Narratives of Agency and Capability from Two Adolescent Girls in Post-conflict Liberia

Abstract

Between 1989 and 2003, Liberia experienced a brutal civil war characterized by ethnic killings, sexual violence and the use of child soldiers. Five years after the war ended, half the population of Liberia was under 18 years old. Understanding the needs of these youth is thus essential to the recovery of the nation. This study focuses on the narratives of two female adolescents, selected from 75 in-depth individual interviews with post-conflict Liberian youth conducted in 2012. A narrative analysis approach was employed to examine each interview for multiple layers of meaning. The aim of the study was to elucidate factors that may enable post-conflict youth to reclaim a sense of agency and return to normal developmental tasks. The study explores the ways in which these youth navigate complicated power dynamics in the post-conflict setting and how gender impacts their experiences of their own agency and capability. The dynamics between the participants and the interviewer are explored to further illustrate how power dynamics manifest. These narratives support the involvement of youth in projects that help others as an avenue for promoting agency and resilience for themselves.

Alternative Ways of Capturing the Legacies of Traumatic Events: A Literature Review of Agency of Children Living in Countries Affected by Political Violence and Armed Conflicts

“…Pells (2011) outlines that many Rwandan children adopted a "survival mission" (p. 602), which is defined as a determination to contribute in making the world a better place or to help others in similar conditions. Similar results emerged from the two studies conducted by Levey et al (2016Levey et al ( , 2018 in Liberia. In these studies, children demonstrated their sense of agency through the expression of their willingness to work in order to change their living conditions, both by planning for the future and by expressing confidence in their ability to carry out plans.…”

“…Additionally, agency exhibited through both hope and education recurrently emerged within the reviewed studies (Levey et al, 2016(Levey et al, , 2018Pells, 2011). In Rwanda, children expressed a strong desire to work and act in order to make their life meaningful.…”

“…Therefore, scholars jointly advocated for communityoriented and child-centered programs that are not merely symptoms-focused but also oriented at fostering advocacy and a sense of agency among children and in their social ecology (Levey et al, 2018;Veronese et al, 2017. As long as the critical attention continues to focus exclusively on children's vulnerability, researchers will be unable to properly engage children as social and political actors (Crawley, 2010; Levey et al, 2018). Alternatively, involving them in psychosocial and community-oriented projects could foster agency.…”

Orphans in post-conflict Liberia: Seeking care in fractured communities

“…The methods for the aforementioned study focused on post-conflict Liberian youth have been described in detail in a previous publication (Levey et al, 2016). Briefly, a convenience sample of 75 adolescents (38 girls, 37 boys) ages 13–18 were recruited from schools and community centers in Monrovia, Liberia in 2012.…”

Post-conflict initiatives and the exclusion of conflict-affected young people in northern Uganda

“…For example, Levey et al . (2018) provide an in-depth analysis of stories from two girls in post-conflict Liberia. In examining the factors that enable youth to reclaim a sense of agency and return to relative normality, the authors pay particular attention to the ways that the family relationships mediated their behaviours.…”