Trembling city
![East End Police station area Sierra Leone Free Town Apr 99 - Copy](/files/styles/landscape_01/public/media/image/East%20End%20Police%20station%20area%20Sierra%20Leone%20Free%20Town%20Apr%2099%20-%20Copy%20%282%29.jpg?h=52d3fcb6&itok=jrc97brY)
In this new article in Cooperation and Conflict, senior researcher Peter Albrecht and associate professor at Royal Danish Defence College, Maya Mynster Christensen, explore how policing took place in Freetown’s war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The article shows how many different actors sought to take control of the city. Ex-combatants came from the jungle and settled on the city margins, bringing with them strategies from warfighting by recreating a system of bases. At the same time the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) re-emerged with substantial external support, mainly from the UK, seeking to control the city through a combination of force and negotiation.
Policing as a practice became an attempt by both ex-combatants and the SLP to border in as well as border out, defensively against external interference and offensively to take control of the territory of the city.
Freetown as a trembling city was a reminder of the possibility of war that Freetown very easily could return. It also became a more general condition of the city as an inhabited space, where multiple and often incompatible and conflictual logics and control clashed, overlapped and co-existed uneasily.
![easterne police station april 1999 free town sierra leone](/files/styles/common_02/public/media/image/Eastern%20PS%20Apr%201999%20-%20Copy%20%282%29.jpg?itok=OEC1mXUO)
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![Peter Albrecht](/files/styles/square_01/public/media/image/peter-albrecht.jpg?h=25d940ac&itok=i6CJs71d)