Search

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]

This article focuses on the personal missionary experience of an African American woman physician, Dr Georgia Ester Lee Patton (1864-1900), later known as Georgia Washington. Patton worked in Liberia, a unique setting for missionary activities, being a colony established by former American slaves. The primary resource materials used here are missionary photographic archives, which comprise a distinct category of colonial cultural production. Photography assisted missions in promoting western achievements, disseminating Christianity, and advancing progress, by exposing Africans to western civilization. Such imagery was largely created by European photographers working within the social milieu of missionary organizations. Missionary photographs, therefore, functioned as an official public record of the missionary enterprise; today they are invaluable records of the histories of Christian missions around the globe. Missionary archives exist as both public and private archives. Private archives, as opposed to the images planned for a public audience, were compiled by individual missionaries and intended for private viewings. For this case study I use the private archive Patton compiled after she worked as a medical missionary in Liberia between 1893 and 1895. Patton later returned to Tennessee, where she became the first woman physician in the city of Memphis. This article seeks to determine how Patton’s perception of herself as an African American, as a woman, as a Christian, and as a physician influenced her unusual experience as a medical missionary in late nineteenth-century West Africa. [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]

The Ebola virus disease that emerged in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea in 2014 created an unprecedented public health emergency that caught national and international organizations off guard. Despite available guidelines to respond to public health emergencies, coordinated action to control the disease only came almost 6 months after what is now considered the first human contact with the virus. Theory-based frameworks, like the ideation model and the pathways framework, are important tools for guiding research and the design of communication activities and strategies to effectively impact on the more likely determinants of the intended behavior. By using theory, these frameworks increase the chances that localized research and communication interventions can effectively change desired behaviors and their behavioral determinants. In an outbreak situation such frameworks are all the more important, when time is of the essence and lives are on the line. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic entered Liberia through Lofa County in February 2014 and spread to two health districts where the nongovernmental organization Global Communities had been implementing community-led total sanitation (CLTS) since 2012. By December 2014 the county had 928 Ebola cases (422 of them confirmed) and 648 deaths. Before the epidemic, CLTS was triggered in 155 communities, and 98 communities were certified as Open Defecation Free (ODF). Using mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, we determined that no cases of EVD were found in ODF communities and in only one CLTS community that had not reached ODF status. No differences were found between EVD and non-EVD communities in tribe, religion, ethnic group, or major sources of Ebola information. Radio was the most common source of information for all communities, but health workers were the most trusted information sources. CLTS ODF communities attributed their avoidance of EVD to Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene behaviors, especially hand washing with soap and disposal of feces that they learned from CLTS prior to the epidemic. Communities that got EVD blamed their strong initial resistance to Ebola response messages on their distrust that Ebola was real and their reliance on friends and family for advice. A strong inverse correlation between EVD and CLTS with or without ODF emerged from the regression analysis (R = –.6). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This brief essay is a commentary on how critical health communication theory can contribute to an understanding of the cultural dynamics of infectious disease pandemics. In particular, we focus on a specific trajectory of health communication theorizing—the culture-centered approach—and its heuristic and pragmatic utility in enhancing knowledge about public health crises like infectious disease outbreaks. In the backdrop of the mobilizations against the 2014 Ebola virus disease epidemic in the 3 West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, indigenous cultural practices were construed as pathogenic and local agency of affected communities disregarded, even as the global risks of the epidemic were highlighted. In contrast to this interventionist notion of culture, the culture-centered approach offers a heuristic rubric through which to scrutinize the dialectical interrelationship between indigenous cultural practices, structural determinants of health, and the everyday agency of individuals of affected communities. We argue that such a listening-based paradigm of communication theorizing is instrumental in developing authentic, ethical, and effective health communication practice in public health crises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During an emerging health crisis like the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, communicating with communities to learn from them and to provide timely information can be a challenge. Insight into community thinking, however, is crucial for developing appropriate communication content and strategies and for monitoring the progress of the emergency response. In November 2014, the Health Communication Capacity Collaborative partnered with GeoPoll to implement a Short Message Service (SMS)–based survey that could create a link with affected communities and help guide the communication response to Ebola. The ideation metatheory of communication and behavior change guided the design of the survey questionnaire, which produced critical insights into trusted sources of information, knowledge of transmission modes, and perceived risks—all factors relevant to the design of an effective communication response that further catalyzed ongoing community actions. The use of GeoPoll’s infrastructure for data collection proved a crucial source of almost-real-time data. It allowed for rapid data collection and processing under chaotic field conditions. Though not a replacement for standard survey methodologies, SMS surveys can provide quick answers within a larger research process to decide on immediate steps for communication strategies when the demand for speedy emergency response is high. They can also help frame additional research as the response evolves and overall monitor the pulse of the situation at any point in time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Peacebuilding actors have been heavily criticized for being postcolonial, orientalist and mired in a Western rationality, causing a gap between needs on the ground and the means provided, and resulting in poor delivery. From recent fieldwork in Liberia, Haiti and South Sudan we argue that while there is merit to much of this critique, there is also a will to analyse and understand the local political economy and how international actors become a part of it, but that peacebuilding tends to fall victim to conflicting power structures within the UN and between international actors, as well as to the lack of application of acquired knowledge and cumbersome processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite increased international attention to managing the potential impacts of peacekeeping on host countries, unintended consequences continue to emerge. This article focuses particularly on the alternative economies that peacekeeping operations generate and the differential economic impacts on individuals who come into contact with peacekeepers. Based on empirical evidence derived from fieldwork in Liberia, the article highlights the everyday lives of women whose livelihoods have been affected by the presence of peacekeeping missions. It also discusses how such economies adjust during the peacekeeping drawdown phase, and explores the dynamics that such economies have on specific segments of the Liberian population. The argument is that, while peacekeeping economies are critical in stimulating the local economy and providing livelihoods during and in the immediate aftermath of war, they have negative unintended impacts that need mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programmes, return to home communities is a normative given, around which reinsertion and reintegration support is planned. Yet such an approach is oblivious of pre-war social dynamics of rebel recruitment and civilian experiences of rebel abuse and coercion. These manifest as important sources of social tension between communities and combatants in the post-war period and complicate reintegration. This research shows that the ‘recruitment–reintegration’ nexus offers a key variable for explaining tensions between civilian communities and ex-combatants in post-conflict Liberia, and could be leveraged in future efforts to improve DDR programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the efforts of external actors to influence opportunities for national political elites to gain or maintain positions of power in post-conflict societies. The analysis compares the cases of Liberia and Kosovo, both of which have been characterized by high levels of external intervention though with significant differences in the scope of authority of external actors. Despite these differences, similar dynamics have characterized elite formation in both countries. The impact of external actors on elite systems is mostly indirect, and chances for accumulating authority provided by the national setting determine elite careers. External actors bow to these national conditions rather than decisively changing them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The war that ravaged Liberia between 1989 and 2003 had myriad causes and belligerents, but there can be little question of the demographic cohort that provided the manpower for the war machine: youth. Young, disconnected Liberians became easy recruits to the conflict's warring factions as they sought a sense of importance and independence away from the cultural background that marginalized them. Building on qualitative field research in Liberia, this article bridges its primary case study with theory and secondary data, to examine the threat of post-war re-marginalization and disengagement of youth in the country. The article argues that economic reintegration programmes have not addressed issues of youth empowerment directly enough, and that targeted political and social engagement strategies from a vertical and horizontal integration perspective would be more effective in the re-engagement of youth in civilian life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the cessation of civil conflict in 2003, the Liberian government is poised to expand greatly its protected area network to conserve the country's remaining rainforest. Liberia holds within its borders nearly half of the remaining Guinean rainforest, a global biodiversity hotspot. The planning process for this effort has been a central part of rebuilding Liberia's forestry sector, which helped fuel past conflict. The process, known as the Liberia Forestry Initiative, is widely considered to have been exemplary with regard to multistakeholder dialogue and policy making. Because the issue of land tenure remains widely contested, however, the initiative risks seriously aggravating land rights problems, complicating the prospects for a durable peace. This article focuses on the process through which land was zoned for strict protection and how this process is likely to exacerbate land tenure conflict in Liberia's priority conservation areas. Although the international conservation community sees postconflict scenarios as opportunities for promoting conservation initiatives, unresolved land tenure issues make for problematic outcomes, including land disputes and legal disarray. Such problems can result in significant volatility and can make the peace process and recovery much more, not less, difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International agencies intervene to promote reform in Liberia with promises to remake the country. Yet elections produce victories for former wartime commanders and officials accused of corruption. Many of these people continue to play important roles in the economy and command vocal followings. International organizations face a choice between a more radical intervention that amounts to a counterinsurgency operation to remove these people from their positions at the risk of creating political instability, and tacit acceptance of their power. Looking beyond these choices, is it possible that corrupt members of the elite and insiders can contribute to economic growth and political stability? Comparison of the organization of corruption in Liberia with models in East Asia indicates that political networks rooted in Liberia's economy may offer the promise of helping to integrate ex-combatants into the economic life of the country and address local demands for participation in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]