After Peace Agreements, What Next? What Liberia Could Teach Us About Sequencing Peace

On 18 August 2026, Liberia marked 23 years since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in Accra, Ghana, bringing the country’s second civil war to an end. The agreement addressed the ceasefire, disarmament, security reform, transitional governance, elections, and reconciliation, while also setting out an implementation sequence. It postponed the general elections scheduled for October 2003 “until appropriate conditions are met,” while requiring a new date no later than October 2005. An all-inclusive National Transitional Government was to take office by October 14, 2003, and an implementation timetable specified when other measures were expected to begin.

The importance of that sequencing deserves attention. Peace agreements are often assessed by the commitments they contain and whether those commitments are eventually implemented. Liberia suggests that the timing and order of implementation can also shape whether a fragile political settlement survives long enough for deeper reforms to become possible.

In our recent article on Liberia’s post-conflict experience, we describe this as incremental peacebuilding: sequencing interventions according to political feasibility, institutional capacity, and societal readiness while keeping longer-term reforms in view.

Liberia’s post-conflict peacebuilding process illustrates this logic. The initial priorities were to keep armed factions within the political settlement, stabilize the security environment, and establish the transitional government. In September 2003, the UN Security Council authorized the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), with up to 15,000 military personnel, to support the ceasefire, disarmament, security-sector reform, and preparations for elections.

Disarmament came early because political competition remained vulnerable as long as organized armed groups retained the capacity to return to violence. By 2004, more than 100,000 former combatants had entered the disarmament and demobilization process, and 27,000 weapons had been collected. The program helped reduce widespread remobilization, although implementation was fragmented, with logistical problems, inflated registration numbers, and unequal benefits for men and women. Research has also shown that women associated with armed groups received less attention than male ex-combatants, who were regarded as a more immediate security risk.

Elections were also deliberately sequenced. Liberia did not move directly from the August 2003 peace agreement to a national vote. The transitional period allowed time for disarmament, electoral preparation, and the rebuilding of state institutions. Elections were held in October and November 2005, bringing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to office and returning the country to elected government.

These foundations created space for justice and reconciliation measures to take shape. Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began operating in 2006, after the elected government had taken office. The interval provided time for institutional preparation and greater public acceptance of the process. The TRC estimates that 20,000 statements were taken from Liberians at home and abroad, which documented wartime abuses on a large scale. Its work placed victims’ experiences in the national record while allowing truth-telling to precede the more politically difficult question of criminal prosecutions. Community-based reconciliation followed through mechanisms such as the Palava Hut program, which created local spaces for dialogue and reconciliation around some lower-level wartime offenses.

Criminal accountability, however, moved much more slowly. The TRC recommended establishing a war and economic crimes court in 2009. Successive governments did not do so. The long delay has had significant costs. Victims have waited years for accountability, some alleged perpetrators retained political influence, and the passage of time has complicated evidence preservation and witness participation.

This delay reflects a broader post-war dilemma. In the immediate aftermath of conflict, actors implicated in wartime violence often retain political and military influence, and their cooperation remains important to sustaining the settlement. Liberia recognized that hasty prosecutions risked derailing the peace process. Deferring criminal accountability gave greater priority to ceasefire consolidation, elections, institutional rebuilding, and truth-telling, while leaving open the possibility of prosecutions at a later stage.

That possibility is now taking shape. President Joseph Boakai first created the Office of the War and Economic Crimes Court in 2024 and, in May 2026, renewed its mandate for another year. The office has drafted legislation for the proposed court. More than two decades after the CPA, Liberia may be approaching criminal accountability from a considerably different institutional and political position.

Yet sequencing intended to preserve peace can become a form of justice denial and lack of institutional reform when there is no credible route to implementation. Liberia’s experience, therefore, offers three lessons for peace processes.

The first concerns sequence. Agreements should distinguish between measures needed to reduce immediate risks of renewed violence and reforms that depend on stronger institutions or broader societal readiness. Liberia’s CPA did this explicitly by delaying elections while establishing a transitional government and preparing the conditions under which elections could occur. 

The second concerns readiness. Timetables can organize a peace process, but they cannot create institutional capacity on their own. Liberia’s DDR limitations and the longer struggle over criminal accountability show why implementation sometimes must respond to conditions that were difficult to anticipate when an agreement was signed.

The third concerns those who bear the cost of waiting. Prioritizing armed actors may help stabilize an initial peace, while civilians, women, young people, and victims experience the same sequence as exclusion or delayed justice. Civil society organizations, women’s groups, religious bodies, and other local actors participated in the peace negotiations, subsequent processes, and continue to demand justice. Their participation is one way of assessing whether delay still serves peace or increasingly protects those who benefit from postponement.

Liberia’s experience shows the limitations of incremental peacebuilding. DDR created exclusions, institutional reforms remain incomplete, and criminal accountability has arguably been deferred for too long. Indeed, Liberia’s relative stability over more than two decades provides no simple template for other countries.

But it does show that when it comes to implementation, peace agreements may define the destination and, as Liberia’s did, even prescribe parts of the sequence. What follows still requires discernment about when institutions and society are ready for the next step, what risks come with moving too quickly, and who bears the consequences of sequencing.

Keywords: Liberia, sequencing, peace, peace agreements, Liberian, transitional justice, teach, conflict, conflict resolution

Dr. Kofi Bediako is a Senior Researcher/Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS), University of Pretoria (UP). Previously, he served as an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he also taught International Relations, Development Studies, and Criminology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He further served as a Policy Officer at the African Australian Foundation for Retention and Opportunity in Australia. Dr. Bediako’s research, teaching, and publications focus on international relations, transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights, development, governance, and post-conflict reconstruction. He holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Melbourne.

Dr. Franka Vaughan’s research explores how histories of race, colonialism, and power continue to shape the possibilities available to people in the present, and what it means to build more equitable futures. Her work spans how racial power operates historically and today, and how people reproduce, contest, and transform it. 

She is currently a VicHealth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, at the University of Melbourne, exploring co-designed, whole-of-system approaches to anti-racism. This research examines how institutions move beyond recognising racism as a social problem towards developing the capacity for transformative change. This work informs projects on racial literacy and anti-racism in higher education and community sport, focusing on how anti-racism is translated into organisational practices, cultures, relationships, and collective action.

Franka’s historical research emerges from her doctoral work on Liberia, Black settlement, and settler colonialism. She examines questions of freedom, sovereignty, belonging, and solidarity, exploring how Black political actors have pursued liberation, built institutions, and imagined alternative futures, while also grappling with the exclusions these projects produced. Building on this work, she is increasingly interested in how migrant and refugee communities understand their relationship to Indigenous sovereignty in settler-colonial societies, and the ethical and political responsibilities that emerge from these positions. Her recent monograph isSettler Colonialism in Liberia: Disavowal of the Marginalised and Contemporary Citizenship Debates in Post-War Liberia  (Springer, 2026).