4 - Give Me Your Land or I’ll Shoot!

Summary

Chapter 4 chronicles how conflict—manifested in physical and structural violence—simultaneously ruptured and sealed government-citizen and citizen-citizen relations thereby casting citizenship as a site of enduring struggle for Liberia. It employs Long’s notion of the interface as well as Galtung’s conflict triangle to designate conflict as a dynamic process in which the ‘incompatibility of goals’ of different actors (contradiction) fuels their perceptions and misperceptions of themselves and each other (attitudes) thereby influencing actions (behaviour) that may range from opposition to accommodation.Specifically, the chapter maintains that Liberian citizenship has been constructed and reconstructed because of conflicts precipitated by four major interfaces between a range of actors beginning with the indigenous wars of resistance during Liberia’s state formation in the nineteenth century and climaxing in twenty-first century post-war rivalries over income, land tenure, and transitional justice. While strained government-citizen relations engendered dissent and divergence, improvements in those relations also ushered in intervals of consent and convergence. This chapter demonstrates that a decade-long impasse on dual citizenship reveals how Liberian citizenship has changed across space and time through conflict and crisis and is still undergoing transformation.