Oil, diamonds, timber, food aid - just some of the suggestions put forward as explanations for African wars in the past decade. Another set of suggestions focuses on ethnic and clan considerations. These economic and ethnic or clan explanations contend that wars are specifically not fought by states for political interests with mainly conventional military means, as originally suggested by Carl von Clausewitz in the 19th century. This study shows how alternative social organizations to the state can be viewed as political actors using war as a political instrument.
In the aftermath of an armed conflict in Africa, the international community both produces and demands from local partners a variety of blueprints for reconstructing state and society. The aim is to re-formalize the state after what is viewed as a period of fragmentation. In reality, African economies and polities are very much informal in character, with informal actors, including so-called Big Men, often using their positions in the formal structure as a means to reach their own goals. Through a variety of in-depth case studies, including the DRC, Sierra Leone and Liberia, this comprehensive volume shows how important informal political and economic networks are in many of the continent’s conflict areas. Moreover, it demonstrates that without a proper understanding of the impact of these networks, attempts to formalize African states, particularly those emerging from wars, will be in vain.
Moran argues that democracy is not a foreign import into Africa, but that essential aspects of what we in the West consider democratic values are part of the indigenous traditions of legitimacy and political process.
Almost ten years on from the official end of wars in Sierra Leone (2002) and Liberia (2003), attention is shifting from post-war peacebuilding to longer-term development. What headway has been made? What challenges lie ahead? And what lessons that can be learnt? This issue of Accord draws on experiences and perspectives from across societies in both countries to explore comparative lessons and examine progress, and argues that peacebuilding policy and practice needs to concentrate more on people: on repairing and building relationships among communities, and between communities and the state; and on developing more participatory politics and society that includes marginalised groups. It suggests that customary practices and mechanisms can help deliver essential services across a range sectors, and that local civil society can facilitate national and international policy engagement with them.
Liberia was the scene of two devastating civil wars since late 1989 and became widely considered a failed state. By contrast, the country is frequently described as a success story since the international professional Ellen Johnson Sirleaf assumed the presidency following democratic elections in 2005. The book investigates the political economy of civil war and democratic peace and puts the developments into historical perspective. The author argues that the civil wars did not represent the breakdown of the state but exhibited dynamics characteristic of state formation. His analysis of continuity and change in Liberia's political evolution details both political progress and persistent structural deficits of the polity. Book jacket.
This book challenges the dominant view that the first Liberian civil war was caused by ethno-cultural antagonisms between and among the country's various ethnic groups. Alternatively, the book argues that the war was the consequence of the multifaceted crises of underdevelopment - cultural, economic, political, and social - generated by the neo-colonial Liberian State.
“After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa.” Over a decade after leaving her three sons behind in Liberia, Hannah Musgrave realizes she has to leave her farm in the Adirondacks and find out what has happened to them and the chimpanzees for whom she created a sanctuary. The Darling is the story of her return to the wreckage of west Africa and the story of her past, from her middle-class American upbringing to her years in the Weather Underground. It is also one of the most powerful novels of the decade, an unforgettable tale of growth and loss, and an unstinting exploration of some of the most troubling issues of our time: terrorism, race, and the contact between the first world and the third. Hannah Musgrave, the narrator of The Darling, tells us she first travelled to Africa in the mid-1970s, to escape prosecution for her radical political activities with the Weathermen. Arriving in Liberia to work in a medical research lab, Hannah – also known by her alias, Dawn Carrington – meets Woodrow Sundiata, an official in the ministry of public health, and they fall immediately in love. Courting with Woodrow, an intelligent, ambitious man, means encountering his other life in his ancestral village of Fuama – a life that could scarcely be more different from Hannah’s affluent childhood as the daughter of a bestselling pediatrician. Hannah and Woodrow start a family, but she feels herself to be somehow estranged from her life in Liberia and curiously detached from her husband and three sons. Still in search of herself as her children grow older, Hannah develops a closer and closer bond with the chimpanzees at the lab, whom she calls “dreamers.” During the early 1980s, Liberian society grows more unstable, until an illiterate soldier named Samuel Doe brutally overthrows and assassinates the president. Hannah’s courageous intervention with Doe leads to Woodrow’s release from detention, but at a price: she must return to the US, leaving her family behind. Hannah feels that her dreamers will feel her absence more deeply than her family will. In the US Hannah briefly reconnects with her parents after years of estrangement before returning to her friends from her underground years. One of them, Zack Procter, is involved with a plan to spring Charles Taylor – an attractive Liberian politician – from jail, and Hannah involves herself with the plot, genuinely believing that Taylor will bring social democracy to west Africa. Hannah gets permission to return to her family in the mid-1980s, and decides that this time things will be different: she will take charge of her home life, ousting Woodrow’s young cousin Jeanette, and she will build a sanctuary for her chimpanzees. But Charles Taylor has also returned, and his slow and bloody rebellion against Doe leads, eventually, to a night of horrific violence in which Woodrow is murdered and Hannah’s teenaged children disappear. Amidst chaos and almost unbelievable bloodshed, Hannah has time only to move her dreamers to Boniface Island before facing the heartrending decision to escape Liberia, leaving her children behind. More than ten years will pass before she can return to discover their fate, and understand her own.
The reform and the democratic control of the security sector-and the joining together of security and development-have become a major focus of international intervention into post-conflict societies. In theory, security sector reform (SSR) programs derive from a comprehensive national defense and security review. They involve, at the core, the transformation of a country's military and police forces-but they also involve a comprehensive review and restructuring of intelligence services, the penitentiary, the judiciary, and other agencies charged in some way with preserving and promoting the safety and security of the state and its citizenry. However, the process of SSR in Liberia, supported by the United Nations, the United States, and a number of bilateral donors, is far more rudimentary than the conceptual paradigm suggests. It is aimed simply at the training and equipping of the army and the police, with little attention or resources being devoted to the other components of the security system.
