The ‘basket case’ and the ‘poster child’: explaining the end of civil conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique

Abstract

Through a comparison of protracted domestic conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique this paper evaluates several standard explanations regarding the roles of leaders, third parties and domestic social forces in resolving or continuing civil wars in Africa. The paper finds that no single account of how peace is achieved is sufficient to explain the continuance of violence in Liberia and the successful attainment of peace in Mozambique. Rather, an explanation that can accommodate the divergent outcomes of conflict in the two countries must combine insights from elite, structuralist and agency‐based approaches. Furthermore, the paper addresses the ways in which the construction of social organisations, particularly women's groups, during wartime affects the direction of donor funding and the shape of reconstruction efforts after the peace is signed. We illustrate our argument by examining the efforts of leaders, third parties and local actors, particularly women, to perpetuate violence or to bring about peace in Liberia and Mozambique, and the gendered contexts in which donor aid is distributed in the postwar period.

Notes

Mary H Moran and M Anne Pitcher are in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Political Science at Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA. Email: [email protected] and [email protected].

The authors wish to express their appreciation to Lorraine Coulter and Sarah Hamill for their assistance with the research for this article. The authors would like to thank Carlos Yordan, Dan Lieberfeld and participants at the 2002 Women's Worlds Congress in Kampala, Uganda for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article.

Zartman (1985: 238) appears to acknowledge the importance of social forces when he argues that ‘Parties need to be domestically strong to make foreign concessions’. Yet he reduces their role to providing support for the leadership and when they do so, leaders are more likely to negotiate. He does not discuss what might occur when domestic groups disagree with the position of their leadership.

One women's peace group, Mozambican Women for Peace, formed two years after the peace accord, played a brief but important role to ensure that the peace process was maintained during the 1994 elections. It was comprised mostly of professional women and was based mainly in the capital (see Snyder, 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M Anne Pitcher

Mary H Moran and M Anne Pitcher are in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Political Science at Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA. Email: [email protected] and [email protected].