Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor’s role in the account is defined by the movement of armed conflict across borders: while seeking to overthrow the Liberian government, he became a connection through which Foday Sankoh and a group of his fighters entered Sierra Leone. Their invasion helped open a civil war that the book treats not as an isolated eruption, but as part of a wider cycle linking extractive rule, political conflict, and state failure.

Taylor and the Sierra Leone Invasion

Foday Sankoh, a former corporal in the Sierra Leonean army, had been imprisoned after participating in an abortive coup against Siaka Stevens’s government in 1971. After his release, he eventually went to Libya, where he entered a training camp run by Muammar Qaddafi for African revolutionaries. There he met Charles Taylor, who was plotting to overthrow the government in Liberia.

When Taylor invaded Liberia on Christmas Eve 1989, Sankoh was with him. On March 23, 1991, Sankoh crossed from Liberia into Sierra Leone with a group of Taylor’s men, mostly Liberians and Burkinabes, and attacked the southern frontier town of Kailahun. They called themselves the Revolutionary United Front and announced that they had come to overthrow the corrupt and tyrannical government of the All People’s Congress. Taylor’s place in this account is therefore tied to the RUF’s origins and cross-border entry, even though Sankoh led the Sierra Leone attack.

A State Already in Decline

The invasion took place amid the deterioration of Sierra Leone’s government and public services. Stevens and his All People’s Congress had taken over and intensified the extractive institutions of colonial rule. By 1985, when Stevens, ill with cancer, brought Joseph Momoh in to replace him, the economy was collapsing. Roads and schools deteriorated; national television broadcasts stopped in 1987 after the information minister sold the transmitter, and a radio tower fell in 1989, ending broadcasts outside Freetown.

The account describes Sierra Leone’s state as having totally failed by 1991. Its explanation connects that failure to institutions that concentrated power and wealth while neglecting basic public services, leaving grievances and instability to deepen. Taylor’s role in helping to initiate the Sierra Leone conflict is set against this institutional background rather than treated as its sole cause.

Regional Conflict and State Failure

The book links Taylor’s intervention in Sierra Leone to his simultaneous role in initiating a savage conflict in Liberia, which also led to state failure there. It places both countries within a wider pattern: extractive institutions can generate unrest and armed conflict, while conflict further weakens state authority and helps produce state failure. Comparable cycles are identified in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, the Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda.

Sierra Leone’s civil war lasted from 1991 to 2001. In the book’s analysis, the country’s experience shows how institutional impoverishment and conflict can compound one another: extractive systems undermine services and development, conflict further erodes order, and weakened state capacity leaves society exposed to continuing instability. Taylor is significant in this account as an actor whose campaign in Liberia intersected with Sankoh’s and helped spread armed conflict into Sierra Leone.