ABSTRACT
Liberia represents a case in which extreme elite predation – banal theft – generated armed violence against the state, rendering a state that resembled an organized crime syndicate more than an entity that served the country as a whole or its people. Liberia thus represents a different type of escalatory pattern than South Africa, one which reflects a basis for mobilization centered around economic (and, secondarily, ethnic) grievances, and a pattern of political violence by factionalized militias (and the Armed Forces of Liberia, AFL) that generated extreme deprivation and gross violations of human rights. Consequently, it also reflects then a different kind of peace process in which the international community engaged primarily for humanitarian motives, and in which effective coordination by an International Contact Group of states led to a comprehensive peace agreement in 2003. Following a by-all-accounts successful peace operation by the United Nations (UN), Liberia, by 2005, had through the peace process been given a new chance at state building and democratization.
