Peacebuilding as a New Form of Colonialism: A Case Study of Liberia and Sierra Leone

: Around two decades ago, legal anthropologist Merry posed the question, "what can we learn about law and globalization today from revisiting the law and colonization literature?" She emphasized how colonial arrangements transformed and affected the fundamental character of contemporary and international law. While peacebuilders, development experts, and human rights activists embrace law as a tool for social change, others have looked back on the history of legal development in the Global South to warn that the rule of law served as a framework for social control. It preserved authority and punished rebellious acts that threatened order while promoting development and social progress. As a result of this reminder, the critical peacebuilding literature has begun to pay attention to how the rule of law and transitional justice frameworks may serve as conceptual, lexical, and discursive foundations for post/neo-colonial control. This article used a historical, empirical, and comparative study of post-war Sierra Leone and Liberia to argue that the transplantation of legal norms and technologies has become more professionalized. In contrast, international efforts to rebuild the rule of law have reinforced social domination by legitimizing external actors as peacebuilders and reconstituting the relationship between the domestic political class and global capital. Social domination refers to the attempt to build an unequal playing field, wherein the country's political and economic elites can leverage and reproduce earlier forms of power relations and domination to consolidate their security within the from the security created by a large external presence.


I. INTRODUCTION
Not only have post-colonial theorists and critical socio-legal academics exposed the paradoxes inherent in contemporary law, but they have also drawn strong similarities between legal colonialism and legal globalization. 1 Around two decades ago, legal anthropologist Merry posed the question, "what can we learn about law and globalization today from revisiting the law and colonization literature?" She emphasized how colonial arrangements transformed the fundamental character of contemporary and international law. 2 Peacebuilders, development experts, and human rights activists embrace the law as a tool for social change. Other commentators have looked back on the history of legal development in the Global South to warn that the rule of law served as a framework for social control. In contrast, it preserved authority and punished rebellious acts that threatened order while promoting development and social progress. 3 As a result of this reminder, the critical peacebuilding literature has begun to pay attention to how the rule of law and transitional justice frameworks may serve as conceptual, lexical, and discursive foundations for post/neo-colonial control. According to critics, 'efforts to disentangle the concept of transition from worries about past injustices' amount to a type of ideological obfuscation designed to obscure the structural disparities present in contemporary society. 4 As a departure from problem-solving concerns about how to improve the efficacy of foreign interventions, the critical peacebuilding literature has ideological foundations are taken for granted. 9 The true change of international law, which is still firmly entrenched in colonialism, demands abandoning the neoliberal agenda in favor of political battles for social justice and equality. Furthermore, as currently envisioned and operationalized, the rule of law promotion initiative obstructs the achievement of these socially-oriented aims in post-colonial societies. Inspired by studies of law and colonization, this article does not only build on the critical rule of law scholarship examining the negative consequences of legal globalization in post-conflict environments. Instead, it also attempts to interpret those results as the result of a post/neo-colonial peacebuilding strategy rather than as unintended consequences.
This paper looks into how peacebuilding missions constate what can be called neo-colonialism. It argues that while the transplantation of legal norms and technologies has become more professionalized, international efforts to rebuild the rule of law continue to reinforce social domination by legitimizing external actors as peacebuilders and reconstituting the relationship between the domestic political class and global capital. Social domination refers to the attempt to build an unequal playing field, wherein the country's political and economic elites could leverage and reproduce earlier forms of power relations and domination to consolidate their security within the state apparatus and benefit disproportionately from the security created by a large external presence. This paper has five parts of discussion. The first part provides an overview of the nexus between law and colonialization. The second part discusses the rule of law in peacebuilding and development. The third part examines the rule of law in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The fourth part revisits the discourse centered on 'state failure,' a once-functioning post-colonial state no longer obtains support from or exerts control over its people. The fifth part analyzes the post-conflict state of the states and law as it refers to the major corporate players dominating nations against indigenous people in both countries. 9 Sarah Maddison & Laura J. Shepherd, supra note 1 at 255.

II. METHODS
This study was prepared by critically analyzing various hard and soft copy documents, and it used a historical, empirical, and comparative study of post-war Sierra Leone and Liberia as the basis for the conclusion. It drew upon case study evidence from the case of situations in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The author took into account given by various eminent personalities and their works and also relied on empirical information as far as possible. The sources of the information were a combination of primary and secondary sources depending upon availability and accessibility. For this purpose, theoretical analysis that combined descriptive and analytical approaches based on the available primary and secondary sources was best suited to current research. Theoretical analysis that combined descriptive and analytical approaches based on the available primary and secondary sources best suited to current research has been utilized. The data was collected through an extensive literature survey, library research, and internet search. In so doing, one aspect of this process was identity reconstruction, in which dominant liberal and neoliberal actors (e.g., former colonial powers, international financial institutions, transnational corporations, and international non-governmental organizations) adopt the persona of contemporary peacebuilders intervening to resolve purely postcolonial problems. To represent and legitimize these interveners, the promotion of the rule of law emphasizes logico-legislative concepts that dehistoricize and internalize political disputes in ways that exonerate big powers of responsibility for the structural circumstances that (re)produce violence. By beginning with the collapse of the post-colonial state and focusing on problem-solving policy solutions that do not question historical relations with Euro-American powers or call into question the structural foundations of the modern state, rebuilding the rule of law re-creates a colonial relations project that obscures the imperial past. 10

III. THE NEXUS BETWEEN LAW AND COLONIZATION
The literature on the nexus between law and colonialism views legal cultures as instruments of imperial rule and 'constitutive of colonialism' in practically every instance. 11 This section aims to depict how the rule of law is used as a means of modern colonialism. Comaroff, for example, argues that colonial legal cultures were concurrently languages of practices, symbolic and ritual systems, abstract principles for the production of social orders, citizenship, and subjection, and immanent material realities precisely because they defined the colonial world as a whole. 12 According to this argument, imperial Europe's 'civilizing mission' was justified in the name of 'humane and enlightened universalism.' In contrast, colonization legally justified itself 'by sustaining the pre-modernity of overseas subjects' whom it constantly tribalized, ethnicized, and racialized. 13 This criticism parallels Chanock's observation that 'the development of the South African legal system in the early twentieth century was critical to constructing and preserving the racist state's structures. 14 According to Benton, jurisdictional conflicts were a distinguishing characteristic of the colonial legal system because they intertwined with and shaped the evolving debate about cultural, ethnic, and racial divisions in the Americas. 15 In examining colonial regulation of Indian hemp in twentieth-century India, Shamir and Hacker concur with Comaroff, Chanock, and others in concluding: "the civilizing process made headway by introducing routinized and bureaucratized forms of organizing social life in a way that simultaneously worked to restructure native consciousness and to ensure an effective command and control colonial apparatus." 16 Although these criticisms are directed at colonial empire-building, the author believes they are useful for understanding the concept of legal science, with its doctrines of logical rationality, system construction, and formal legality, as well as abstract principles of scientism, conceptualism, and purism. 17 This doctrine, which underpins the construction of dominant legal cultures, has long been predicated on the premise that the materials of law (statutes, regulations, and customary rules) can be viewed as naturally occurring phenomena or from the norms of custom and society, and that legal scientists can discover inherent principles and relationships in the same way that physical scientists discover natural laws. 18 Legal professionals in North America and Western Europe have interpreted this premise to suggest that they may transmit legal institutions and technology internationally to law schools, courts, justice departments, judicial institutes, and government offices. Nonetheless, opponents claim that legal professionals are ideological slaves of their times because prevailing views are concealed under a veneer of ideological neutrality. 19 It is in this manner that in this way, "European systematic jurisprudence embodies and perpetuates nineteenth-century liberalism, locking in a selected set of assumptions and values and locking out all others." 20 To be sure, legal colonization studies see lawfare as a space for contestation, subversion, and resistance rather than as a site of control. Indeed, the second wave of law and colonialism studies focuses on the counterhegemonic potential inherent in the most repressive colonial legalities, with academics emphasizing subaltern people's agency in mobilizing legal instruments and cultures to advance their interests. 21 Benton argues that colonial administrations maintained or reinvented pre-existing legal institutions to preserve social order while conquered and colonized groups sought, in turn, to respond to the imposition of law through accommodation, advocacy, subtle delegitimization, and outright rebellion. 22 However, as Comaroff and Merry emphasized, the law as a vehicle for colonial governmentality and sovereignty cannot be equated with the law as a subversive instrument. This study is particularly sensitive to the current guises in which key components of colonial legal discourses and institutions have outlived the official end of colonial control and continue to exercise significant influence in politics, culture, and economy. 23 Merry points out as follows: "understanding the complicated role law played in colonialism -as a mode of coercion, a form of social transformation, and discourse of power developed by dominant groups but also open to seizure by subordinates -helps make sense of the dynamics of globalization and the expansion of the rule of law taking place today." 24 As Merry observes, although legal globalization has moved away from racial and civilizational discourses, the legacy of law and colonialism persists in the following ways. Initially, the law is neither external nor incidental to the colonial project's creation. As with other forms of foreign involvement, legal colonialism must be defined in terms of structural relations of colonial difference that influence its conception, operation, and consequences intimately, as is emphasized by Sabaratnam. 25 This indicates that legal discourses are not only narrative accompaniments to dominance but are mutually constitutive parts of contemporary law and hierarchical institutions. 26 Additionally, the establishment of hegemonic legal cultures does not prevent the employment of law for anti-hegemonic purposes altogether. Indeed, if legislation is manifestly partial and unfair, it will conceal nothing, legitimize nothing, and contribute nothing to any class's hegemony, implying that its results will be manifestly unproductive. 27 The argument remains that whatever virtue is connected with this questionable altruism, there is either proportional damage, or it is deliberately permitted to legitimize an unacceptable objective. 28 Finally, it is critical to remember that when legal development prioritizes scientific technocracy, it diverts attention away from persistent efforts for equity and social justice that require a cultural, if not a political, revolution at the center and periphery. 29 In response to these criticisms, the remainder of this paper argues that the promotion of the post-conflict rule of law fosters social control by obscuring the modern state's settler-colonial origins to re-establish the ruling class' link with global capital.

IV. THE RULE OF LAW IN PEACEBUILDING AND DEVELOPMENT
The rule of law has become a sine qua non in current peacebuilding and development processes, providing the framework for addressing several rebuilding difficulties. This section aims to serve as a quick dive into the doctrinal use of peacebuilding and the rule of law for pushing colonist agendas. Development experts worldwide advocate for the rule of law as the surest path to market-led growth. Human rights organizations promote it as the best safeguard against human rights violations. In peace and security, the rule of law is viewed as the surest safeguard against the reemergence of conflicts and the foundation for rebuilding post-conflict societies. 30 Carothers argues that "one cannot get through a foreign policy debate these days without someone proposing the rule of law as a solution to the world's troubles." 31 The rule of law is often endowed with the following characteristics, which some think are necessary for validating and preserving the post-conflict social contract: (i) establishes the stable social order essential for democracy, (ii) sufficiently and consistently defends property rights, and (iii) ensures the expression of collective will via respect for power organization and fundamental human and civil rights. 32 Numerous organizations, including the United Nations, define the rule of law as having two components: (i) a procedural component that emphasizes law publicity, equal application, and independent adjudication; and (ii) a substantive component that gives substance to the formal requirements of international human rights standards and standards of fairness. 33 However, when it comes to operationalizing the idea, the rule of law programs emphasize the establishment of formalistic-legal principles to resemble Weberian concepts of rational authority and legitimacy. 34 In contrast to the traditional authority of the ruling regime, which is justified by tradition and custom, rational authority derives its legitimacy from the institutions established by widely applicable legislation. 35 This rising importance of institutions-game rules and the organizations that create and enforce them-as a critical component of peacebuilding is reflected in the 2011 World Development Report on conflict, security, and development. 36 This paper ties the persistence of violent conflict in developing countries to a lack of governmental capability and lawful institutions. Similarly, while conceding that institutions alone cannot ensure peace, Paris and Sisk believe that without enough attention to state-building, war-torn governments would be less likely to escape the many and mutually reinforcing "traps" of violence and underdevelopment. 37 As a result, the United Nations ( focus on the security-development nexus to bring together key players and mobilize resources from inside and beyond the UN system to re-establish the rule of law in war-torn communities.
As with neoliberal policymakers, many international relations researchers have invested in the rule of law internationalization with great redemptive potential. According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy requires the rule of law institutions and democratic institutions that hold rulers responsible for public choice. 38 In portraying legal globalization as a 'new world order,' Slaughter emphasizes the most successful style of post-conflict reconstruction as a 'dense mesh of horizontal and vertical networks of professionals working in fields such as regulation, justice, and lawmaking. 39 Asserting that democracy and the rule of law remain the characteristics of modernity and the universal norms for legitimate government, Ikenberry concludes that liberal internationalism is without a genuine adversary. 40 What Acharya refers to as the "moral cosmopolitan view [of] norm diffusion," this literature often distinguishes the globalization of legal institutions and ideas from Western colonialism or imperial progressivism. 41 Nevertheless, Merry refers to the British empire as one of these networks and bodies of knowledge in which administrators went from place to place within a framework of common cultural understandings about race and power. The same hegemonic socialization exists today in redemptive garb. 42 Additionally, the rising post-colonial criticism of law, informed by legal colonization studies, serves as a reminder of these troublesome features of the modern rule of law advocacy. To begin, imposing legal standards and institutions on non-Western cultures are tantamount to 'new imperialism.' 43 Brooks expresses this issue by insisting that war-torn societies must accept some of imperialism's worst elements (culturally insensitive invading forces that drive up prices distort local economies, and impose ham-handed "reforms") in exchange for a few of imperialism's advantages. 44 Second, contrary to reformers' aspirations, the new rule of law is prone to capture by powerful parties engaged in power consolidation. 45 For example, Sitze argues that transitional justice mechanisms like truth commissions fail to produce miracles and often end up reiterating the kinds of colonial sovereignty and governmentality whose excesses the institutions exposed and critiqued. 46 He repeats political theorists who warn that by expanding laws, you inevitably generate more government agents and consequently provide a greater number of persons with authority over their fellows. 47 These same characteristics, Sharon asserts, may become an accelerant of dominance rather than an antidote. 48 Finally, these criticisms expose the concept of apolitical neutrality as a smokescreen for an inherently ideological project, with Sitze asserting that the language of transitional justice is a new name for the old colonial theory and practices of humanitarian experts claiming to speak for and thus save otherwise helpless, powerless, and voiceless non-Western victims. 49 Apart from casting doubt on the legitimacy and moral basis for the rule of law advocacy, these considerations point to a clear link between legal colonialism, legal globalization, and post-conflict rebuilding. By incorporating ideas from legal colonization studies and critical peacebuilding scholarship, this paper situates international attempts to reconstruct the rule of law in Liberia and Sierra Leone within a postcolonial framework. These instances were picked using a purposive sampling strategy that seeks to define traits and locate venues that exhibit various aspects of those qualities. 50 In both nations, post-war legal reconstruction is substantially influenced by the same Western powers that founded the dominant contemporary state system-the UK in Sierra Leone and the US in Liberia-and have traditionally favored governing elites. To enhance the critical rule of law literature, I argue that the harmful effects of legal globalization in these nations are often constitutive of social dominance rather than pathological or unexpected outcomes of wellintentioned programs. While I acknowledge that transitional justice mechanisms (e.g., war crimes tribunals and truth commissions) have frequently been used to institutionalize the rule of law, the emphasis here is primarily on interventions aimed at reconstructing the post-conflict state, i.e., legal reform and justice sector development. 51 Besides being critical for re-establishing the economy, legal and judicial reforms are unambiguously about reinforcing ties with past settler-colonial powers.

V. THE RULE OF LAW IN SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA
Sierra Leone and Liberia started (re)building the rule of law after the civil war's conclusion in the early 2000s, with financing and technical assistance from the international community. The UK, Sierra Leone's former colonial power and long-standing bilateral partner, spearheaded donor support for establishing a wide justice system reform agenda. connection between justice sector reform and economic success, DFID's director Mark Lowcock emphasized the need for investors and companies to have confidence in a stable and predictable environment for property rights, contracts, and restitution. 59 The judgment is yet out on whether Sierra Leone and Liberia's efforts to re-establish the rule of law have succeeded in professionalizing their legal systems and justice sectors. According to recent research conducted in Liberia, although the rule of law training programs improved the protection of property rights and decreased the occurrence of some forms of crime, they did not increase faith in the police, courts, or government more broadly. 60 According to a 2014 report by the Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA), while post-conflict reforms have advanced the criminal justice system beyond its pre-conflict capacity for crime prevention, the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) continues to fall short of maintaining transparency and requires increased civilian input in local policing activities. 61 Ironically, after over two decades of re-establishing the rule of law, Sierra Leone's current administration, elected in 2018, views an overhaul of the nation's judicial and justice delivery system as an extreme urgency. 62 Despite these setbacks, reconstructing the rule of law in both nations has primarily succeeded in restoring the post-colonial state and neoliberal economy, which disproportionately favor the ruling political and economic elite. This will be discussed in detail in the next section.

VI. COLONIALISM TAKES OVER (AGAIN)
While Sierra Leone and Liberia were at a crossroads in terms of examining the historical and social structures that gave rise to decade-long armed conflicts, the flurry of post-conflict international activism (some of which This discourse centered on 'state failure,' the notion that a oncefunctioning post-colonial state no longer obtains support from or exerts control over its people. It is no longer even the object of demand since its people recognize its inability to provide supplies. 64 Additionally, the narrative emphasized objective metrics of statehood -political stability, government efficiency, and regulatory quality -before concluding that African nations have weak states and subpar governance. 65 In terms of 'failed states' political economy, the rhetoric focused on conflict resources, notably diamonds. 66 How is the concept of 'state failure' viable when states in Africa have never reached or resembled Weberian ideals, much less European approximations to that intellectual construct? 67 True! However, as Wai argues, the term 'state failure' in Africa obscures an understanding of statehood as an unfinished political project with issues of citizenship and political membership arising from colonial masters' attempt to hurriedly and arbitrarily force multi-ethnic societies into states that were intended to serve the colonial masters' interests. 68 While positivist epistemology hid the past, legal experts (local and foreign) presided over the reconstruction of the new state structure. Fixated on problem-solving policy frameworks, these legal professionals began rebuilding work without conducting a detailed examination of each country's history of state creation and power. In Liberia, this silence meant disregarding the reality that the contemporary Liberian state is a descendant of slavery and the anti-slave trade campaign of the nineteenth century, which culminated in the emergence of pro-American colonial interests in researching back-to-Africa ideas. 69 It downplayed the role of the American Colonisation Society (ACS), which was created to establish "a colony in Africa to take free people of color…residing in the United States…to Africa or such other places as Congress may deem expedient." 70 Additionally, the framework overlooked the reality that Americo-Liberian rule, which lasted from 1822, when the first deported Africans landed in Monrovia, until 1980, was backed by the Euro-American legal system and civilization. 71 The historical irony that the 1847 national constitution, drafted by a Harvard professor named Simon Greenleaf, degraded and alienated indigenous Liberians from their homeland while extolling the American concept of liberty for mulatto immigrants is omitted from the reform narrative. 72 In neighboring Sierra Leone, the restoration plan omitted the history of the current state as a result of the anti-slavery campaign and British colonialism. Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, was 'bought' from indigenous rulers in 1787 to resettle slaves exiled from North America or recaptured on the high seas after the cessation of the history and legitimize current policies. 78 Not only were the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the TRCs in both countries temporally separated, but they were also required to produce an internal narrative of atrocity crimes unique to Sierra Leone and Liberia as if their warlords and autocrats emerged exclusively in post-settler/colonial times. External players such as Western governments, international financial institutions, and businesses are completely exonerated of blame for political violence in these nations, regardless of their dubious background. However, whereas indigenous peoples in white-settler colonies such as Canada may attempt to exploit the past to attack current policies and circumstances, post-conflict policies like Sierra Leone and Liberia are often the result of a realignment of interests between global (external actors) and local elites. 79 Indeed, as Hanlon says, some of "the same old men who were responsible for the war are still in power, both in government and in a reinstated chieftaincy system." 80 Elite restoration post-conflict is not about restoring the Krios or Americo-Liberians to power. Sierra Leone's educated protectorate elite seized political authority over the Krios at independence in April 1961, much as Liberia's 1980 military coup ended Americo-Liberian political leadership. Rather than that, it is about re-establishing the settler-colonial state as the dominant mode of economic accumulation and power. 81 It is the restoration of the colonial rule of law's most prized legacy, namely the state's capacity to control, examine, monitor, discipline, and punish subjects' behavior in a sphere brought under the scope of the law. 82 This reestablishment of hegemonic authority is unavoidable since legal reconstruction succeeded in re-coupling state and government and narrowing the divide between public power and private wealth, rather than disconnecting them, as Kandeh strongly recommends. town of Butaw and Sierra Leone's Kono area demonstrate, this reconfiguration of law, power, and capital is most visible in local economies, which host the resources and labor required by global capital.

VII. POST-CONFLICT STATE OF THE STATES AND LAW
Butaw is one of the local villages in Sinoe County in south-eastern Liberia. It is one of the localities where Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) has taken up 16,758 hectares of farmland for oil palm cultivation and associated infrastructure. Among the company's eight fundamental principles is a commitment to protect community self-determination, land rights, sovereignty, culture, indigenous traditions, and holy places, all achieved via the communities' free, prior, and informed consent. 84 Residents of Butaw, however, protested GVL's actions in a letter sent on 1 October 2012 and addressed to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Malaysia, portraying the corporation as a global palm oil company that has taken over their lands. Among the grievances raised in the letter was the legality of the concession agreement; the absence of free, prior, and informed community consent; damage to farmlands; insufficient compensation and community development fund; disrespect for sacred lands and the old town; insufficient job opportunities; and harassment and intimidation by company-funded police. 85 Disturbed by the company's tardy response and the government's complicity, Butaw organized a demonstration against GVL on 26 May 2015, after another letter from the Butaw Youth Association threatened the company's Chief Executive Officer with 'consequences' if he refused to meet with them. 86 84 James Otto, "Golden Veroleum Liberia Comes under Spotlight Again for not Living Up to MOU," LandPortal (12 August 2021), online: <https://landportal.org/news/2021/09/golden-veroleum-liberia-comes-under-spotlightagain-not-living-mou>.). 85 Forest People, "Letter of complaint to RSPO from communities within proposed oil palm concession in Liberia," Forest People Programme (29 October 2012), online: <https://www.forestpeoples.org/en/topics/palm-oil-rspo/news/2012/10/letter-complaintround-table-sustainable-palm-oil-rspo-indigenous>.
Ignited by around 40 young men who attempted to prevent employees from visiting the plantation, the disturbance drew hundreds of young people who looted and assaulted GVL's complex. Due to the inability of the Sinoe local police force to maintain control, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) forces were summoned to disperse the demonstrators and remove international workers. 87 Following an order from the Greenville City Magistrate Court, Liberia's elite Police Support Unit (PSU) executed a search and seizure warrant while wearing full body armor and armed with semi-automatic weapons. The warrant included economic sabotage, terroristic threat, criminal mischief, and rioting as among the offenses. 88 Then, 17 young males with bodily injuries were incarcerated in a crammed Greenville cell. Among them was Fred Thompson, who died of an unexplained reason and was buried without an examination after 49 days in prison. 89 When asked what GVL is doing to eliminate imprisonment, the director of Corporate Communications said that the firm would want incarcerated individuals to be handled according to the law. 90 To address these issues, Justice Minister Benedict Sannoh released a statement in February 2015 urging local populations to avoid concessionaires, as the government would not tolerate any action that obstructs or otherwise disrupts the smooth functioning of concessionaires operating inside. 91 Previously, in June 2011, President Sirleaf cautioned the inhabitants of Sinoe County against unpatriotic and anti-nationalistic behavior that would jeopardize GVL operations and deter possible investors. 92 In December, the president issued another warning in response to local protests against another concessionaire, as revealed in this statement: 57 underequipped peripheral health centers, two physicians, and eight community health officers. 97 Apart from an increase in crime (including robbery, murder, and rape), Koidu has become a flashpoint for violent riots against corporate development, frequently resulting in the declaration of a state of emergency, with central authorities invoking Military Assistance to Civil Power (MACP) for extended periods. In December 2007, police officers stationed at Koidu holdings fatally shot two demonstrators, prompting the business's suspension and the creation of the Jenkins-Johnston Commission of Inquiry, which issued a scathing report against the corporation. Five years later, in December 2012, police murdered two more people during a strike by miners seeking better pay and working conditions. Along with the promised Christmas bonus, 'the miners demanded a change in what they characterized as horrible working conditions and an end to suspected racism' in the mines. 98 These relationships between indigenous peoples, the state, and corporate actors show an uncanny similarity to the settler-colonial economy of around a half-century ago. Although legality is often challenged, as Chalmers argues in her study of Liberia's Central Prison system, it stands at the epicenter of a colonizing force that converts individuals into living dead via acts of sovereign expression. 99 These people are experiencing capitalism law 'with a repertory of language, legal forms, and institutional practices' that places a premium on the market and contract as the foundations of a stable socioeconomic order. 100 In Liberia, one research highlighted that concession talks often prioritize the government's claim to land ownership above indigenous groups' traditional land tenure. 101 These concession agreements are inaccessible to community members not just because copies are lacking but also because they are written in extremely legalistic and technical language that is unintelligible to the rural population's majority of illiterates. According to corporate lawyers, these 97 Ibid. 98  This legal authority serves as a reminder of 'how legality became the preeminent signifier of state legitimacy and "civilization"' during the period when Europeans lacked permission via an election process to govern over non-white people, as Hussain analyses. 103 Hussain discusses the rule of law, which he defines as a "government bound by fixed rules applicable to all." Once "law" is conceptualized as a "process" rather than an immutable system of justice comprised of a set of normative rules derived from either a rational social contract or an unwritten constitution predating conquest, the stage was set for periodic interruptions of this process to attend to a competing but equally vital tutelary obligation: ensuring the "safety of the people." 104 Hussain states that the instance of martial law, the blatant display of military might, was seen as edifying in and of itself. It aided in the inculcation of a "habit of obedience," a consciousness of the state as a sovereign power, an essential prerequisite for subjects to obtain before being pronounced suitable for political activity. Hussain explains that martial law in colonial India served as the common-law counterpart of a continental proclamation of the state of siege, a royal edict authorizing the army to assume the jurisdiction of civil courts. 105 However, martial law was theoretically constructed within the language and logic of common law. It enabled propagandists and apologists to claim legitimately or fraudulently that extending the rule of law to the colonies was a good thing.
Additionally, this legislation was utilized to resolve Mamdani's 'native issue,' which concerned how a small settler-colonial minority could govern over an indigenous majority. 106 Nonetheless, this imposition is the reimagining of customary law by settler-colonial control.
While Sierra Leone and Liberia have a dual land tenure system, contemporary elites are delighted to support paramount chiefs who act as caretakers of common land, especially in chiefdoms representing what Mamdani refers to as decentralized despots. 107 As was the case in Tankoro Chiefdom, where the paramount chief was on the board of directors of the main mining corporation, it makes strategic sense for the state and global capital to bargain with strong land custodians rather than an entire community. Similarly, DFID's backing for President Kabbah's Paramount Chief Restoration Programme (PCRP) paralleled the British-pioneered tactics of indirect colonial authority in Africa. The UK was even ready to construct residences for returning paramount chiefs, spending around $2,277,442 over two years, rescinding the plan only when public concern over supporting a traditional domination style seemed to contradict Blair's ethical foreign policy image. 108 As was the case during colonial times, this elite alliance has been maintained as central administrations have concentrated on integrating the dual land tenure system into a single neoliberal framework, as Sierra Leone's 2017 Land Policy indicates. Additionally, both nations' settler-colonial laws traditionally recognized customary land tenure exclusively in surface acreage, sometimes awarding the state exclusive rights to resources lying six feet under the soil.
The reconfiguration of this relationship demonstrates unequivocally that when major corporate players dominate nations or become inextricably linked to them, legislation becomes a product of the economy, and what was previously "Western" rule has become global corporate capitalism. However, as a political scholar, Fitzjames Stephen famously observed, the law regulates the most significant aspects of people's everyday lives' and constitutes a moral victory that is more dramatic, more enduring, and more substantial than physical conquest. 109 There is trust in the law's strength, even among those oppressed by it. For example, in March 2016, Sierra Leone's high court ruled that a Chinese company, Orient Agriculture Ltd., must pay $52,300 in compensation to families displaced from their farmland in Nimiyama Chiefdom, one of those rare cases intended to demonstrate that the system is not entirely unjust, as Thompson would argue. 110 Following the judgment, one of the locals credited the legislation, stating that before, we were amputees, but today we have two complete hands because the law is on our side. 111 According to Sonkita Conteh, director of NAMATI Sierra Leone, the judgment demonstrates a way to wring justice out of a dysfunctional system. 112 While NAMATI's efforts are to be appreciated, the study of law and colonialism is necessary to remind attorneys that the legal system may be functioning as intended and that even tiny victories may serve just to legitimize the present system. When individuals seek salvation via the same legal system, it makes perfect sense that law was the 'sum and substance' of what settler-colonial governments desired to educate the indigenous population. 113 While Butaw and Kono's stories demonstrate the pervasive link between the judicial system and past injustices, any attempt to undermine the established order must occur within the system. Within the system, the order must exist-as theorized by Dugard, this implies that the legal system works to institutionalize control while also impeding radical social reform. 114 The profits from Sierra Leone's and Liberia's post-war economic boom did little to improve the living conditions of the overwhelming majority of ordinary citizens are no longer surprising, as this neoliberal reality is all too prevalent throughout post-colonial Africa, according to the 2012 Africa Progress 109 Nasser Husain, supra note 103 at 4. 110 Edward Palmer Thomson, supra note 27.
Panel report. 115 Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General, was spot on when he observed that these reforms have concentrated "too much of Africa's enormous resource wealth … in the hands of narrow elites and, increasingly, foreign investors without being turned into tangible benefits for its people." 116 It may be novel that when marginalized populations seek to protest these social injustices, they often face the violence of law enforcement agents trained and equipped by the international community.

VIII. CONCLUSION
As with Sitze's examination of post-apartheid South Africa's rule of law reform, I have used a post-colonial lens to argue that post-war legal reconstruction in Sierra Leone and Liberia not only failed to deliver on emancipatory promises but was also downright obstructive by reinforcing socio-legal domination at the expense of historical struggles for social equality. Apart from obscuring the settler-colonial roots of political violence, international efforts to rebuild the rule of law have been preoccupied with re-establishing the post-colonial state and transitioning to a functioning market economy, processes that have historically resulted in structural injustices in both countries. However, past battles for social justice have been repressed, not erased, by neoliberal peace-as shown by the people of Butaw and Kono-indicating the continuance of popular dissatisfaction with the 'post-conflict' state and corporate world. These social concerns have endured because coloniality is inextricably linked to transitional justice and the rule of law reform initiatives, often heralded as emancipatory endeavors. This analysis, like the scholarship on legal colonization to which I am indebted, poses a more serious challenge to rule of law reformers: until the history of legal development in post-colonial societies is rigorously interrogated and deconstructed, (re)building the rule of law will end up reinstating the structural injustices that precipitated social and political conflicts in the first place. Taking settler-colonial history seriously is the first step toward decolonizing the post-conflict rule of law project. This process requires the law to be grounded in a social sense of justice and responsibility less influenced by the modern state and corporate capitalist interests disguised as efficiency. Political consciousness and examining the material reality are required in decolonizing foreign intervention.