This book presents poetry, which the author believes is another suitable medium of scholarship for expressing his views on Liberia's development. He says that studying poetry, evaluating its messages, and embracing them within relevant contexts can be helpful to Liberians to empathize with and support each other rather than engaging in acts of violence and destruction. The poems cover some of the salient issues of Liberia’s developmental process, highlighting the conditions of progress, stagnation, and regression. The lyrics, figuratively in some poems and literally in others, express the author’s sentiments and hopes for positive change now and in the future for Liberia. . It also includes lyrics with philosophical and social overtones regarding family and friends.

An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.

Odyssey of a Liberian Village Boy By: Nyankun Thomas Odyssey of a Liberian Village Boy is the journey of Nyankun Thomas as a person and also his adventure through childhood, from Liberia to the United States, all of his trials and tribulations. Readers can hopefully learn from his experiences and make better choices in their own lives. Life is about falling down and getting back up. One should never be afraid of failure.

In the aftermath of the Liberian civil war, groups of ex-combatants seized control of natural resource enclaves in the rubber, diamond, and timber sectors. With some of them threatening a return to war, these groups were widely viewed as the most significant threats to Liberia's hard-won peace. Building on fieldwork and socio-historical analysis, this book shows how extralegal groups are driven to provide basic governance goods in their bid to create a stable commercial environment. This is a story about how their livelihood strategies merged with the opportunities of Liberia's post-war political economy. But it is also a context-specific story that is rooted in the country's geography, its history of state-making, and its social and political practices. This volume demonstrates that extralegal groups do not emerge in a vacuum. In areas of limited statehood, where the state is weak and political authority is contested, where rule of law is corrupted and government distrust runs deep, extralegal groups can provide order and dispute resolution, forming the basic kernel of the state. This logic counters the prevailing 'spoiler' narrative, forcing us to reimagine non-state actors and recast their roles as incidental statebuilders in the evolutionary process of state-making. This leads to a broader argument: it is trade, rather than war, that drives contemporary statebuilding. Along the way, this book poses some uncomfortable questions about what it means to be legitimately governed, whether our trust in states is ultimately misplaced, whether entrenched corruption is the most likely post-conflict outcome, and whether our expectations of international peacebuilding and statebuilding are ultimately self-defeating.

Contains the proceedings of the May 1996 hearing before the Subcommittee on Africa, House of Representatives, which addressed the crisis in Liberia. Witnesses include: Hon. George Moose, Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of African Affairs, U.S. Dept. of State; Hon. Vince Kern, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs, U.S. Dept. of Defense; and Lady Johnet Bush, President, Liberian Community Association of Rhode Island.