The Evolution of the Liberian State A Study in Neo-patrimonial State Formation and Political Change Felix Gerdes Arbeitspapier Nr. 1 / 2013 Institut für Politikwissenschaft Forschungsstelle Kriege, Research Unit of Wars, Rüstung und Entwicklung Armament and Development Anschrift und Bezugsadresse Universität Hamburg - IPW Forschungsstelle Kriege, Rüstung und Entwicklung Allende-Platz 1 D - 20146 Hamburg Telefon +49 (40) 42838-3689 Fax +49 (40) 42838-2460 Internet: http://www.akuf.de E-Mail:
[email protected] ISSN 1432 – 8283 About the Author Dr. phil. Felix Gerdes earned his doctorate from the University of Hamburg (UHH) with a dissertation on the political economy of war and peace in Liberia and recently worked in a DFG-funded project on post-war elite formation (2010-2012) at the same university. His principal research interests lie in the political economy and political sociology of states in South-East Asia and Africa. Felix Gerdes currently works at Zaman University, Phnom Penh. Comments welcome:
[email protected] Abstract Against the background of the hypothesis of historically rooted state failure in Liberia, this paper argues that Liberia’s political history represented a fast-paced process of state formation. It traces the development of formal and informal institutions of sovereign, central authority and investigates the drivers of the geographical extension and the institutional growth of this central authority. Against dominant position in the debate on African state- building, the author argues that the formation of the Liberian state was strongly driven by conventional old world mechanisms. While different initial conditions, different configurations of social forces and a different world economy indeed entail divergence in local forms of the state, secular political trends have similar effects in different places.