The Outbreak of the Sierra Leone Civil War began on March 23, 1991, when Foday Sankoh led armed men across the border from Liberia and attacked Kailahun in southern Sierra Leone. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) presented the incursion as a campaign against the ruling All People’s Congress (APC), but the episode also marked the breakdown of a state hollowed out by years of extraction, weakened public institutions, and collapsing government authority.

Background: Extractive Rule and State Breakdown

The book locates the outbreak within a political order inherited from British colonial rule and intensified after independence by Siaka Stevens and the APC. Rather than overturning extractive institutions, the postindependence leadership adapted them for its own benefit. Under Stevens, state power and economic resources were concentrated in the hands of a narrow ruling group, while the institutions that might have constrained its power weakened.

The decay had become visible before the invasion. In 1985, Stevens, ill with cancer, brought Joseph Momoh in as his successor; by then, the economy was collapsing. Roads deteriorated, schools disintegrated, national television broadcasts stopped after the transmitter was sold in 1987, and a radio tower serving areas beyond Freetown fell in 1989. By the end of Momoh’s rule, civil servants, teachers, and Paramount Chiefs were no longer being paid. The account describes a central government that had collapsed before armed incursions and rebellion became its most visible symptoms.

The March 1991 Invasion

On March 23, 1991, Sankoh’s force crossed from Liberia and attacked the southern frontier town of Kailahun. Sankoh had served as a corporal in the Sierra Leonean army and had been imprisoned after participating in an abortive coup against Stevens’s government in 1971. After his release, he eventually went to Libya, where he attended a training camp run by Colonel Qaddafi for African revolutionaries. There he met Charles Taylor, who was plotting to overthrow Liberia’s government.

When Taylor invaded Liberia on Christmas Eve 1989, Sankoh accompanied him. The force that later entered Sierra Leone included men from Taylor’s ranks, mostly Liberians and Burkinabes. They called themselves the Revolutionary United Front and announced that their objective was to overthrow the APC government, which they described as corrupt and tyrannical. The invasion thus connected Sierra Leone’s political crisis to armed conflict across its border, while presenting a challenge to a government whose authority and public services had already been severely eroded.

Institutional Conflict and Its Stakes

The book’s account distinguishes the RUF’s stated opposition to the APC from the broader question of how political power was organized and exercised. In extractive systems, political elites can shape economic institutions to benefit themselves, and the resulting wealth and resources help them preserve their political dominance. Those who profit from the arrangement have incentives to defend it, including by building private forces, buying influence, or manipulating elections. This feedback can make extractive institutions persist even as the wider society bears their costs.

The invasion did not occur in a setting where public authority was robust enough to contain the consequences of political conflict. Sierra Leone’s deteriorating infrastructure and unpaid public workers were evidence of a government losing its capacity to govern. In the book’s analysis, extractive institutions can weaken state authority so severely that conflict accompanies economic stagnation, displacement, and broader social breakdown. The 1991 incursion is introduced within that argument: it was an armed challenge to the APC, but also an episode in the crisis of a state already undermined by extractive rule.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

The outbreak serves as a point of entry into the account of Sierra Leone’s civil war and as an example of how political and economic institutions can reinforce one another to destructive effect. The RUF’s arrival from Liberia made the loss of state control unmistakable, but the book stresses that armed groups were symptoms of a deeper institutional collapse, not its original cause. By the time the invasion began, the country’s governing structures and basic services had been weakened through years of concentrated power and extraction.

The episode also illustrates the uncertain consequences of political upheaval. A force can mobilize against an extractive government without that challenge itself establishing inclusive or durable institutions. The account therefore places the invasion alongside a broader contrast: organized collective action can help widen political participation and transform institutions, but an armed confrontation amid state collapse is not, by itself, evidence that such a transformation has occurred.