War biographies: Human rights violations during the 1991-2002 Sierra Leone civil conflict

Documenting the effects of conflict is impeded by data unavailability. Utilising data with retrospective questions addresses this challenge since it generates quasi-longitudinal information. Individual testimonies collected by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) established in South Africa and Sierra Leone are characteristic of these types of data because they enable victims to retrospectively recount human rights abuses. The 2004 Sierra Leone TRC dataset exemplifies a unique human rights data, enabling researchers to document the effects of the Sierra Leone civil war, 1991-2002. The data emanated from testimonies by 7,706 Sierra Leoneans. It is a human rights database with seventeen categories of violations summarised to: killing, forced displacement, destruction of property, sexual violence, physical abuse, arbitrary detention, forced imprisonment and pillaging. Quantification of the testimonies resulted in 40,242 violations records. This study documents the effects of the conflict through geospatial mapping of violations at different administrative levels. The analysis is important because the effects of conflict are asymmetrically distributed across the regions affected. This paper asserts that regional differences in human rights violations underlie these variations in the post-war population distribution.