Returnees in Post-conflict Cabinets - Elite Perceptions in Liberia

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security III & Migration and Citizenship
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Migration and Citizenship

Abstract

This paper explores the meaning that is associated to diaspora returnees in post-conflict cabinets. After civil war, states often suffer from a lack of capacity at the same times as issues of identity are brought to a head. In such settings, donors and domestic political leaders often suggest that diaspora returnees contain a solution. These individuals, encouraged to take on political positions at the highest level, are by many donors seen as an essential piece of the liberal peace jigsaw. It is assumed that they can help reconstructing post-conflict state institutions into agreement with Western standards of government, while ensuring local ownership and thereby local legitimacy.
However, where political power can be gained by contesting claims of ethnic identity and national belonging, these are often contested. Returnees may be perceived as belonging to a privileged elite, which had the chance to leave during the conflict. Appointments of diaspora returnees may cause great friction between local elites, different actors may challenge returnees right to hold office and may even initiate public protests (Hughes 2007, Turner 2008, Sánchez Villa 2011).
Despite high stakes, and increasing support by western donors to diaspora returnees, we have limited knowledge about how returnee minister’s dual belonging are interpreted and articulated by local political elites. By combining three different, but related, fields of research - migration studies, diaspora studies and research on statebuilding – this paper seeks to answer: How do local political elites understand returnee ministers’ presence in post-conflict cabinets’? And, what kind of arguments is used for or against their presence?

These research questions are investigated in the context of post-conflict Liberia, where president Eller Johnson Sirleaf in 2006 received donor support to recruit a large share of her cabinet ministers’ from the diaspora. This paper builds on elite interviews carried out with former ministers, presidential candidates, opposition leaders and local researchers. Accounts from interviews are combined with written sources to evaluate if the meaning-making of returnee ministers’ found extend beyond the elite group included.
Findings reveal how opponents use returnees’ diaspora identity as an instrument in the political debate, but also how some returnees use their background to claim superiority over local actors. Moreover, this paper exposes an apparent dilemma connected to the presence of returnees in relation to objectives of statebuilding. It is demonstrated how local political elites believe that diaspora returnees are needed to ensure an efficient government and especially one that will be granted donor support. At the same time, it is claimed that returnees may be a threat to good governance and nationalism objectives. It further reveals how a situation where dual citizenship is prohibited, in reality has encouraged an unrestricted appointment of ministers from the diaspora. Finally, this paper shows how returnee ministers’ dominance in the government are used to discredit the former regime and as a key argument in the debate about legalizing dual citizenship in Liberia.

Author

• Anna Ida Rachel Rock, Uppsala University