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This article empirically deepens understandings of the relationship between everyday ex-combatants and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone. It asks, what are the agentic implications of this victim-centred model of justice among its designated perpetrators (everyday or ordinary ex-combatants)? This article advances criticisms against the participatory limitations of the victim-centred model of justice in truth commissions. It applies the concept of friction to analyse the theft of agency produced by Sierra Leone’s TRC among everyday ex-combatants. It analyses the contradictions between everyday ex-combatant hopes for the TRC against institutional expectations set for this population to reveal the agentic effects of this sticky engagement. In so doing, this article exposes the agentic theft produced by compound frictions which interact to deny agency among those designated as perpetrators by the material engagement and frictional travels of transitional justice. It argues that the primacy placed on the restoration of victims’ dignity within truth commissions comes at a particularly heavy cost for the population of everyday ex-combatants, who experience multiple processes of exclusion as a result.

Between hope and expectation: understanding ordinary ex-combatant agency in Sierra Leone’s TRC