Religion, Tradition, and Restorative Justice in Sierra Leone by Lyn Graybill (review)

In Religion, Tradition, and Restorative Justice in Sierra Leone, Lyn Graybill delivers another detailed study of the restorative justice process. Her study of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was published in 2002, and in 2017, she follows up with a work that focuses on the aftermath of the civil war in Sierra Leone. This book offers more than its title suggests, beginning with a brief history of the war, the role of the Inter-Religious Council, and the creation of Sierra Leone's TRC; other elements place her work firmly in the peace-building, African studies, and religious studies literatures.

Graybill lays bare an overarching dissimilarity between the West and the rest of the world as seen in the process of peace building in Africa: the West, with its concept of punitive justice, running counter to traditional African concepts of justice, which invariably include restoration and reconciliation. This conflict is played out in the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the TRC's work, running concurrently. Graybill describes religious leaders' roles in the process and the Islamic and Christian interpretations of justice.

Bringing all these elements together, Graybill undergirds her discussion with interviews and survey results. Statistics offer a wider context for the events described, but her interviews of participants in the TRC bring life and personality to the study. Her comparisons to truth-and-reconciliation work in South Africa, Mozambique, and Rwanda are instructive and important.

In an introduction, seven thematic chapters, and a conclusion, Graybill tells the story of the years immediately following the civil war in Sierra Leone. She navigates the traditional fields of anthropology, history, religious studies, and political science with deft attention to the humanity of those being studied. Naming no good or bad guys, she takes no sides. She puts forward the idea that the people of Sierra Leone prefer the work of the TRC to that of the Special Court and backs it up with survey results and interview excerpts.