Mary H. Moran

Rethinking Patrimonialism and Neopatrimonialism in Africa

Abstract: Current usages of the terms patrimonial and neopatrimonial in the context of Africa are conceptually problematical and amount to a serious misreading of Weber. His use of the term patrimonial delineated a legitimate type of authority, not a type of regime, and included notions of reciprocity and voluntary compliance between rulers and the ruled. Those reciprocities enabled subjects to check the actions of rulers, which most analyses of (neo) patrimonialism overlook. We apply these insights to a case study of Botswana and suggest that scholars reconsider the application of Webers concepts to African states.

The 'basket case' and the 'poster child': explaining the end of civil conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique

Through a comparison of protracted domestic conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique this paper evaluates several standard explanations regarding the roles of leaders, third parties and domestic social forces in resolving or continuing civil wars in Africa. The paper finds that no single account of how peace is achieved is sufficient to explain the continuance of violence in Liberia and the successful attainment of peace in Mozambique. Rather, an explanation that can accommodate the divergent outcomes of conflict in the two countries must combine insights from elite, structuralist and agency‐based approaches. Furthermore, the paper addresses the ways in which the construction of social organisations, particularly womens groups, during wartime affects the direction of donor funding and the shape of reconstruction efforts after the peace is signed. We illustrate our argument by examining the efforts of leaders, third parties and local actors, particularly women, to perpetuate violence or to bring about peace in Liberia and Mozambique, and the gendered contexts in which donor aid is distributed in the postwar period.

International Human Rights, Gender-Based Violence, and Local Discourses of Abuse in Postconflict Liberia: A Problem of "Culture"?

Abstract: In this article we draw on three years of ethnographic observation of postconflict humanitarian intervention in Liberia to consider the process whereby global efforts in the areas of gender-based violence (GBV) and human rights are interacting with local debates over kinship, entitlement, personal rights, and social responsibility. This article draws upon Liberian narratives, complaints, and efforts to regulate, in a national context, social norms and behavior in regard to gender-based violence issues in postconflict life while also engaging with an ongoing international human rights discourse on the subject of GBV. Our ethnography takes a multiscalar approach to give a sense of the process, multiple discourses, and dialectics of power involved in this issue, and to demonstrate how the definition of “the GBV problem” in Liberia, the target of complex GBV interventions, is different from the conception held by agencies, governmental ministries, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are responsible for implementing global mandates.

A Review of: “Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, 1830–1970: The Impact of Globalization and Civil Society on Media-Government Relations, by Carl Patrick Burrowes”: Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004. 312 pages.

In Power and Press Freedom in Liberia, 1830–1970, Carl Patrick Burrowes has produced a marvelously detailed and meticulous history of journalism in Liberia from the founding of the colony in 1822 through independence in 1847 and into the late 20th century. At the same time, his book is also an intellectual history of one aspect of the Atlantic world, focusing on the journalistic writings of African and African American intellectuals who were grappling with the meaning of race, nationalism, governance, and political independence in the 19th and 20th centuries. As Africa’s oldest independent republic, Burrowes argues that Liberia is the perfect case on which to test a number of current theoretical models in the communications literature. Paradigms that attempt to explain state restrictions on the press as determined by either “ethnic conflict” or “lack of modernization” can be evaluated against the long history of constitutional provisions, statutes, libel laws, and Supreme Court decisions that have governed Liberia’s journalists for an extended period. By examining the appeals made to ethnicity, institutional solidarity, or constitutionalism in moments of conflict, Burrowes teases out the relationships between these factors and the deliberate imposition of limitations or restrictions on the press. His conclusion is that, paradoxically, it was the very modernization of the state, in the context of the Cold War, that led to an assault on free expression. Contrary to the usual tilt of the Liberianist literature, ethnicity seems to have played little role in either decisions to muzzle the press or in critiques of the government by journalists. Rather, “limits on press freedom increase along with asymmetry and imbalance in the distribution of power resources, meaning ‘coercive, utilitarian and normative assets’ that include the armed forces, jobs, schools, and mass media communications” (pp. 266–267). The press became less free in Liberia, Burrowes argues, as the central government increased its power over other institutions of formerly equal weight, such as churches and private businesses. The literature in Liberian studies, as Burrowes notes, has long emphasized the social and political division between the descendents of the 19th-century American settlers (free people of color and freed slaves seeking to prove that Black self-rule could be successful) and the indigenous African groups that composed 95% of the population. The “Black colonialism” thesis has too often assumed an unbridgeable gulf between these sectors of Liberian society, and Burrowes delivers a compelling account of the formation of a coastal Creole society, “a new people and culture born of the encounter between global and local forces” (p. 5). While the original settlers were concerned with proving their claim to a common humanity with Europeans, their children’s generation was faced with the problem of building a territorial state with extremely limited resources. As long as the government limited citizenship and participation to “Black Christian republicans,” conflicts were played out along lines of religious denomination, geographical location (the coast vs. the “upriver” settlements), and point of origin in the New World. With the increasing enfranchisement of members of the 16 different

29.95 paper

Powers, Maria N. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. xv + 241 pp. including reference notes and index.

Women's studies in anthropology: Old debates and new issues

19.95 cloth. Wolf, Margery. Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. viii + 285 pp. including notes, and index.

Liberia: The Violence of Democracy

24.95 cloth. Simms, Margaret C., and Julianne M. Malveaux, eds. Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1986. 302 pp. including chapter references.

Gender, Militarism, and Peace-Building: Projects of the Postconflict Moment

12.95 paper.