Idle youth and infrastructure reconstruction in post-conflict Liberia

A new book “Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies Change and Continuity” examines development and international intervention in the Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (ebola epidemic). The emphasis on ‘crises’ in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades.

Senior Researcher’s Jairo Munive’s chapter “Roads as Imaginary for Employing Idle Youth in the Post-conflict Liberian State” addresses one of the central analytical problems of understanding postwar rebuilding in Liberia, namely, the recuperation of national and local infrastructural systems that provide educational and employment opportunities for “idle” youth.

National political narratives in this country makes this problem a high priority of postwar policy-making because youth are rhetorically defined as dangerous, and prone to recruitment for military entrepreneurs in the region, if they remain idle, destitute, and lacking in hope. The economic well-being of youth through employment, it will be argued, becomes the mark and symbol of the well-being of the whole social body of the nation and ultimately the Liberian state.