This book supplements rather than surpasses earlier literature on its topic because it focuses on state rather than society in Sierra Leone, and thus excludes issues such as land ownership, lineage organisation and marriage alliance that would otherwise have provided insight into the ‘grass roots’ workings of the patrimonial political economy. Even so, we should be grateful for what we have: a deft summation of electoral politics from independence to the one-party state, a careful assessment of four national elections (in 1996, 2002, 2007 and 2012), and a fair-minded review of literature on the civil war and its aftermath.

The analysis of the politics of the rebellion is unsatisfactory, however. This is because it elides the part played by private security operatives in shaping political perceptions of the war through their influence over counter-insurgency strategy. Harris implies that the government's (de facto) minister of defence from 1996 had earlier organised a national civil defence movement, to carry the war to the rebel Revolutionary United Front. This understates the crucial role played by Executive Outcomes, a South African-based private security company, in shaping decisions to seek an outright military solution, and thus to deny the rebel movement political ‘space’. Localised militia had, indeed, begun to deploy from 1992. But a ‘national’ para-military civil defence force emerged only after elections in 1996, with much prompting from Executive Outcomes, as a means to follow up the company's increasingly effective air raids against rebel bases. The most significant of these raids was on the RUF jungle headquarters (The Zogoda) in October 1996, during a ceasefire period intended to protect the Abidjan peace negotiations. The mission was given authorisation by a reluctant government only after a barrage of ‘advice’ from Executive Outcomes about the need to finish off the rebels militarily (as is made clear in a memoir published by company's founder, not cited by Harris). It was claimed that the rebels had no valid political position. Harris appears to align himself with this view by asserting (without offering evidence) that the RUF leader was devious and opportunistic, and that the movement lacked a political programme (here he is aware of evidence to the contrary, but dismisses it). Ironically, he compares the RUF unfavourably, in terms of political content, to Renamo, even though he concedes that the setting up of the Mozambican rebel movement was the work of Rhodesian and South African counter-insurgency specialists. People with the same background staffed Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone. They knew the importance of crediting Renamo with political content, and of denying any such content to the RUF. That its military opponents projected the RUF as having no politics is not evidence that it had no politics. Harris also claims the post-war RUF political party was as ‘inept as its parent organization’, without mentioning that 400 of its Freetown-based political cadres were locked up without charge or trial in May 2000 and not released until six years later.

Aside from these defects, however, the book has much to recommend it, not least its trenchant criticism of the Special Court for War Crimes in Sierra Leone. What is now needed is matching political history from the perspective of local institutions.