Informal institutional change and the place of traditional justice in Sierra Leone’s post-war reconstruction

Sesay, Mohamed

doi:10.1093/afraf/ady038

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Spiritual beliefs are central to many if not most survivors' accounts of responsibility for the mudslide, but such convictions often sit alongside the view that government officials share responsibility, and should also be held to account. In this sense, many survivors' views on responsibility for this disaster resonate with some accounts of responsibility for grievous injustices in the war, in which the supernatural and customary authorities also figure centrally (Sesay, 2019;Alie, 2008;Graybill, 2017). Many survivors use prayers and rituals as means to remedy the losses and rights violations the disaster wrought, but in spite of persistent scepticism about the trustworthiness and capacity of the state and its officials, they have also mobilized to demand that the government accept and exercise remedial responsibility for the disaster and protect victims' rights, as we discuss below.…”

Section: Responsibilities Of Earthly Authorities: Inviting Disaster Through Negligence Inadequate Policies Incapacity and Corruptionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“When the ground opened”: Responsibility for harms and rights violations in disasters – Insights from Sierra Leone

Sesay

Bradley

2021

Journal of Human Rights

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So-called "natural" disasters are often characterized by major human rights abuses, yet responsibility and accountability for such violations have attracted relatively limited attention in research and practice. Instead, these events and survivors' suffering are often dismissed as "acts of God" or tragic misfortunes. Through analysis of an under-examined disaster-the 2017 mudslide in Freetown, Sierra Leone-this article probes survivors' perspectives on responsibility for disasters, and suffering and violations accompanying them. While survivors in this case often attribute responsibility to God or other supernatural forces, they also understand the state and other earthly actors as sharing different forms and degrees of responsibility for the disaster and its harmful consequences. Indeed, seeing the mudslide as an "act of God" does not absolve the state from its obligation to protect citizens from harms associated with disasters and subsequent response efforts. Survivors' perspectives provide significant insight into the challenge of advancing accountability in disaster contexts.

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Section: Responsibilities Of Earthly Authorities: Inviting Disaster Through Negligence Inadequate Policies Incapacity and Corruptionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“When the ground opened”: Responsibility for harms and rights violations in disasters – Insights from Sierra Leone

Sesay

Bradley

2021

Journal of Human Rights

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“…Take burial practices, which were central to Ebola outbreaks, given that they necessarily entail interaction with the bodily fluids of the infected deceased. During their anthropological fieldwork in rural Sierra Leone during and after the outbreak, Richards et al (2020) found that transmission had to be understood in the context of “the elaborate funeral rituals of … sodalities,” particularly “the distribution of duties in preparing and taking leave of the corpse”—a set of rules known “only to members of the sodalities.” These in turn intersected with “where the key elders came from across a chiefdom or chiefdom section,” since the efficacy of state rules about interactions with dead bodies would depend on the nature and level of “collaboration with chiefdom administrations,” owing to Sierra Leone's “dualist” legal system of national and Chiefdom law (p. 15; see also Sesay, 2019, pp. 19–20).…”

Section: Rule Of Law Reform the Negotiation Of Legal Autonomy And The...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world

Desai

2023

Law & Policy

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Law has translated the coronavirus crisis into politically salient forms in people's lives, from states of emergency, to border closures, to mask mandates. Yet political theory work on these forms has focused on constraining arbitrary state power. In this paper, I try to broaden this focus. Substantively, I argue that policy and its implementation also matter to how we theorize the role of law in crises, in terms of how we understand the political power of society and its relationship to the state. Methodologically, I argue that thinking about law in this way is more than a complement to or replacement for thinking about constraints on arbitrariness. Rather, different forms of thinking about law and crisis should constantly be used to critique each other in order to pursue the sorts of legal innovations required by geomobile and interconnected crises. Given that the current pandemic and its broader consequences are still unfolding, I turn to development policy and practice to demonstrate the process and consequence of such ongoing critique in action. Studying rule of law reforms-including during the West African Ebola crisis-I show how practitioners continually reimagined law in ways that facilitated ongoing legal innovation that could adapt to the politics of the crisis. | INTRODUCTIONWhy is the relationship between law and crisis important? At the level of political theory, law is a way in which a crisis becomes politically salient in people's lives, by translating the crisis into familiar terms with political purchase, such as authority and right, or even states of emergency and vaccine mandates. In more abstract terms, "crisis" refers to conditions of rupture that

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Governance of Traditional Local Institutions and Achieving SDG16

Franklin

2020

Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

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Informal institutional change and the place of traditional justice in Sierra Leone’s post-war reconstruction

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

“When the ground opened”: Responsibility for harms and rights violations in disasters – Insights from Sierra Leone

“When the ground opened”: Responsibility for harms and rights violations in disasters – Insights from Sierra Leone

Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world

Governance of Traditional Local Institutions and Achieving SDG16

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