y sergeant, leaded the RUF- with the argument that he represented the urban dispossessed and promised impoverished peasants a greater share in the mineral wealth misused by the government. The grievance was being used as a driver to alter the sense of the fight, and allow the greedy to take control of the situation and turning it into a 9-year war, concentrating it in the diamond districts. In 1999, Sankoh and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, president of Sierra Leone at the time, signed the Lome Peace Accord (UNSC, 1999) under pressure of the United Nations and the US Government. As a concession to RUF, Sankoh was released from death sentence for his war crimes and was appointed as chairman of the Strategic Mineral Resources Commission, a position that controlled most of Sierra Leone’s diamond exports.
Corruption, impunity and a lack of fulfilment of civil grievances led to international agencies to intervene in the form of peacekeeping operations. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), worked as the international response to conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia and DRC. This strategy was focused on commodity sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and aims to establish transparency in the whole process of the diamond industry. The effectiveness of the Kimberley Process is also very debatable; however, what is has been proved is that the framework has inspired to move forward in order to comprehend more the complexities of this conflict (and others in the Global South) that consequently, motivated the creation of the KPCS. (Ballentine and Nitzschke, 2004).
“Sierra Leone’s descent into conflict cannot be adequately understood as a manifestation of a nihilistic ‘new barbarism’. Nor should it be seen solely as a function of a greed-based warlordism that stands outside the ‘normal’ political economy of the state, the region, or indeed the globalized world” (Pugh et al. 2004, page 132).
2.2 Indonesia
Differently from the clear greed projection in the study case mentioned before, Indonesia experienced a drastic turndown of their main commodities’ regions and the life quality of their inhabitants. From 1968 with the rise of Suharto into the power to the late 1990s, the new era called New Order boosted Indonesia’s macroeconomics, all these based on natural resources like oil, gas, mining and timber (Indonesia-Investment, 2013). “During this period, oil was the country’s main export commodity and a major source of government revenue. In the 1980s, the role of oil as a source of revenue declined while that of other natural resource commodities, such as liquid natural gas (LNG), timber and minerals, increased. By the mid-1990s, Indonesia had become the world’s largest exporter of LNG and plywood, the second largest producer of tin (after China), the third largest exporter of thermal coal (after Australia and South Africa), and the third largest exporter of copper (after the US and Chile)” (Tadjoeddin, 2007, page 12). Regional dynamics, along with East Timor’s independence and the radical increase of private investments in primary resources in the country, left locals without any opportunity to obtain wealth.
