African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on February 7, 2008
African Affairs 2008 107(427):177-199; doi:10.1093/afraf/adm090
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Emerging Patterns in Liberia's Post-Conflict Politics: Observations from the 2005 Elections
Amos Sawyer (asawyer{at}indiana.edu) is a research scholar at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, and Chairman of the Governance Reform Commission of Liberia. A version of this article was presented at a conference on ‘Designing Constitutional Arrangements for Democratic Governance in Africa: challenges and possibilities’, held at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, 30–31 March 2006 and at a subsequent colloquium. The author is grateful to Jacqui Bauer, Clarke Gibson, Kunle Oyerinde, Eric McLaughlin, Peter Schwab, Tiawan Gongloe, Gediminar Flomo, Richard Panton, and other colleagues who commented on the paper during the conference and subsequently; and to Emmanuel Munyeneh who double checked facts and figures for this version. The author is especially grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
The 2005 elections were the first Liberian elections in over a century in which the political environment was controlled neither by the settler oligarchy nor, latterly, by the dictators Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor. Observers feared that the post-conflict environment was not conducive to holding elections and that a serious programme of reconciliation and constitutional reform should have preceded them. Nevertheless, elections were conducted with some degree of success, providing an opportunity to identify some emerging patterns in post-conflict Liberian politics. This article assesses some of the new or hitherto dormant institutions and processes that are likely to play a significant role in shaping Liberia's political order in the twenty-first century.