In mid-April this year, the Analyst, a Monrovia newspaper, reported that US Ambassador to Liberia John Blaney warned that the current transition was Liberia’s last chance to secure its future and that successful October elections will “declare that Liberia is permanently at peace and ready for business investments that will create more jobs and bring prosperity.” The perception of elections as the key to lasting peace and development typifies the international community’s approach to post-conflict transitions in Africa. While the ambassador’s optimism is to be appreciated, the transformational power of elections has not borne out in the 25 years of violent conflicts in Liberia despite two failed transitions and has yet to show convincing results in neighboring Sierra Leone as well.

This essay examines critical elements of Liberia’s current post-conflict transition process and discusses some of the key challenges that must be addressed if Liberia is to transcend the cycle of violent conflicts in which it has been entrapped since the military coup of 1980 and build foundations for democracy and development. The current approach to post-conflict transition, like previous initiatives, does not offer sufficient opportunities for addressing governance issues that are basic to the attainment of durable peace and development. Unless appropriate governance reforms are integrated into the transition agenda, Liberia will not successfully embark on a new course. In pursuing this argument, I will briefly examine Liberia’s transition program, commenting on some of its key components and noting their underlying assumptions and implementation strategies. Lastly, I will comment on the contextual issues that pose major challenges to the success of the transition agenda in Liberia.

Challenges and Assumptions of Transition Initiative

The approach to post-conflict transition adopted in Liberia has drawn from a generic model typically used by the international community in most post-conflict situations in Africa. It calls for inserting a peacekeeping force, disarming armed groups, forming a power-sharing transitional government dominated by leaders of antagonistic armed groups, and holding elections. Limited peacebuilding activities undertaken before elections typically include restructuring the military (often to absorb ex-combatants), resettling some of the displaced, and initiating a transitional justice process. Studies of the effectiveness of this model are inconclusive. UN experts claim a success rate of 50 percent, but admit that the UN has only intervened in at most 50 percent of the post-Cold War internal wars waged around the world. In the case of Liberia, the application of this model has neither yielded peace nor formed the basis for longer-term governance due to the questionable assumptions that underlie the formulation, the mode of implementation employed, and the failure to sufficiently adapt the approach to the Liberian and wider Mano River basin contexts.

Flawed Assumptions About Power-sharing

Scholars and practitioners of peacebuilding processes have noted that some of the assumptions that underpin the current approach outlined above are questionable in certain circumstances. For example, the assumption that bringing leaders of armed groups into power-sharing arrangements gives them sufficient incentives to commit to peace and to become guardians of a process of building democratic institutions has proven questionable in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Sierra Leone in 1999, leaders of armed groups took advantage of power-sharing arrangements negotiated under the Lome Accord to launch new armed offensives despite the presence of a regional peacekeeping force. In 1997, Liberians were rushed into holding elections precisely because the power-sharing transitional government dominated by the leaders of armed groups broke down after a month-long firefight among them in Monrovia. Similar arrangements in the Democratic Republic of Congo hang precariously in the balance.

Observers of the Liberian conflict agree that while the current power-sharing transitional arrangements have supported disarmament and the attainment of a certain degree of much-needed physical peace, they have failed to end plunder and pillage, provide social peace, create an environment for reconstruction, and lay foundations for long-term democratic governance as expected; all this comes despite the presence of 15,000 UN peacekeepers and stern warnings issued by diplomats. What seems absent in these power-sharing arrangements among leaders of armed groups are credible third-party guarantees that include a stringent regime of sanctions and a robust enforcement mechanism. Under British leadership, such guarantees were eventually established by the international community in Sierra Leone. In the absence of comparable international leadership, the rush to elections is considered a way of avoiding the collapse of the transitional government in Liberia.

Eclectic Implementation

Another shortcoming of the post-conflict transition agenda in Liberia is that its various activities have been implemented without sufficient coordination and without the guidance of a long-term, larger vision for the post-conflict Liberian society and political community. The connections among disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants (DDR) are conceptually stated in all related documents, but were not effectively established in practice.

While this shortcoming can be attributed in part to resource constraints, it was also due to a lack of effective coordination among implementing agencies and a failure to fully engage Liberians as partners in the design and implementation of these activities, treating them instead as observers. For example, faith-based organizations and other groups that have been important in community-level conflict resolution and the survival strategies of local people were ignored in DDR. The failure to create an institutional framework for co-production of DDR and other transitional activities among the international community, the transitional government, and others in civil society has had substantial negative consequences for revitalizing public economies, jump-starting private sector initiatives, and garnering Liberian human resources for post-conflict reconstruction. From a Liberian perspective, the transition has proceeded largely as a checklist of mechanical tasks performed in Liberia by experts and UN diplomats and donor countries, with Liberians seen either as untamed warriors or ungrateful obstructionists.

It has been argued that Liberians are too divided to be brought into dialogue. This argument begs the question. It is precisely because Liberians are divided by fear and deep suspicion rooted in a legacy of predation, repression, and governance failure that dialogues must be initiated and mechanisms created to induce their joint participation in restoring their society. This is what peacebuilding is all about. It is true that the transaction costs of broadened participation in the transition process are high but the dividends to be gained in terms of deepened legitimacy make for a more robust transition process and greater confidence in the durability of the outcomes. The costs in lives and resources of failed transitions are far higher than those associated with a properly conceived and implemented transition process that relies on co-production with Liberians in the design and implementation of transition activities.