Rebels in a rotten state

To write about violence and atrocity in a way that does not sensationalize or dehumanize is incredibly difficult. Kieran Mitton manages to find the right words in his excellent Rebels in a rotten state and in so doing provides an in-depth and thoughtful analysis of what makes people engage in brutal acts of violence. Combining extensive empirical research in Sierra Leone with debates on violence in psychology, conflict analysis and security studies, Mitton argues that emotions, namely shame and disgust, and their manipulation through systemic brutalization, is crucial to understanding violence and conflict. Shame, disgust and systemic brutalization: not easy topics to research or read about. However, Mitton's highly readable prose and his command of the subject make for a convincing argument, even though the content is often difficult to read (see for example the index entry, ‘babies, killing of’). I am not a Sierra Leone expert and read this book because I wanted to learn more about the civil war and the country. What is instructive about this work is the way in which it engages with debates on violence in Sierra Leone and how it avoids bogging down readers with acronyms relating to various factions. Instead of setting up a straw man argument, Mitton critically engages with debates on the new barbarism and with greed vs grievance theories to show the aspects of the conflict they reflect, the known critique of such theories and, crucially, what they do not explain. Mitton's extensive research and engagement with the perpetrators of violent acts demonstrate how generalized ideas of barbarism or greed do not fully explain or capture why people did what they did, or the strategies of violence they used. People engaged in violent acts because of a system of brutalization that reproduced shame for themselves and disgust for others. However, after reading the substantive chapters of the book, I am unsure how emotions are isolated from common understandings of atrocity in Sierra Leone: shame and systemic brutalization could be seen as tools or mechanisms of the new barbarism; disgust is embedded with grievance towards the ‘rotten state’. The three pillars of Mitton's argument may explain why people did what they did and how emotions became reproduced in the higher structures of power. However, by the end of the book, my impression was that systemic brutalization was established as a tool towards a specific end (new government, purging the rotten state) at the beginning of the conflict, but then became self-reinforcing so that brutalization became an end in itself

Anger · Argument (complex analysis · Criminology · Disgust · Grievance · Political science · Shame · Sierra leone · Sociology · State (computer science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Peacebuilding and International Security · Psychology · Social Psychology

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