Mats Utas (2003, 2005) and Danny Hoffman (2011) documented how Liberians built and rebuilt their lives while shuttling between camps, NGO jobs, cities, and armies and negotiated the possibilities of war-bounded worlds.
This is not to say that postwar Liberian life was unlivable, everywhere, all the time. People found opportunities for political, military, and social success. As Chris Coulter (2009) documented among ex-combatant women in Sierra Leone, after the war people reunited with families; some of those reunions were joyous, while some were painful. People learned who had lived and who had died, who had left for America and who had decided to stay behind in Guinea or Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire. Women and men found love and protection and created new families and communities. Mary Moran’s (2012) ongoing work on Liberian men who did not become combatants reveals how families remained strong and intact throughout the war, with family members often using any means necessary to keep their children from becoming fighters. Men and women found success in business, education, and NGOs, and many were promoted to national and international prominence through government, business, and NGO circuits. Schools operated, albeit intermittently, and people bought land and rebuilt homes.
But it would be accurate to say that the onset of peace did not begin at the end of the Liberian Civil War. Tendrils of violence and destabilization protruded into postconflict realities for years after 2003, and Liberians today recall the years of 2004, 2005, and 2006 as particularly terrifying and insecure. In the war’s aftermath, 50 percent of the Liberian population temporarily resettled in Monrovia, and most of the remainder moved into a few large towns and cities in the interior. People were dispossessed from their lives and at a loss as to how to move forward. Many had passed through the various institutions of the war—refugee camps, IDP camps, militias, and the various incarnations of the Liberian government—and had come through with new identities: Pentecostal, psychosocial worker, ex-combatant, politician. Though some had reaped huge benefits from the wartime economies, most people ended the war poorer than before, and their personal connections to prewar communities, ethnicities, and identities were more abstract than many liked to admit. There was rampant banditry, armed robbery, and homelessness, and family units often could not keep up with the constant need for care, realignment, and reinvention that the postconflict moment had created. Moreover, certain habits of violence that had been instilled in youth over the long period of war took years to fade away. Boundaries needed to be re-created around physical, domestic, and privately controlled space, and the battles to reenact those boundaries were often public, heated, and intensely personal.
In the relatively closed social, economic, and spatial boundaries of the postwar period, Liberians were transformed into beneficiaries of a massive, uncoordinated, and decentralized project of humanitarian social engineering. This included modernist practices of social persuasion like media campaigns, mass education initiatives, radio shows, theatrical presentations, and communal instruction in human rights, gender-based violence, and “peacebuilding.” In a parallel social universe, churches and mosques were used as vital locations for trauma healing, national forgiveness, and conflict resolution (Heaner 2010). People sought the Good News and instructions for living a good and moral life at church services, prayer meetings, and Bible groups, which also imposed elaborate social rules and behavioral restrictions on believers’ everyday lives. In addition, in such places of worship war criminals, war barons, prostitutes, and nearly everyone else sought, and gained, forgiveness and redemption for their wartime pasts.
Because the median age of the population during the postwar period was eighteen and because the Liberian war lasted, on and off, for approximately thirteen years, by the time the war ended, more than half the Liberians left alive had almost no memory of life before the war, and the balance of the population had spent most of their adult lives as transients. In contrast to the situation in neighboring Sierra Leone, where many rural communities remained intact during the war, many Liberian youth had no adult relatives in the country who could tell them what life had been like before the onset of the political violence of the Samuel Doe era. The change promised by the postconflict transition wasn’t just ephemeral—it was epochal, and very strange and unknown.
From the center of Monrovia, I watched the human environment of postwar subjectivity and tried to gauge social, cultural, and psychological resilience. From my perch, it seemed that the norms of West African life were turned inside out. On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, in 2005, I visited Mahtahdi, a suburban Monrovia neighborhood, for a community-based psychosocial training. There, I watched from the back of a truck as a surge of youth rioted around an NGO vehicle and started to throw rocks, while a dozen boys and girls trampled over old people in order to rip their sardine sandwiches and juice drinks out of their hands. On the main streets of Monrovia, and in the vicinities of the important markets, young men and women milled outside, seething with anger and loss, looking for what to do next with their lives. They pressed their bodies against doors and gates, and when they opened, they were forcefully shooed away by guards. Women hunched over squat cooking grills roasting bananas and raged over the cost and poor quality of commodities. The food vendors along the sides of streets had very little to sell, and it was of terrible quality. Impoverished youth, handicapped men and women, and street children climbed on top of NGO Land Rovers stuck in traffic and pelted NGO cars with rocks. Lebanese shopkeepers humiliatingly castigated Liberian employees. Even the nuns seemed angry.
The economics of postconflict life are almost never quantified in humanitarian policy research, but they ought to be. With the end of the war, economies of housing, food, and transportation were inflated by the vast international presence and by the country’s total dependence on imported goods for every alimentary, construction, and transportation need. Food, clothing, and construction materials were scarce and prohibitively expensive as hundreds of thousands of Liberians sifted through the broadest reaches of the city trying to reclaim land and rebuild housing structures. In the meantime, they imposed on the uncertain hospitality of friends and relatives, squatted in abandoned buildings, or took rooms in dense and partially exposed housing arrangements at inflated rents.
At the same time, the humanitarian industry was, without a doubt, the single biggest formal employer in Monrovia and it was the largest, most reliable, and most certain source of scarce capital in a cash-poor environment. The need and desire for jobs in the humanitarian economy led thousands of Liberians to make great personal sacrifices. Psychosocial workers I interviewed left their children alone, together, in cities halfway across the country so that they could take field-based positions for a global NGOs, and worried about their children’s welfare under the oversight of strangers. Men and women abandoned parents and marriages in order to relocate for NGO jobs, and from afar, fretted about their spouses’ fidelity, their parents’ health, and their siblings’ spending of salary remittances. People spent half of their salaries on complex transportation arrangments in order to retain the jobs that promised the distant possibility of promotion and capital accumulation.
In contrast to the rapid restoration of normative social order that Coulter describes in Sierra Leone’s postconflict recovery, Liberian social life was filled with what James has called “routines of rupture,” or “multiple ongoing disruptions to daily life rather than single traumatic events after which there is a ‘post-’” (James 2010, 132). Rupture itself became a part of everyday discourse, as Liberians talked about their daily experiences of ruptures in the language of trauma. “All of Liberia is traumatized,” I heard time and time again. Borrowing NGO lingo, people said of each other, “There isn’t the human capacity. People are totally traumatized.” When Liberian government officials, expatriate NGO workers, repatriating Liberian refugees, and UN staffers used the word “traumatized,” the term indexed a social pathology of an inability to participate in the “normal.” Cultural space was filled with radical questioning, uncertainty, doubt, and fear, which manifested themselves in humanitarian trainings, education programs, and occupational training initiatives. Within this artificial time frame, everyone present was intent on combating the latent potential for the reversion to violence. Veena Das wrote, “It is not only violence experienced on one’s body in these cases but also the sense that one’s access to context is lost that constitutes a sense of being violated. The fragility of the social becomes
