Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia

This book is highly recommended to scholars and policymakers interested in grappling with the fuzzy lines between state/non-state, licit/illicit, political/economic, and even war and peace. Rather than considering these fault lines as hermetically sealed boundaries closing off our current approaches to understanding politics, Cheng effectively demonstrates how powerful forces in fact emerge from them. * Thomas Patrick Hinkel, Contemporary Voices * This book makes several important contributions to research on peacebuilding, state formation, and non-state actors ... Through careful, qualitative research in postwar Liberia, it demonstrates that local combatant networks play essential roles in postwar stabilization — and potentially beyond. The book thus points to the importance of extralegal groups in postwar settings, and suggests that both researchers and peacebuilders ignore them at their peril. * Louis-Alexandre Berg, Canadian Journal of African Studies * Chen's study is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on how extra-legal groups build state-like institutions where the 'legitimate' state is either absent or extremely weak ... Cheng brilliantly highlights how extra-legal armed groups provide the basic structures that allow market exchanges and the rule of law — no matter how problematic — to survive and even thrive. * Shortlisted, Canadian Political Science Association Book Prize * Cheng's book makes important conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of the emergence, development and functions of extra-legal groups thereby enriching the African politics literature and comparative politics literature more generally. * Honorable Mention, African Politics Conference Group Best Book Award *