ABSTRACT
In the prologue to her book This Child Will Be Great, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf described her homeland Liberia as ‘a wonderful, beautiful, mixed-up country struggling mightily to find itself’ (Johnson Sirleaf, 2009: 1). It is a 43,000-square-mile West African nation with a population of 4.6 million divided into sixteen ethnic groups. Sixteen indigenous languages are spoken alongside English. Recently, it was prominent in the international media for a catastrophic health disaster named ‘Ebola’. A decade earlier, the country emerged from a brutal fourteen-year civil conflict in which 200,000 lives were lost, and horrific tales have been told about the experiences of child combatants on both sides of the conflict, which, according to Human Rights Watch (2004), numbered 15,000. The complex social and historical context of this country’s development makes it a compelling space within which to study principles and practices of inclusive education, particularly post conflict, which is the focus of this chapter.
