Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Governance After Armed Conflict

230 Pages·2019·2.52 MB·English

by  Michael D. Beevers

Michael D. Beevers
P E A C E B U I L D I N G A N D
N A T U R A L R E S O U R C E
G O V E R N A N C E A F T E R
A R M E D C O N F L I C T
Sierra Leone and Liberia
Peacebuilding and Natural Resource Governance
After Armed Conflict
Michael D. Beevers
Peacebuilding
and Natural Resource
Governance After
Armed Conflict
Sierra Leone and Liberia
Michael D. Beevers
Department of Environmental Studies
Dickinson College
Carlisle, PA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-63165-3 ISBN 978-3-319-63166-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63166-0
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To the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone…
P a
reface and cknowledgments
This book emerged over time. In the late 1990s, I served as a Peace Corps
volunteer in Niger, West Africa. I was far from the wars in Liberia and
Sierra Leone, but I distinctly remember listening to BBC and Voice of
America reports about the role diamonds were playing in those conflicts.
Several years later, I was in graduate school at the University of Washington
when the literature linking the environment and natural resources to
armed conflict was arguably at its intellectual peak. The more I read, how-
ever, the more I kept thinking about my time in the Peace Corps where it
appeared, to me at least, that environmental challenges actually brought
the people of my little community together, rather than divide them. It
was around this time I picked up a copy of Environmental Peacemaking
edited by Ken Conca and Geoffrey Dabelko that was not only skeptical of
the idea that environmental change triggers war and insecurity, but argued
quite the opposite that environmental cooperation could serve to reduce
environmentally linked violence and be a catalyst for peace. This was an
intriguing (and subversive) idea and one that I felt deserved further study.
I wanted to investigate the plausibility that certain environmental or natu-
ral resource management initiatives could reduce violence and instability,
and perhaps even spin off positive outcomes for peace. As I pursued my
doctoral degree, I thought there was no better place to examine this prem-
ise than in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where diamonds, timber and other
resources were widely believed to have fueled war, and where paradoxically
diamonds, timber and other resources were widely believed to be vital for
peacebuilding. Of course, my fieldwork took me in directions I had not
imagined, and this book goes on to tell a much more complicated story
vii
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
than the one I had conjured up in my head. One focused on how interna-
tional peacebuilders came to understand the links between natural
resources, armed conflict and peace, and the limits of policy interventions
that stressed a skewed “security and market” approach.
It goes without saying that the ideas that fill this book did not originate
in a vacuum. I owe a significant debt of gratitude to the long list of people
who have influenced my thinking. Although I cannot list them all here,
please know I am more than grateful. I would like to give special shout out
to Ken Conca who since my days at the University of Maryland has served
as an adviser, mentor and colleague. Thanks, Ken. Geoffrey Dabelko,
Richard Matthew, Carl Bruch, Erika Weinthal and Virginia Hoefler have
provided encouragement and insight along the way. I have also had many
fruitful discussions about the topic of this book at workshops and have
benefited from feedback after presentations at Duke University’s Nicholas
School of the Environment and the annual meetings of the International
Studies Association and American Political Science Association. Finally, I
am indebted to the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as practitio-
ners and organizations around the world working at the interface of peace-
building and natural resources, who have talked to me openly and with
passion.
This book could not have been completed without financial support
received from a variety of sources. Early fieldwork was funded through the
United States Institute of Peace’s Jennings Randolph Peace Scholarship
program and a fellowship from the Harrison Program on the Future
Global Agenda at the University of Maryland. I benefited greatly from a
sabbatical year as a Visiting Research Professor at the Strategic Studies
Institute of the United States Army War College. Dickinson College also
provided me research funds that have been vital to my work.
Several of the ideas presented in this book have appeared in a preliminary
form in other publications. I started to develop my thinking as it relates to
natural resource governance in Liberia and Sierra Leone in a chapter enti-
tled “Forest Resources and Peacebuilding: Preliminary Lessons from
Liberia and Sierra Leone” that appeared in Päivi Lujala and Siri Aas Rustad,
eds., High-Value Natural Resources and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding (New
York: Routledge, 2012). Initial thoughts in Chap. 5 about international
intervention in Liberia’s forest sector appeared as “Peace Resources?
Governing Liberia’s Forests in the Aftermath of Conflict” in International
Peacekeeping (vol. 22, no. 1, 2015: 26–42). The ideas presented in Chap. 8
that compare interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone build on work that
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT S ix
first appeared as “Governing Natural Resources for Peace: Lessons from
Liberia and Sierra Leone” in Global Governance (vol. 21, 2015: 227–246).
Finally, some of my ideas in Chap. 8 regarding the role of narrative in shap-
ing natural resource governance in post-conflict settings were hinted at in
“Forest Governance and Post-Conflict Peace in Liberia: Emerging
Contestation and Opportunities for Change” in The Extractive Industries
and Society (vol. 3, no. 2, 2016: 320–328). The anonymous reviewers at
Palgrave Macmillan gave me excellent comments and the editorial team,
including Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg, have been very helpful in guiding
this book to press.
Of course, I could not have completed the book without the support of
my family. I have spent months and months in the field and many, many
hours away from home writing and otherwise preoccupied with the con-
tent and publication of this book. Karen, Crosby and Cassidy, thanks for
your patience, understanding and love. I hope this book does you proud.
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction 1
Part I Natural Resources, Armed Conflict and Peacebuilding 17
2 International Peacebuilding: Origins, Development
and Strategies 19
3 Natural Resources: A Catalyst for Conflict and Peace? 39
Part II Conflict, Forests and Peacebuilding in Liberia 63
4 From Settlement and State Consolidation to Civil War
and “Conflict Timber” 65
5 International Intervention and Post-Conflict Forest
Governance 87
xi
xii CONTENTS
Part III Conflict, Diamonds, Minerals and Peacebuilding
in Sierra Leone 121
6 Colonialization and One-Party Rule to Civil War
and “Conflict Diamonds” 123
7 International Intervention to Govern Diamonds
and Minerals 145
Part IV Transforming Conflict Resources into Peace
Resources in Liberia and Sierra Leone 181
8 The Limits of Securing and Marketizing Natural
Resources and a Way Forward 183
Index 221