Making Me You: The Elusive Missions of Development and Peace in Liberia and Sierra Leone

In: Journal of peacebuilding & development, Band 11, Heft 1, S. 40-53

Abstract

Pressure on development actors to demonstrate results has forced the adoption of logical models that objectify contexts and people through cultural, time, and other value-laden frames that distance the service providers from those they purport to serve. This permits the compartmentalisation of the past, the present, and the future of target populations into dismembered experiences in which the emotions, knowledge, and desires of people bear no relationship to each other. Based on encounters in workshops, focus group discussions, and personal interviews, as part of post-conflict peace and development interventions in Liberia, this study asserts that the best efforts of donors and practitioners in peace and development can do no more than skirt around the challenges ordinary people face without finding lasting solutions, since their metrics aim to make the targets be like them, not better of themselves. Donors count what target populations do not count as peace or development.