Based on rich oral histories, this is an engaging study of citizenship construction and practice in Liberia, Africa's first black republic.

Ever since it was founded for freed blacks in the early 1800s, Liberia has been a country of extremes, whether comparing wealth and poverty; the lifestyles of urban elites and rural tribal communities; or corrupt national government and familial trust. This book uses Liberia’s history as the background and ongoing source of the current political and social situations, as revealed by Afrobarometer data. The study considers the ethnicity, gender, and residential location of Liberian citizens and their attitudes regarding the country’s rule of law, state authority and democratic accountability – it’s government and economic health. After presenting the history and the current data, the author makes recommendations for changing the future of this African nation. If implemented, these changes could have a profound and positive effect on the future of this country that is rated as the third-poorest in the world.

This book examines how the economic survival strategies of former fighters in Liberia can help explain the trajectories of war-to-peace transitions.

Both political economy and foreign policy have been transformed in the sixteen states of West Africa at the start of the 1990s because of interrelated external factors (end of the Cold War and start of a New International Division of Labour) and internal factors (national structural adjustment programmes). Sixteen leading analysts of new regional relations, of both cooperation and conflict, offer original revisionist insights into ECOWAS and ECOMOG, debt and democracy, reform and resistance. The mixture of case studies and comparative analyses constitutes a comprehensive overview of West African actors, issues, structures, perspectives and possibilities at the end of the century, with relevance for development discourses and directions in other peripheral regions. Together these offer timely redefinitions and reconceptualisations of central notions like civil society, diplomacy, foreign policy, peacekeeping, security, and self-reliance for political economies and cultures throughout the South.

International relations at large and Africa's in particular are shaped by the actors' historical location, by what they offer economically and culturally, and by who they are socially. In international relations nations tend to deal with objective conditions as they are or as they are perceived. However, Lumumba-Kasongo demonstrates through case-studies of Liberia and Zaire/Congo that what the objective conditions are may not necessarily be what they ought to be in the national development process. The international struggle for power between the West and the East and their supportive brutal and oppressive states in the South, especially in Africa, created the extremely weak conditions that redefined international relations as the tools of domination, rather than the tools of understanding and cooperation. As Lumumba-Kasongo clarifies, Africa did not gain economically or developmentally from this struggle. An important work for scholars and researchers of contemporary Africa and international relations in general.

Liberia Diplomatic Handbook - Strategic Information and Developments