Description
Book SynopsisLiberia, a small West African country that has been wracked by violence and civil war since 1989, seems a paradoxical place in which to examine questions of democracy and popular participation. Yet Liberia is also the oldest republic in Africa, having become independent in 1847 after colonization by an American philanthropic organization as a refuge for Free People of Color from the United States. Many analysts have attributed the violent upheaval and state collapse Liberia experienced in the 1980s and 1990s to a lack of democratic institutions and long-standing patterns of autocracy, secrecy, and lack of transparency. Liberia: The Violence of Democracy is a response, from an anthropological perspective, to the literature on neopatrimonialism in Africa.
Mary H. Moran argues that democracy is not a foreign import into Africa but that essential aspects of what we in the West consider democratic values are part of the indigenous African traditions of legitimacy and politic
Trade Review
"Drawing on the author's ethnographic fieldwork in a Glebo community outside Harper, Liberia in the early 1980s, and her continued contact with Liberians in West Africa and in the diaspora, Liberia: The Violence of Democracy takes aim at the popular and scholarly tendency to treat violence and representative democracy as polar opposites. . . .Moran offers a compelling Africanist case study to be read in conjunction with the Europeanist political philosophy of thinkers like Jacques Rancière or Giorgio Agamben. This is, however, an extremely accessible book, and its greatest contribution may come if and when it is picked up by policymakers and the staff of international NGOs." * Journal of Contemporary African Studies *
Table of Contents
Introduction: Liberia, Violence, and Democracy
1. The Case for Indigenous Democracy
2. Contested Histories
3. Civilization and the Liberian Nation
4. The Promise and Terror of Elections
5. The Lock on the Outhouse Door: Discourses of Development
6. The Crisis of Youth and the Promise of the Future
7. Conclusion: A Wedding and a Funeral
References
Index
Acknowledgments
