Enclosure, dispossession, and the green economy: new contours of internal displacement in Liberia and Sierra Leone?

Abstract

Through a review of recent writings in political ecology and agrarian studies, this paper appraises the potential for emerging forms of ‘green economy’ initiatives to catalyze new forms of internal displacement in West Africa, with specific emphasis on the postwar contexts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Following the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the primary drivers of forced migration are conventionally thought to include some combination of civil war, ostensibly ‘ethnic’ strife or cleansing, development-induced migration, or allegedly ‘natural’ disasters. However, land acquisitions for both conservation and commercial agriculture seem poised to constitute an important additional driver of internal displacement, threatening to map onto the unresolved legacies of these previous instances of forced migration in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. Drawing lessons from the role of agrarian grievances in each country’s history of civil conflict, in particular, I explore the ways in which such forms of displacement may pose clear and present dangers to the very peacebuilding efforts that proponents of a green economy transition in the Mano River region claim to support.

Keywords:

• Green economy
• territorialization
• accumulation by dispossession
• internal displacement

Notes

1. These were later adapted by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA, 2004), and have been further recognized in the African context within the African Union’s 2012 Kampala Convention for the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa.

2. For an examination of primitive accumulation in the colonial Ugandan context, see Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015).