Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War. Sharon Alane Abramowitz
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a history of exposure to a traumatic event and symptoms from each of three symptom clusters: intrusive recollections, avoidant/numbing symptoms, and hyperarousal. The fifth criterion concerns duration of symptoms, and a sixth assesses functioning.
When applied to mass violence, the cycle-of-violence theory proposes a metaphoric linkage between the cyclical violence involved in patterns of domestic abuse, and the recurrence of conflict among warring parties, giving long-standing conflicts a naturalized, intergenerational, and historically inscribed character (Lumsden 1997; Maxfield and Widom 1996). Scholars theorize that different factors contribute to the cycle of violence, including value commitments that valorize violence, psychodynamic tendencies toward violence emerging from the process of socialization, recent ethnic or regional rivalries, religious doctrine, land and resource rivalries, or “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Other theories posit that structural violence, or the prevalence of violence already in society, makes the continuity of violence a “tacit” strategy for survival. The cycle-of-violence theory also postulates that there can be a reversion to the cycle of violence—as when children of abusive parents are assumed to reproduce the roles of victim or abuser as they mature. Violence, which is, at its most basic level, a form of social action, is imagined across the humanitarian community as a crucial and determinative component of self, identity, and social values.3
It is important to note that the cycle of violence thesis, though widely circulated in therapeutic circles in the United States and elsewhere to this day, was researched intensively in the 1980’s, and was debunked. A series of case-control studies that examined violence among the adult survivors of child abuse found that participants were as likely to choose non-violence in their intimate relationships as they were likely to enter into abusive relationships. The appeal of the cycle of violence metaphor, however, has remained strong, and has persisted across therapeutic domains, and has entered into the international sphere of peacekeeping interventions. There, in ways reminiscent of the theories that emerged from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud and Strachey 1958), and classical anthropological studies of culture and personality (Benedict 1989), the idea of the deterministic nature of the cycle of violence has come to form a constitutive part of peacekeeping discourse.
Psychological theories regarding the cycle of violence were mapped onto Liberia’s postconflict space in fascinating ways. Drawing on the cycle-of-violence hypothesis, politicians, humanitarians, psychologists, and historians have argued that violence is inscribed into the cultural, ethnic, and tribal folkways of the Liberian population. Humanitarian workers and peacekeeping officials invoked cycle-of-violence arguments routinely; and merged their claims with arguments about resource scarcity and warlord politics had led to the social conditions contributing to civil war in Liberia (See Ellis 1999, Powers 2005, Reno 1999). But remarkably, these explanatory models extended to the U.S. and Liberian political classes, as well.
Consider the statements of the following two key leaders involved in managing the early postconflict transition: Andrew Natsios, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) representative to Liberia, and Charles Gyude Bryant, the unelected president of the National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL) from 2003 to 2005. At a 2004 donor conference regarding Liberia’s postconflict recovery, Natsios noted that “reintegrating and revitalizing Liberian communities, particularly in the countryside, through community-based economic, psychosocial, and political transition programs,” was one of the three key factors required to ensure postwar stability and democratic transition (Natsios 2004).
Following his speech, Charles Gyude Bryant endorsed Natsios’s support for psychosocial intervention by arguing that it would be a crucial part of postconflict social engineering. He said,
The reintegration and rehabilitation of ex-combatants into civil society, and the repatriation of more than 250,000 refugees and relocation of some 300,000 internally displaced people into communities which have been stripped of social amenities and governance structures by more than a decade of war, are daunting challenges that can only be addressed within a broader framework of national recovery. For us as a nation, this is definitely new ground. Relying on old formulas and old methods will not do. Success will require innovative approaches to problem solving and social engineering. (Bryant 2004)
Advocates of the cycle-of-violence thesis believe that intervention is required to breach this pathological pattern of destruction, and a failure to intervene leads to ever-expanding, ever-renewing cycles of violence, retribution, dominance, and aggression that have one possible end: the permanent destabilization of social order. Because of the psychosocial “causes” implicit in the cycle of violence thesis, humanitarian aid workers have come to think of mental health and psychosocial interventions as having the ability to disrupt “cycles of violence,” and thereby end conflict.
Ideas of postconflict reconstruction traced the project of transformation from the national to the individual through a process of social engineering that was located in the psychological and behavioral lenses of trauma and recovery. Humanitarians argued that the reconstruction of Liberia was a “hearts and minds” matter and that Liberians needed to be persuaded to abandon the past and live “normal lives.” Finding the “new normal” was the task of the day, and psychosocial interventions were a crucial site for the “normalization” of targeted populations: women who had been raped, men who had been combatants, children who had been separated from families, and victims of various other kinds of violence.
Demobilization of armed factions, the political reconstruction of the Liberian state, and a militarized peacekeeping intervention were deemed to be unable to create a lasting peace in Liberia. Peacekeeping had to be wedded to societal rehabilitation for the cessation of war to occur. By transforming individual and collective behavior, cognition, emotion, and consciousness, humanitarians hoped they could socially engineer Liberians to be compliant with—or at least not resistant to—the project of nation-state building. Through the inconsistencies of the term “psychosocial” and its loose and ambiguous connection with the concept of mental health, humanitarian organizations had an unlimited mandate to intervene in people’s psychological and social lives.
The Postconflict Postcolony
Although the historiography of the Liberian Civil War is important, the history of Liberia’s postconflict period requires its own telling, for the way the war transpired did not determine its aftermath. Over the next few pages, I want to relate a specific history of the postconflict period, one that pays particular attention to institutional authority, military presence, widespread population insecurity, and human experience. Most histories of Liberia end at the postconflict present where this book begins, so the end of the war is our point of departure.4
In 2003, when a coordinated effort by the United Nations, the United States, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) led to Liberian president Charles Taylor’s exile in Nigeria, and internationally negotiated peace treaties established the NTGL, Liberia constituted a critical point of human vulnerability across the West African region. For years, Liberia was an unfettered source of weapons, young and cheap soldiers, epidemic diseases, illegal narcotics, and opportunities for military adventurism throughout the West African region. These activities were supported through the rapacious exploitation of diamonds and gold, virgin rain forest lumber, and latex plantations; through the provision of falsified financing and shipping documentation; and through the wholesale extraction of anything that could be sold, from copper wiring ripped out of schoolhouse walls to ceramic toilets hacked off of cement floors. In Monrovia, the capital, there was no electricity or clean water, and NGO workers were battling yet another cholera epidemic while journalists reported on the human devastation. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was gearing up to repatriate nearly a million people from neighboring Sierra Leone, Ghana, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire, and initial attempts at disarmament were failing. Vast UNHCR-administered camps for the internally displaced littered