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Indigenizing PostconflictState Reconstruction in Africa:A Conceptual FrameworkSamuel Gbaydee DoeCurrent approaches to state building, primarily dominated by the liberal peace thesis, tend togloss over indigenous or organic mechanisms rooted in the sociological, historical, political, andenvironmental realities of postconflict contexts. Liberal peace theories prescribe electoral democracyand the free market as panaceas for all postconflict states, irrespective of the institutionaland cultural ripeness of the societies to cope with the inherent competitiveness of ‘democracy’and the markets. Such universalized and ‘best practice’ approaches not only restore superficialstates, they also extend the colonial project of undermining organic processes of state formationand state building. Indigenization stands as a complement to the liberal peace approach. Centralto indigenization is the recognition of the role of emerging agencies and structures as part of thebasis for recovery. There exist any number of ways that postconflict state reconstructionprocesses can be indigenized.WITH INCREASING STATE IMPLOSIONS, the multipolar international system that has replacedthe cold war bipolar system has assumed responsibility for ending deadly internalconflicts and reconstituting failed and collapsed states. 1 It does this throughwhat Marina Ottaway refers to as the ‘state reconstruction industry’ and Roland Pariscalls the contemporary liberal peace thesis. 2 Africa has hosted the largest number ofmultilateral peacekeeping and state-rebuilding missions in the world, and given thegrowing social, economic, and political debility on the continent, this trend is likely tocontinue for some time. The scale and impact of the multilateral state reconstruction1. The 1995 Failed States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace shows that seventeen of the thirty-threecountries in a critical state of failing were in Africa, as were twelve of the forty-two countries with strongsigns of failure. The more detailed 2006 index has four clusters: critical condition, strong signs of failure,basically unstable, and stable countries. All the African countries fell into the first two categories; fifteen ofthe twenty-eight critically failing states were in Africa. No African state was considered to be stable. See theindex at www.fundforpeace.org/web.2. M. Ottaway, ‘Rebuilding state institutions in collapsed states’ in J. Milliken (ed.), State Failure,Collapse, and Reconstruction (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 246.Samuel Gbaydee Doe is the development and reconciliation adviser for the Office of the ResidentCoordinator at the United Nations Development Programme, Colombo, Sri Lanka. This article derivesfrom the author’s ongoing work on his doctoral dissertation, ‘Indigenizing state reconstruction: Therole of the Poro Society in Liberia and Sierra Leone’.Africa Peace and Conflict Journal, 2:1 (June 2009), 1–16.© 2009 University for Peace Africa Programme. All rights reserved. ISSN 1659–3944.