Anti-corruption Efforts in Liberia: Are they Aimed at the Right Targets?
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract International agencies intervene to promote reform in Liberia with promises to remake the country. Yet elections produce victories for former wartime commanders and officials accused of corruption. Many of these people continue to play important roles in the economy and command vocal followings. International organizations face a choice between a more radical intervention that amounts to a counterinsurgency operation to remove these people from their positions at the risk of creating political instability, and tacit acceptance of their power. Looking beyond these choices, is it possible that corrupt members of the elite and insiders can contribute to economic growth and political stability? Comparison of the organization of corruption in Liberia with models in East Asia indicates that political networks rooted in Liberia's economy may offer the promise of helping to integrate ex-combatants into the economic life of the country and address local demands for participation in politics. Notes 1. Reginald Maugham, The Republic of Liberia, New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1920, pp.84–106. 2. World Bank, 'Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program', p.3 (at: siteresources.worldbank.org/LIBERIAEXTN/Resources/GEMAP.pdf). 3. UN Security Council, 'Report of the Panel of Experts Submitted Pursuant to Paragraph 5 of Security Council Resolution 1689 (2006) concerning Liberia', 15 Dec. 2006, p.8. 4. Renata Dwan and Laura Bailey, Liberia's Governance and Economic Management Assistance Programme (GEMAP), Washington, DC: Fragile States: The LICUS Initiative, May 2006, p.8. 5. A subject explored in Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 6. UN Security Council, 'Report of the Panel of Experts Appointed Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1395 (2002), Paragraph 4, in Relation to Liberia', 11 April 2002, p.11. 7. 'Annex 1: Strategic Commodities Act: An Act to Designate Certain Natural Resources, Mineral, Cultural and Historical Items as Strategic Commodities', Monrovia: House of Representatives, 2000. 8. Douglas Farah, 'Al Qaeda's Growing Sanctuary', Washington Post, 14 July 2004, p.A19. 9. UNMIL 'Humanitarian Situation Report', Monrovia: Humanitarian Coordination Section, 3 March 2005, p.1. 10. UN Security Council, 'Report of the Panel of Experts', 2006, p.15. 11. International Crisis Group, 'Liberia: Staying Focused', Monrovia and Brussels, 13 Jan. 2006, p.5. 12. Quote from Stephen Ellis, 'Liberia', in Andreas Mehler, Henning Melber and Klass van Walraven (eds), Africa Yearbook, 2005, Leiden: Brill, 2006, p.109. 13. Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, La Criminalisation de l'État en Afrique, Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1997, p.15. 14. Conversations with the author during field research in Liberia and Sierra Leone since 2000. 15. Axelle Kabou, Et si l'Afrique Refusait le Développement?, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1991. 16. Francis Fukuyama, 'Social Capital and the Global Economy', Foreign Affairs, Vol.74, No.5, 1995, p.94. 17. David Harris, 'Liberia 2005: An Unusual African Post-conflict Election', Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol.44, No.3, 2006, pp.375–95. 18. Jean Claude Willame, Patrimonialism and Political Change in the Congo, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972, pp.131–4. 19. Thomas Callaghy, The State–Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p.5. See also Guenther Roth, 'Personal Rulership: Patrimonialism and Empire-building in the New States', World Politics, Vol.20, No.2, 1968, pp.194–206. 20. Author's observations and conversations with former militia members, 2005. 21. Kate Meagher, 'Social Capital, Social Liabilities, and Political Capital: Social Networks and Informal Manufacturing in Nigeria', African Affairs, Vol.105, No.421, 2006, pp.553–82. 22. Monday B. Akpan, 'Black Imperialism: Americo-Liberian Rule over the African Peoples of Liberia', Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 7, No.2, 1973, pp.226–9. 23. David Brown, 'Politics as Ritual: Rules as Resources in the Politics of the Liberian Hinterland', African Affairs, Vol.81, No.325, 1982, pp.482–7. 24. Robert Clower, George Dalton, Mitchell Harwitz and Alan A. Walters, Growth without Development: An Economic Survey of Liberia, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966, p.23. 25. Paul Gifford, Christianity and Politics in Doe's Liberia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp.18–28. 26. S. Byron Tarr, 'Founding of the Liberian Action Party', Liberian Studies Journal, Vol.15, No.1, 1990, p.25. 27. Augustine Konneh, 'Citizenship at the Margins: Status, Ambiguity, and the Mandingo of Liberia', African Studies Review, Vol.39, No.2, 1996, pp.50–52. 28. Personal correspondence between Dutch businessman Gus Kouwenhagen and his partner, President Doe, in the author's possession. 29. Bill Berkeley, The Graves are not yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa, New York: Basic Books, 2001, p.33. 30. UN Security Council, 'List of Individuals Subject to the Measures Imposed by Paragraph 4 of Security Council Resolution 1521 (2003) Concerning Liberia', 15 Dec. 2006, p.4. 31. Monbo & Company, 'Auditor's Management Letter Resulting from the Audit of the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company for the Years 2004 and 2005', London, 20 April 2006, in author's possession. 32. UN Security Council, 'Report of the Panel of Experts Submitted Pursuant to Paragraph 5 of Security Council Resolution 1689 (2006) Concerning Liberia', 15 Dec. 2006, p.41. 33. Interviews with Boley associates. 34. A notable exception is Paul Richards et al., 'Community Cohesion in Liberia: A Postwar Rapid Social Assessment', World Bank, 2005. 35. Paul Hutchcroft, 'Centralization and Decentralization in Administration and Politics: Assessing Territorial Dimensions of Authority and Power', Governance, Vol.14, No.1, 2001, pp.23–53. 36. Calculated from Security Council quarterly reports on UNMIL operations. 37. Nicolas Cook, 'Liberia's Postwar Recovery, Key Issues and Developments', Report RL 33185, Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC, 12 March 2006. 38. International Monetary Fund, Liberia: Third Review of Performance under the Staff Monitored Program – Staff Report, Washington, DC, Oct. 2007, p.18. 39. UN Security Council, 'Fifteenth Progress Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Liberia', 8 Aug. 2007, p.9. 40. 'Roar Over NPA's GEMAP Agent', New Democrat, 19 March 2007, pp.1, 14. 41. Interview with a former associate of George Boley (LPC chairman), 22 April 2007. 42. 'Sinoe Youths Want Investors on Rubber Plantation,' Analyst, 8 Feb. 2007, p.10; 'Land Dispute: Liberia's Next War Trigger', Analyst, 21 March 2007, pp.1, 10. 43. Author's observations and discussions in Sierra Leone, June–July 2005. 44. David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. 45. Paul Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. 46. David Kang, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.3. 47. Transparency International, Annual Report 2007, Berlin, 2007, p.17. 48. World Bank, World Development Report 2007: Development and the Next Generation, 2006, pp.288–9. 49. Stephen Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in Newly Industrialized Countries, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. 50. David Wank, 'Business–State Clientelism in China: Decline or Evolution?', in Thomas Gold, Doug Guthrie and David Wank (eds) Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture and the Changing Nature of Guanxi, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.97–116. 51. Xiaobu Li, 'Booty Socialism, Bureau-preneurs, and the State in Transition', Comparative Politics, Vol.32, No.3, 2000, pp.273–94. 52. This analysis I owe to Zhu Jiangnan, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. 53. Nicole Woolsey Biggart, 'Institutionalized Patrimonialism in Korean Business', in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Business Institutions, Vol.12 of Comparative Social Research, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1990, pp.114–33. 54. Mark Grenovetter, 'Coase Revisited: Business Groups in the Modern Economy', Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol.4, No.1, 1995, pp.93–130.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it