School of Social and Political Science

Description

Ex-combatants originated Liberia’s motorcycle taxi sector, and conflict-affected youth make up the vast majority of its estimated 175,000 ‘riders’ (drivers). Like in several other post-war African contexts, motorcycling emerged after Liberia’s civil war as a critical economic sector, providing riders with livelihood opportunities and constituting a significant space of socio-political youth mobilisation. But the sector is not just where economic survival happens in a context of severely limited economic mobility. Nor is it the caricature prevalent in security reporting and many media and police narratives, where criminals gather and bad young men break worse. The talk asks, whose experiences and knowledge count as data about peace and security? It evidences—through interviews, participatory action research, and documentary film—how motorcycling is a critical site of post-war reintegration, where security is ambivalently built, social ties are formed, peacebuilding identity is forged, and urgent quests for peacebuilding recognition play out. 

Part of CeSeR’s Series: Contemporary Security Challenges, co-hosted with the Centre for African Studies.

Registration not required.

Speaker Bio

Jaremey McMullin is exploring youth peacebuilding processes through a multi-year project, 'Motorcycling as Peacebuilding in Liberia', that analyses the peacebuilding impacts and challenges of the commercial motorcycling sector in Liberia. His other primary research interest areas are the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants and the politics of veterans' return from war. This research interprets the impacts of reintegration and veterans' assistance programmes on post-conflict identities, conflict resolution, and security, and identifies the consequences of incomplete reintegration. A related project considers veteran-led modalities of assistance and veteran-to-veteran peer support in the United States. His 2013 monograph, Ex-Combatants and the Post-Conflict State: Challenges of Reintegration, was published in the Rethinking Political Violence series by Palgrave Macmillan. He has published articles and book chapters on the narration of youth peacebuilding identity and reintegration strategies (Review of International Studies), and on ex-combatant reintegration in Namibia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the United States (Review of International Studies, International Peacekeeping, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Conflict, Security & Development). He has also published articles on child soldiering (Third World Quarterly) and the role of non-state criminal groups during conflict (Civil Wars).

He directed and produced a documentary short film series on everyday peace, Liberia: Legacies of Peace (2019) and another documentary short, Silkies (2020), on prevention of veteran suicide. He has written several reports and evaluations for the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Section at the United Nations Department of Peace Operations, including a 2020 report, 'The Legacy of DDR in Liberia', and he serves on the Research Working Group of the Integrated DDR Training Group.