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Liberia Incorporated: military contracting, cohesion and inclusion in Charles Taylor’s Liberia
Swedish Defence University, Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership (ISSL), Division of Strategy.
2017 (English)In: Conflict, Security and Development, ISSN 1467-8802, E-ISSN 1478-1174, Vol. 17, no 1, p. 53-72Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

In the existing literature, compensation is often understood to be an inferior source of cohesion in military organisations. Through an investigation of the militias who fought for Charles Taylor’s government of Liberia, this paper makes three claims. Firstly, the organisation of these forces was looser than is often claimed in previous literature, which assumes tight and often coercive military patrimonialism. Consequently, the militias did not enjoy the interpersonal bonds of solidarity that have dominated recent cohesion literature. Secondly, since Taylor chose to suppress attempts to build cohesion around ethnicity, it played a subordinate role in unifying the militias. Thirdly, Taylor instead relied on military contracting and compensation, which allowed for the broad mobilisation of forces. The combination of militias’ hopes of inclusion into the state patrimony and insufficient resources to realise this left the cohesion of the militias fragile. Ultimately, this paper questions both whether Taylor had any choice but to resort to compensation in a context with a weak state and fragmented social organisation, and also whether the strategy is as inefficient as often thought.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017. Vol. 17, no 1, p. 53-72
Keywords [en]
Civil wars, cohesion, compensation, Liberia, military contracting, militias, strategy
National Category
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Research subject
Krigsvetenskap
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-6581DOI: 10.1080/14678802.2017.1261446ISI: 000408629700003OAI: oai:DiVA.org:fhs-6581DiVA, id: diva2:1069415
Available from: 2017-01-28 Created: 2017-01-28 Last updated: 2020-01-09Bibliographically approved

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Käihkö, Ilmari

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf