Liberia's War Recurrence: Grievance over Greed
Scholars of peacebuilding are increasingly moving beyond questions of how to reach negotiated settlements to how an apparently stable postwar peace can be consolidated. Liberia offers a good case study, as its civil war of 1990–96 seemed to have concluded with an internationally supported election in 1997 and the withdrawal of international peacekeeping forces. Yet it experienced renewed warfare involving many of the same actors by 2000. What explains the failure of Liberia's peace? Recent research on civil wars has emphasized the causal role of poverty, natural resource dependency, and weak state institutions. Although Liberia reflects many of these factors, I argue here that grievance and exclusionary behavior underlie Liberia's civil war recurrence. These findings suggest that national actors and international peacebuilders should focus strategies on addressing postwar elected governments’ exclusionary conduct toward former enemies.