What led people in Liberia to join militias and become in involved conflict during the country’s terrible civil war? How can an understanding of the factors that got people ‘into’ violence help policymakers design more effective disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration and rehabilitation (DDRR) programmes to get them ‘out’? This study, conducted with 491 ex-combatants using respondent-driven sampling, finds that assumptions of combatants’ marginalisation before joining militias were inaccurate. Rather, it was mainly security concerns that caused the Liberian youth to fight. DDRR approaches are in need of re-thinking to link them more directly to social cohesion and societal security.
DDRR in Liberia as elsewhere was built on the assumption that the rank and file of those who joined armed movements were marginalised. However, this is not true in Liberia’s case. The study found that fighters were no more or less marginalised than most other young people in Liberia.
Most ex-combatants interviewed lived a relatively normal life before the war, and based their decision on whether to join an armed group on the security predicament that they believed they and their families were facing. Other findings were that:
- Most (two-thirds) of recruitment was voluntary. One-third of ex-combatants said they were kidnapped or forced into militias.
- Few fighters cited ethnicity as a reason for joining armed groups. The ethnic composition of groups is interesting but not explanatory.
- Combatants who saw war as an occupation were in a minority. The ‘mercenary warrior’ problem cited by some international NGOs may exist, but is not significant in Liberia.
DDRR tends to focus on poverty and marginalisation as reasons for youths to join armed groups, and structure interventions to address these two factors. Because the Liberian DDRR missed the real underlying reasons for people to ‘get into’ the war, it has been relatively unsuccessful in the reintegration and rehabilitation components. Post-conflict programmes should be based on knowledge derived from and specific to the local context. DDRR programmes in Liberia need urgent rethinking to:
- Avoid having a perverse effect by taking a group that was not especially stigmatised and setting them apart, seeing them as ‘other’, and making them problematic
- Re-examine security considerations and focus more on social cohesion and societal security to provide effective ‘ways out’ of violence, which are not addressed by the current focus on poverty and marginalisation
- Better understand the interrelationship between a tangle of local conflicts and Taylor’s rebellion that plunged the country into collapse as a basis to designing interventions.
