Pardee-CFLP-Remittances-TF-Report

4. The Role of Remittances in Post-ConflictReconstruction: The Case of LiberiaChantel F. PheifferThe civil war in Liberia that officially ended in 2003 left the country devastated.The physical infrastructure, economic framework, and governance structureswere barely existent. Not only was there hardly a foundation on which to rebuildthe country, the majority of Liberians were either living abroad or living in poverty.Hundreds of thousands of Liberians had left and/or fled the country whilethose who remained behind (and survived) had no jobs, no skills, no education,and no prospects. The vacuum of human capacity and threat to human securitywas enormous.While Liberia transitioned out of war, the international community in thisperiod became increasingly excited about the potential and actual role of remittancesfor development in the global South. Research revealed the relativelylarge aggregate sums sent home on an annual basis and the World Bank beganto investigate the role of these funds in supporting household consumption.Throughout the 2000s, professionals and academics have produced an impressivearray of studies on the interaction of migration, development, and remittances.Despite this increased attention to the remittance-development nexus,however, scholarship of remittances in post-conflict states in particular hasremained scarce.The challenge with post-conflict states is that untenable political situations andextreme capacity deficits limit severely the extent to which data can be collectedand analyzed. Until relatively recently Liberia has been an example of a potentiallyinteresting but largely neglected case study in remittances. This began tochange as peace settled in and stability began to coalesce in the latter part of thedecade. In 2006 the Central Bank of Liberia started to publish remittance data inits annual reports, which revealed surprisingly large sums of repatriated income.The publication in 2009 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) finalreport underwrote this finding and provided greater detail of the role which thediaspora—especially U.S. diaspora—and remittances played in Liberia’s postconflictreconstruction.What has made the Liberian case even more interesting is the fact that the WorldBank in 2012 ranked Liberia the second highest remittance-recipient (as a per-Remittance Flows to Post-Conflict States: Perspectives on Human Security and Development 71