, undermined itself through its determination to cling to power and plunder the nation's resources, including diamonds, permitting the resurgence of a rebel movement that was practically defeated. In Part II of the book, entitled ‘One step forward, two steps back’, Jimmy Kandeh anatomises the 1996 elections which brought Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's SLPP party to power, Lans Gberie takes apart the 1997 AFRC coup, seen by many as ‘only a cruder replay of NPRC rule’; Kandeh evaluates the mixed record of democracy after 1996; while Olu Gordon, himself a Freetown editor, describes the role of the press in opposing the AFRC military junta. Part III considers the role of ‘Other players in the drama’. Arthur Abraham discusses the journey from peace deals in Abidjan (1996) to Lome (1999), Funmi Olonisakin (the only non-Sierra Leonean contributor) scrutinises the role of ECOMOG, the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force, while Abdullah and Rashid consider the use of child soldiers.

The essays are all extremely rich and well written, displaying the intricacies and complexities of the Sierra Leonean experience from the point of view of individuals who were often on the ground at the time, and thus a vital resource for serious scholars of the war. As Abdullah remarks in his introduction, ‘To reduce all these happenings, these “thick descriptions”/histories, to a footnote in a narrative that privileges the economic factor is to devalorise research and scholarship in understanding and changing our reality’, a calculated swipe at the influential ‘greed not grievance’ thesis of Paul Collier.

Several of the chapters here were previously published in a 1997 issue of CODESRIA's journal Africa Development. That volume was conceived in part as a reaction to Paul Richards' 1996 book Fighting for the Rainforest. The contributions there, as here, provided important new perspectives on, qualifications to, and, in places, refutations of parts of Richards' argument. Sadly, some of the chapters have been scripted as an unrestrained assault not only on the views but also on the authority to speak of Richards himself. In the opinion of this reviewer, the scornful rhetorical style of these attacks obfuscates as much as it illuminates, personalises the arguments, destroys the possibility for productive disagreement, and drives a wedge between writers who at the time must have been committed to the same ends, namely the restoration of peace in Sierra Leone.

Since 1997, new perspectives on the war have begun to emerge, which are not captured here. For instance, in the pages of African Affairs Richard Fanthorpe and Paul Richards have both highlighted the pre-eminent role of youth excluded from power and patronage in rural areas, with Richards stressing the importance of a local legal system that reduced some youth to debt-bondage, suggesting that the RUF had some of the characteristics of a slave revolt. Meanwhile Krijn Peters has revived the idea that at least an element of the RUF had a vision of social transformation, which appears to have had some affinities with Pol Pot's Cambodia. David Keen has used psychiatric theory to argue that the conflict's extravagant violence can be explained by feelings of marginalisation, humiliation and lack of social respect, his perspective providing valuable nuance to the argument of Abdullah who simply reads off the conflict's outrageously violent acts from the ‘lumpen’ class position of their perpetrators. Lans Gberie has written a better rounded book-length narrative of the war than is presented here, while the Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission provides the most comprehensive and detailed history available.