BY PATRICIA TAFT In December 2013 in a tiny village in Guinea, a young child fell ill and died of a disease that would come to define much of the news in 2014. The Ebola virus, previously only known in Central and East Africa, laid ravage to large swaths of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, […]
Tag Archives: Liberia
The MDGs: Paving the Way to Human Security
- 14 August 2014
BY KRISTA HENDRY As we approach the last 500 days to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), I want to reflect upon what they actually mean for our work at The Fund for Peace. Our mission is to understand the underlying conditions of conflict in order to build practical solutions to address them with all […]
It Takes a Generation: West African Success Stories
- 24 June 2014
BY NATE HAKEN Many truisms about peace-building incline towards pessimism. There is a “vicious cycle,” a “conflict trap,” “unintended consequences,” the problem of “political will,” and a slew of transnational “exogenous pressures” beyond the sphere of anyone’s control. Certainly, the Fragile States Index (FSI) is often perceived as a buffet of bad news stories and […]
Liberia: Mitigating Conflict through Responsible Resource Distribution and Management
- 14 June 2013
BY KRISTA HENDRY AND GEORGE WAH WILLIAMS Over the past decade, the Liberian economy has rebounded from fourteen years of civil war. Its GDP has had measurable growth since 2004 and the African Development Bank predicts a growth rate of over 7% in 2013. This is in part due to financial and technical aid from […]
National Reconciliation in Grand Gedeh
- 08 March 2013
BY PATRICIA TAFT AND GEORGE WAH WILLIAMS On a clear day in the middle of the dry season, it can take up to fifteen hours to travel less than 475 kilometers (350 miles) from Liberia’s capital city of Monrovia to Zwedru, the capital of Grand Gedeh County. Grand Gedeh lies in the southeast corner of […]
Turning the Page on Charles Taylor
- 08 November 2012
BY KENDALL LAWRENCE, NATE HAKEN, PATRICIA TAFT AND NORA LOCASAR On April 26, 2012, the International Criminal Court convicted Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor for his role in the commission of crimes against humanity during the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. For Sierra Leone, this brought a dark chapter to a close — […]