The known case of the ‘Conflict Diamonds’ in Sierra Leone demonstrates how a ‘greed’ perspective can be projected. This long war had many actors involved in it, including the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (RSLMF), various splinter groups and civil defence forces and private companies. (Richards, 2003, page 9). Sierra Leone experienced true violence in the 1990s, when grievances clashed local authorities, and rebel groups took control of these grievances and use them for the illegal exploitation of diamonds in order to reach personal interests. “Both the composition of the initial force that crossed into Sierra Leone and Taylor’s motivations for supporting the RUF highlight the regional dynamics that underpinned Sierra Leone’s conflict” (Pugh, Cooper, Goodhand, 2004). The civil war started on March 23, 1991, when a group of 100 fighters from Sierra Leone and Liberia invaded east Sierra Leone. Foday Sankoh, an ex-army 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).