Trembling city
Policing Freetown’s war-peace transition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8911399 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Albrecht (0000-0003-0942-7628, corresponding author), Maya Mynster Christensen (0000-0003-3424-8584, Royal Danish Defence College) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 478-495 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cooperation and Conflict (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-8367 • E-ISSN: 1460-3691 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00108367211068876 |
| OpenAlex | W4210520406 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 31 |
While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions, the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize this notion of urban space to capture Freetown’s war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sierra Leone Police (SLP) re-emerged with external support, seeking to compartmentalize and fixate Freetown through a combination of force and negotiation. We use borders and bordering to understand policing as attempts by both ex-combatants and the SLP to border in as well as out; defensively against external interference and offensively to make territorial claims. By extension, it is tensions in these practices between attempts to defend and harden borders, and at the same time, expand and soften them that trigger a tremble. The city tremble was a reminder of the possibility of war that Freetown very easily could return to. It also became a more general and inconspicuous condition of the city as an inhabited space, where multiple and often incompatible and conflictual spatial logics, strategies, and practices of policing clashed, overlapped and co-existed uneasily
Ethnology · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Sierra leone · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Spanish Civil War · Transformative learning · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Global Security and Public Health · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts
Divided Cities
Cities at War
The divided city – a space for frictional peacebuilding
City and soul in divided societies
Socio-spatial agency and positive peace in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
The politics of landscape as ways of life in the ‘divided’ city
Security sector reform under international tutelage in Sierra Leone
Cities and Conflict in Fragile States in the Developing World
Pirate Towns
The everyday at the border
What Is Policeness? On Being Police in Somalia
Mercenaries of democracy
The spatiality of violence in post-war cities
Separation and positive accommodation
Geopolitical fault-line cities in the world of divided cities
The relational spatiality of the postwar condition
Other Domains of Democratic Theory
Urban borderwork
The West Side Boys
The City as Barracks
Theorizing Borders
Security Beyond the State
African cities and violent conflict
Introduction
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |