Popular Political Culture, Civil Society, and State Crisis in Liberia

Popular Political Culture, Civil Society, and State Crisis in Liberia. By John C. Yoder. New York; Queenston, Ontario; and Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Pp. 354. $129.95/£79.95. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Liberia seemed the shinning model of a modern state, sporting American republicanism and commercial capitalism, all supposedly buttressed by Christianity and Western civilization. Monrovia, Liberia's capital city, was the epicenter of Africa's independence movement. Many leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of Guinea, and Sir Milton Margai of Sierra Leone, trekked there receive advice on building democratic states after decolonization. The charter of the Organization of States was drafted in Liberia. All seemed well up 1989, when Liberia exploded into violence that lasted fourteen years. The turmoil left hundreds of thousands dead, uprooted and internally displaced over half of the estimated 3 million people, and sent a third fleeing into exile. The economy was wrecked. All of this has raised interesting questions, primary among them: Why did Liberia, with its long history of Western, democratic experimentation and nation building, explode into violence and disintegrate into ethnic warlordism? Why was the violence so brutal? Why did prewar Liberia not become a true democracy? And why did the development of good governance evade postwar Liberia? John Yoder attempts address these and other questions in Popular Political Culture, Civil Society, and State Crisis in Liberia. Yoder argues that Liberian civil society is a homogenous mass, based on social constructs of order, tolerance, accountability, and adaptation and innovation. He maintains that regardless of ethnic affiliation, whether Americo-Liberians, recaptured slaves, or indigenous peoples, and whether elite or non-elite, educated or uneducated, all Liberians share a common set of political culture and popular civic values, ... attitudes and perceptions, and that these values govern their behaviors and connect them one another, from the lowliest villager the president. Claiming to measure Liberian civic values against those generally regarded as essential for democracy, liberalism, or good Yoder concludes that Liberian civic values are antidemocratic, undermine good governance, and led Liberia's tragic war. Adekeye Adebajo's Liberia's Civil War (2002) arrives at a different conclusion, and is worth comparing with Yoder's study. As evidence, Yoder offers vague generalities, folklore, speeches of Liberian leaders, anecdotal conversations with a dozen or so people, student papers, his journal, teaching at the University of Liberia and Cuttington University College, a visit an elementary school, and his own beliefs. How many Liberians did he interview? When and where were the interviews conducted? How was the sample selected? How large was the sample? How representative was the sample of the parent population? Yoder does not provide answers these questions. He claims that a shared African heritage ... helped shape Liberian civic values. Further, Regardless of their ethnic, racial, or class origins, I believe that Liberians have tended agree that order and hierarchy are essential for social stability. And even if some Liberians expressed sincere and deep feelings about liberty or democracy, Yoder dismisses them: [I]t would be wrong assume that they and their compatriots were profoundly devoted democracy. …

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