State Building Interventions In Post Conflict Liberia

Post-conflict Liberia has been subjected to extensive international state-building, at some point hosting the largest and one of the longest UN peacekeeping missions in the world, and inflow of aid that exceeds in multiples the GDP. In order to understand the international state-building efforts in Liberia, it is pertinent to reflect them against the extractive and predatory nature of the Liberian republic, and the central role natural resources exploitation and plantations have played in accommodating transnational interest in the country’s abundant natural resources and fertile land. This book focuses on the political economy of Liberian state-building, and in particular the question of the governance of natural resources. By combining a historical perspective and ethnographic knowledge, the author examines a number of interrelated questions: How was access to the state distributed in Liberian state-building? How are those to be governed and their representation included in political economic decision making, and more particularly, in decisions over natural resources governance? This book will be of interest to students and scholars of state-building, international development, African political science and political economy.

In the aftermath of the Liberian civil war, groups of ex-combatants seized control of natural resource enclaves in the rubber, diamond, and timber sectors. With some of them threatening a return to war, these groups were widely viewed as the most significant threats to Liberia's hard-won peace. Building on fieldwork and socio-historical analysis, this book shows how extralegal groups are driven to provide basic governance goods in their bid to create a stable commercial environment. This is a story about how their livelihood strategies merged with the opportunities of Liberia's post-war political economy. But it is also a context-specific story that is rooted in the country's geography, its history of state-making, and its social and political practices. This volume demonstrates that extralegal groups do not emerge in a vacuum. In areas of limited statehood, where the state is weak and political authority is contested, where rule of law is corrupted and government distrust runs deep, extralegal groups can provide order and dispute resolution, forming the basic kernel of the state. This logic counters the prevailing 'spoiler' narrative, forcing us to reimagine non-state actors and recast their roles as incidental statebuilders in the evolutionary process of state-making. This leads to a broader argument: it is trade, rather than war, that drives contemporary statebuilding. Along the way, this book poses some uncomfortable questions about what it means to be legitimately governed, whether our trust in states is ultimately misplaced, whether entrenched corruption is the most likely post-conflict outcome, and whether our expectations of international peacebuilding and statebuilding are ultimately self-defeating.

Peacebuilding in Africa: The Post-Conflict State and Its Multidimensional Crises argues that building enduring peace in post-conflict states in Africa requires comprehensive, state-specific approaches that address the multidimensional crises that generated civil conflict and instabilities in these countries. Contributors examine states such as Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, and Sudan to demonstrate that peacebuilding projects in each of these states must address the cultural, economic, political, and social root causes of their respective underlying civil conflicts. In addition, contributors prove that peacebuilding projects must be shaped by the centrality of human security: the respect for ethno-cultural diversity, the advancement of human material well-being, the protection of political rights and civil liberties, and the redesigning of the military and security architecture to ensure the safety of all citizens from both internal and external threats.

This new Handbook offers a combination of theoretical, thematic and empirical analyses of the statebuilding regime, written by leading international scholars. Over the past decade, international statebuilding has become one of the most important and least understood areas of international policy-making. Today, there are around one billion people living in some 50-60 conflict-affected, 'fragile' states, vulnerable to political violence and civil war. The international community grapples with the core challenges and dilemmas of using outside force, aid, and persuasion to build states in the wake of conflict and to prevent such countries from lapsing into devastating violence. The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding is a comprehensive resource for this emerging area in International Relations. The volume is designed to guide the reader through the background and development of international statebuilding as a policy area, as well as exploring in depth significant issues such as security, development, democracy and human rights. Divided into three main parts, this Handbook provides a single-source overview of the key topics in international statebuilding: Part One: Concepts and Approaches Part Two: Security, Development and Democracy Part Three: Policy Implementation This Handbook will be essential reading for students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, peacebuilding, development, war and conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.

This book examines the ways in which long-term processes of state-formation limit the possibilities for short-term political projects of statebuilding. Using process-oriented approaches, the contributing authors explore what happens when conscious efforts at statebuilding ‘meet’ social contexts, and are transformed into daily routines. In order to explain their findings, they also analyse the temporally and spatially broader structures of world society which shape the possibilities of statebuilding. Statebuilding and State-Formation includes a variety of case studies from post-conflict societies in Africa, Asia and Europe, as well as the headquarters and branch offices of international agencies. Drawing on various theoretical approaches from sociology and anthropology, the contributors discuss external interventions as well as self-led statebuilding projects. This edited volume is divided into three parts: Part I: State-Formation, Violence and Political Economy Part II: Governance, Legitimacy and Practice in Statebuilding and State-Formation Part III: The International Self – Statebuilders’ Institutional Logics, Social Backgrounds and Subjectivities The book will be of great interest to students of statebuilding and intervention, war and conflict studies, international security and IR.

This innovative Handbook offers a new perspective on the cutting-edge conceptual advances that have shaped – and continue to shape – the field of intervention and statebuilding.

The shocks of the unexpected outbreak of violent internal armed conflicts in post Cold War West Africa continue to linger in policy and academic circles. While considerable attention is devoted to explaining the civil wars, there is little understanding of the delicate and unpredictable processes of reconstruction. Post-war reconstruction programmes in Africa have become, by and large, externally driven processes; and while externalisation may not be negative per se, it is important to interrogate how such intervention recognises and interacts with local dynamics, and how it manipulates and conditions the outcomes of post-conflict reconstruction agenda. Investigating the interface between power elite, the nature of post-war regimes and the pattern which post-war reconstruction takes is important both for theory and practice. This original study, by some of West Africa's leading scholars, interrogates post-war reconstruction processes in the twin West African countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone, focusing on the effects of regime types on the nature, scope, success or failure of their post-war reconstruction efforts. Political scientists, diplomats, the international community, donor and humanitarian agencies, advocacy groups, the United Nations and its agencies, would find it an important resource in dealing with countries emerging from protracted violence and civil war.

This new Handbook offers a combination of theoretical, thematic and empirical analyses of the statebuilding regime, written by leading international scholars. Over the past decade, international statebuilding has become one of the most important and least understood areas of international policy-making. Today, there are around one billion people living in some 50-60 conflict-affected, 'fragile' states, vulnerable to political violence and civil war. The international community grapples with the core challenges and dilemmas of using outside force, aid, and persuasion to build states in the wake of conflict and to prevent such countries from lapsing into devastating violence. The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding is a comprehensive resource for this emerging area in International Relations. The volume is designed to guide the reader through the background and development of international statebuilding as a policy area, as well as exploring in depth significant issues such as security, development, democracy and human rights. Divided into three main parts, this Handbook provides a single-source overview of the key topics in international statebuilding: Part One: Concepts and Approaches Part Two: Security, Development and Democracy Part Three: Policy Implementation This Handbook will be essential reading for students of statebuilding, humanitarian intervention, peacebuilding, development, war and conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.