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Akum, Richard Fonteh (2017) Informal ordering, authority and control: borderland dynamics and postwar statebuilding in Liberia. PhD thesis. SOAS University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/26675 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. INFORMAL ORDERING, AUTHORITY and CONTROL: BORDERLAND DYNAMICS and POSTWAR STATEBUILDING in LIBERIA RICHARD F. AKUM Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2017 Department of Politics and International Studies School of Oriental and African Studies University of London 1 Declaration for PhD Thesis I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of the SOAS, University of London concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. Signed: ____________________________ Date: _________________ 2 Abstract Critical statebuilding as a subfield of International Relations explicitly engages in mutually constitutive dialogical interaction with the practice of international statebuilding and peacebuilding. Beyond challenging formal institutionalist approaches to international statebuilding, critical statebuilding highlights – ‘local’, ‘interactive’, ‘process’, ‘power’, ‘ownership’ and ‘territorialized’ dimensions of quotidian statebuilding and peacebuilding in practice. The networked and fluid positionality of critical scholars, multifaceted statebuilders and pluralized subjects of international statebuilding interventions necessitate the constant renegotiation of operational and positional boundaries in knowledge production about statebuilding processes and their outcomes. However, by emphasizing a blend of neo-modern and postmodern analyses critical statebuilding research in IR has largely overshadowed grounded and reverse engineered approaches that reflexively reconstitute predominantly informal everyday socio-political processes. Quotidian informality provides the empirical basis for understanding competing and negotiated claims to pluralized territoriality and sovereignty within contexts of flux and uncertainty. This thesis deploys a grounded experiential ethnography to discern territorialized understandings of the implications of quotidian human processes on postwar statebuilding. By reverse engineering quotidian processes of informal ordering, authority and control within borderlands under international statebuilding intervention in Liberia, it provides a counter narrative to dominant state-centric and formal statebuilding theory in IR. Prior knowledge of – Liberia’s civil wars (1989-1996 and 1999-2004); successively negotiated peace accords; and international investment in postwar reconstruction – provided the backdrop for the research project. This thesis thus centralizes borderland manifestations of pluralized informal ordering, networks and quotidian experiences in understanding postwar statebuilding in Liberia. Quotidian organization of social livelihoods within Liberia’s borderland cities evidences fluidly negotiated symbolic and spatial positionality by organized non-state borderland actors over time. This multifaceted tapestry of borderland dynamics of informal ordering, embedded authority and social control expose the empirical content of negotiated territoriality and pluralized sovereignty in everyday practice. The historical, contextual and social embeddedness of these borderland processes contrast, yet unavoidably interact with internationally imagined and sequentially deployed statebuilding. Interaction between “the embedded” and “the imagined” evidence syncretic dissonance with the appropriation, objectification and incorporation of the latter by the former endangering statebuilding restructuring long-term processes of state formation. 3 Table of Contents SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................................................................... 7 LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................................................ 9 LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................................................... 9 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 12 STATES, BORDERLANDS AND THE SPACES IN-BETWEEN ............................................................................... 12 BORDERLANDS IN CIVIL WAR: BETWEEN NATIONAL DYNAMICS AND REGIONAL CONNECTIONS ......... 18 PROBLEMATIZING BORDERLANDS AND POSTWAR STATEBUILDING IN LIBERIA ....................................... 24 SOME KEY ASSUMPTIONS ..................................................................................................................................... 30 IMPORTANT RESEARCH QUESTIONS ................................................................................................................... 33 METHODOLOGICAL NOTE ..................................................................................................................................... 34 CONTRIBUTIONS OF THIS STUDY ......................................................................................................................... 36 THESIS CHAPTER OUTLINE .................................................................................................................................. 38 CHAPTER 2 ............................................................................................................................................. 45 LIBERIA: BORDERLANDS IN HISTORICAL STATEBUILDING PERSPECTIVE ................................................... 45 THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF TWO LIBERIAS (1821 – 1964) ....................................................................................................................................................................... 48 THE 1980 COUP, LIBERIA’S POST-COUP STATE AND BORDERLAND AS BATTLEFIELDS ......................... 60 BALKANIZATION AND TERRITORIAL CONTROL AS WAR STRATEGY DURING LIBERIA’S CIVIL WARS ... 65 CONFLICT RELAPSE AND FIGHTING FOR LIBERIA’S BORDERLANDS ............................................................. 69 ACCRA AND POSTWAR STATEBUILDING IN LIBERIA: BRINGING THE STATE BACK INTO POSTWAR BORDERLANDS ........................................................................................................................................................ 72 A POSTWAR DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIP VIEWED FROM THE BORDERLANDS ..................................... 78 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................................ 83 CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................................................................................. 85 BORDERLANDS, PEACEBUILDING AND STATEBUILDING – THE NEED FOR AN INTEGRATIVE ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK ........................................................................................................................................................... 85 GETTING TO THE POSTWAR STATE IN LIBERIA ................................................................................................ 89 POSTWAR PEACEBUILDING AND STATEBUILDING – EVOLVING INTERVENTIONARY CONCEPTS ............ 93 BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL MEANS AND LOCAL ENDS: INTERPRETIVELY GROUNDING POSTWAR STATEBUILDING ...................................................................................................................................................... 98 STATEBUILDING INTERVENTIONS: FROM PROBLEMATIC ASSUMPTIONS TO UNCERTAIN OUTCOMES 103 STATEBUILDING AS BORDERING AND ORDERING .......................................................................................... 108 QUOTIDIAN BORDERLAND DYNAMICS: INFORMALITIES IN STATEBUILDING ........................................... 110 BORDERLANDS AND STATEBUILDING – A PROCESS-ORIENTED APPROACH ............................................ 116 BORDERLANDS IN POSTWAR STATEBUILDING: A QUESTION OF PLURALIZED AUTHORITY .................. 122 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................................................... 124 4 CHAPTER 4 : INTERROGATING SPACE, PLACE AND PROCESS: