Returning to Rebuild: Forced Migration, Resource Transformation and Reintegration of Liberian Returnees from Ghana and Guinea

This dissertation is a comparative study of Liberian refugee returnees from Ghana and Guinea, their engagement in post-conflict peacebuilding and highlights their resource transformation experience. At the core of this inquiry are the issues of how the structures of forced migration interact with the refugee's agency to transform the resources of the refugee returnee and how the returnee's deployment of their resources towards their individual reintegration are connected to their country of origin's post-conflict peacebuilding activities. The study argues that the resource transformational experience of returnees is a result of the complex interplay between the structures of forced migration and the refugee's agency. Drawing on social constructivism's mutual constitution of structure and agents, the study highlights the various structures that refugees encounter as having different influences on different agents (refugees). It also provides a context within which to understand and examine how refugees as agents operate within structures of constraint and opportunity, which more or less likely leads to resource gains and losses. It further posits that returnees deployment of their resource towards their reintegration activities have direct links to peacebuilding which makes the returnees active participants and not passive beneficiaries of the process.;Using the 'most similar systems', the study specifically compares the transformations in resources of Liberian refugee returnees from Ghana and Guinea beginning from flight, exile and ending with returnee's reintegration after return. The violent displacement of Liberian refugees across West African countries led to major material, social, personal and cultural resource losses among the refugees. However, the asylum phase provided them with either opportunities or constraints that transformed their resources as well as the structures (conditions) of asylum. The study reveals that although Ghana and Guinea are similar economically, due to their different political and security situations, they provided starkly different conditions of asylum. These differences in asylum conditions coupled with the refugee factors such as their pre-flight resources and agency accounts for the comparatively less resource gained by the returnees who sought asylum in Guinea to those who were in Ghana. Subsequently, the different return and reintegration experience has also resulted in the transformation of the returnee's resources. Nonetheless, the study reveals that each group of refugees returned to Liberia transformed and with varied resources which have been very crucial in the returnees effort at rebuilding their individual lives, the aggregate results the current study suggests highlights their participation in Liberia's peacebuilding.