Coping with the Intricacies of the Everyday

Abstract
This PhD project is part of the research project entitled “The Work of State Imageries: How Imageries of Governance and the State Constitute Everyday Practice in Conflict Affected West Africa”. Its aim is to understand how imageries of governance and the state are negotiated and how they influence everyday practices of the local population in conflict affected West Africa.
This project asks how ordinary people cope with the difficult and often unsafe conditions of living after the end of the violent crisis in Liberia. Its focus is on three main questions:

• How do ordinary people in a peri-urban and urban setting try to make a living?
• How do they cope with the precarious delivery of common and public goods such as security or access to natural resources or the provision of food and water?
• How do new forms of governance emerge in the context of Liberia’s post-conflict society? 

It thus looks at the everyday practices of the local population in urban and peri-urban Monrovia and Saniquellie which is located in Nimba County, near the border to Guinea. Nimba county was the target of Taylor’s Coup in 1989. The urban and peri-urban context is chosen because it has been affected more deeply by the violent crisis than other areas. In particular towns and medium sized cities in the northern parts of Liberia had been dominated by rebel groups, leading a large part of the local population to migration. Civil life and the local economy had to be rebuilt from the start. International companies are returning to Liberia, especially in Nimba County. In addition, state and governance are experienced more directly in urban centers. Based on the scanty literature, we assume that the reconfiguration of Liberian society after the official end of the civil war will not lead back to a state as it existed before 1989. We will address this change by focussing on the situation of ordinary people as outlined above and by asking how their life is affected by the emerging forms of governance.

Keywords: Liberia, West African Conflict, State, Statehood, Youth, Everyday Life, Political and Economic Anthropology

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Till Förster

Short CV

• Assistant of the Managing Director of SystemsX.ch, the Swiss research initiative in Systems Biology, 2007-2009
• Event Assistant of the National Education and Research Summit of Oct 20, 2006, Rectory of University of Basel
• MA in Social Anthropology, University of Basel, 2006
• Student Assistant at the Library of the Institute of Social Anthropology University of Basel and the Museum der Kulturen, Basel, 2004-2006
• Internship at the Sisters of Charity Children’s Home in Kumasi, Ghana, 2004
• Field research practice in Bamenda, Cameroon, 2003