Chain work: the cultivation of hierarchy in Sierra Leone’s cannabis economy

Christopher A. Suckling

Review of African Political Economy, 2016, vol. 43, issue 148, 206-226

Abstract: Violence is often treated as an organisational complement to illicit drug production in the global South. The article challenges this view with reference to the ‘chain work’ undertaken by Sierra Leone’s cannabis cultivators. Life histories reveal that the migration of cultivators from Kingston, Jamaica to Sierra Leone’s Hastings and Waterloo established apprenticeship as the means by which young men participated in the cannabis economy under the guidance of those they referred to as ‘shareholders’. These shareholders acted as gatekeepers for access to land, cross-border exchange and extra-legal networks. The resulting structural advantages limited challenges by newcomers for an activity usually understood to be ‘naturally’ contestable. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, cultivators are shown to reproduce practices that maintained the dominance of bosses without recourse to violence.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2016.1170677

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