Urbanization vs. Rural Return in Post-Conflict Liberia

The 14-year civil war in Liberia displaced as many as a half a million people internally and for many of those people, initiated a process of urban shift. This paper examines urban migration in Monrovia, Liberia in the context of the Liberian government's rhetoric that has regarded rural return as essential to development. This case invokes questions about how immigrants to urban places constitute their relationship between the city itself and the rural lands they often still call home. It also critiques wartime aid policies that largely fail to account for human agency in a migration decision and that ignore urban self-settlement survival solutions. It offers new perspectives on how migration intersects development policy.

Author

• Butman, Mark Andrew

Language

• en

Keyword

• Migration
• African Geography
• Urbanization
• Internal Displacement
• Post-Conflict Development

Date created

• 2009

Type of Work

• Master's Thesis

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Geography

Degree

• M.A.

Advisor

• Rain, David

Committee Member(s)

• Lubkemann, Stephen C.
• Price, Marie

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/ng451h574