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At the end of their country's 14-year civil war (1989–2003), Liberian women established Peace Huts to provide conflict resolution and mediation services to disputing community members. Peace Huts are modeled on the centuries-old Palava Hut system used to address disputes, but the latter are largely run by men. This article examines how Liberian women have adopted the Palava Hut system to suit their needs in the interest of advancing transitional justice. We document and analyse what women do at Peace Hut sites and how their pursuit of peace and gender justice is related to motherwork, understood in feminist scholarship as the exercise of political agency through maternal activism. Based on a year-long study with women who provide social labour in Peace Huts, this article seeks to provide insight into how women participate in post-conflict initiatives amid infrastructural challenges, structural violence and tensions between the best legal approaches to gender justice and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plural legal system in post-conflict Liberia expresses tensions between modern and customary institutions. This article seeks to understand how Liberians navigate choices in the plural legal system to address gender-based violence cases. By asking how and why people make the choices they do, we highlight how Liberians solve tensions between institutions, by creating flexible categories that allow them to pursue a course of action that does not compromise their ability to access social networks and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the use of Personal Protective Equipment in humanitarianism. It takes the recent Ebola outbreak as a case through which to explore the role of objects in saving individual lives and protecting populations. The argument underlines the importance of PPE in mediating between individual patient care and biosecurity. In addition it questions the preoccupation with technical fixes; challenges dominant perceptions about the subject of humanitarianism being the victims of disaster; traces the production of a particular politics of life; and explores the individualisation of risk and concomitant processes of labour discipline in the everyday lives of humanitarian workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN Security Council meeting on 18 September 2014 represented a major turning-point in the international response to the Ebola outbreak then underway in West Africa. However, in the light of widespread criticism over the tardiness of the international response, it can be argued that the UN, and particularly the Security Council, failed to make best use of a potential resource it already had on the ground in Liberia: the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). This article examines whether UNMIL could have done more to contribute to the emergency response and attempts to draw some lessons from this experience for potential peacekeeper involvement in future public health emergencies. UNMIL could have done more than it did within the terms of its mandate, although it may well have been hampered by factors such as its own capacities, the views of Troop Contributing Countries and the approach taken by the Liberian government. This case can inform broader discussions over the provision of medical and other forms of humanitarian assistance by peacekeeping missions, such as the danger of politicising humanitarian aid and peacekeepers doing more harm than good. Finally, we warn that a reliance on peacekeepers to deliver health services during ‘normal’ times could foster a dangerous culture of dependency, hampering emergency responses if the need arises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]