...Africa was a key focus of Britain's foreign policy under Tony Blair. Military intervention in Sierra Leone, increases in aid and debt relief, and grand initiatives such as the Commission for Africa established the continent as a place in which Britain could ‘do good’. This book critically explores...

...By the mid-nineteenth century, trading networks between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, were well-established. White and black businessmen and women were beginning to profit from the shift from the slave trade to “legitimate” commerce. Sierra Leone’s emerging, property-owning middle class lived...

...The chapter examines how young people in Sierra Leone reproduce social norms that curtail youth political participation in order to ensure a continued presence ‘at the table’, even if that presence is silent and largely symbolic. It draws on Cynthia Enloe to examine how it is not enough for social...

... to the global level, the book demonstrates how implementing reconciliation in post-conflict societies is a highly political practice which entails potentially undesirable consequences for the post-conflict societies to which it is deployed. Inquiring into the example of Sierra Leone, the book shows how...

... to the changing policies of British governors in the colony, the chapter focuses on recovering the experiences of liberated Africans themselves. As such, Christopher shows how Sierra Leone, established as a beacon for freedom in the Atlantic world, came to characterise the ambiguous and abusive construction...

...Chapter 5 moves from the global to the local level and explores how the global constructions of reconciliation are brought to a local post-conflict situation and how they perform there. Focusing on the example of Sierra Leone, the chapter shows how the activities of global reconciliation agents...

...This chapter examines the relationship of colonial taxation and inequalities in the British Empire in West Africa, specifically Sierra Leone. The imperial tendency to create and maintain distinctions between their colonial subjects, even within a single colony, was reflected in taxation...

... interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq—had a mixed record in terms of creating the ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ effect that Chris Brown suggests is the essence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ‘cleansing feature of war’. Blair's approach to Africa, however, grounded in utopian and cosmopolitan ideas...

...This chapter looks at how the British government engaged in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1997 and 2007. It is based on a series of interviews carried out with British officials who served in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and with Nigerian and Sierra Leonean political activists and commentators who...

...Kosovo and Sierra Leone represent significant episodes in Blair's development as a foreign policy decision maker. His style of setting ambitious goals, proactively pursued, and based upon the stark framing of issues, led him in these episodes into exposed positions that constituted gambles over...