Vol. VII / No. 11 | August 2026
Authors:
Lanja Manohisoa Epifaniah – Master’s Programme in International Relations, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia
Summary
Between 2003 and 2020, The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) was one of the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operations in UN history. It suppressed large-scale violence, organized credible elections and formally rebuilt state institutions. Yet by 2020, Liberia’s Human Development Index stood at 0.48, more than half the population lived in poverty, and the health system had collapsed under the stress of the 2014 Ebola crisis. This article argues that UNMIL’s limited human security outcomes are explained by a structural deficit of local ownership: the failure to transfer decision-making authority, ensure inclusive participation, build autonomous institutional capacity, and align reforms with Liberian social and political realities. Applying Donais’s (2012) Local Ownership Framework to 15 years of UNMIL documentation and post-conflict evidence, it appears that the mission achieved stabilisation without transformation: institutions were formally rebuilt, but lacked the legitimacy and autonomy to endure international withdrawal.
Keywords: UNMIL, Human Security, Local Ownership, Peacebuilding, United Nations Peacekeeping
A Warning from Monrovia
In December 2025, Sweden announced it would close its embassy in Monrovia and wind down decades of development aid to Liberia, following earlier cuts by the United States and the European Union. For a country whose police, courts and clinics still lean heavily on money from the United States, mainly through USAID, and a small group of European partners such as Sweden and Ireland (AllAfrica, 2025).
The United Nations Mission in Liberia, known as UNMIL, was at its peak one of the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operations in UN history. It ended fourteen years of civil war, organised three peaceful elections, and helped rebuild a national army and police force from collapse. On paper, it worked. Yet by 2020, when UNMIL packed up and left, Liberia’s Human Development Index, the United Nations’ composite score for health, education and income, stood at just 0.48, placing the country among the ten least developed nations on Earth (UNDP, 2020). More than half the population lived in poverty (World Bank, 2024).
The Peacekeeping Paradox in Liberia
Liberia presents a puzzle standard peacekeeping metrics cannot resolve. UNMIL ended two decades of civil war, established a transitional government, ran three elections with minimal violence, and rebuilt the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) and Liberian National Police (LNP) from collapse. By the measures that peacekeeping evaluation typically privileges—violence suppression, institutional reconstruction, electoral facilitation—UNMIL performed well. Liberia’s Human Development Index score of 0.48 in 2020 ranked it among the 10 least developed nations globally, showing little change from the post-war benchmark despite international investment exceeding US$4 billion over 15 years by 2022 (UNDP, 2020; World Bank, 2024).
Liberia’s development indicators barely moved. This same gap, real success at stopping violence paired with institutions too fragile to stand alone, has shown up elsewhere: Congolese police posts fell into disrepair within weeks of each peacekeeper handover in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2024), and security gains in South Sudan have unravelled wherever peacekeepers drew down without a transition plan (United Nations University, 2026). The question worth asking is not whether UNMIL succeeded, but why on-paper success failed to translate into a Liberia that could stand on its own two feet.
Why Rebuilding Institutions Wasn’t Enough
Political scientist Timothy Donais offers one answer through the idea of local ownership (Donais, 2012). His argument, in brief: post-conflict rebuilding only lasts if the people who will live inside the resulting institutions genuinely control them, not merely staff them. Donais breaks ownership into four ingredients: who actually holds decision-making power, whose voices shape reform, whether local institutions can function without permanent outside support, and whether reforms fit a country’s real social and political life rather than an imported template. Reform that ticks these boxes on paper while failing them in practice is what he calls nominal ownership, performed for outsiders rather than built for insiders. Applying this lens to fifteen years of UNMIL’s record shows the mission built exactly that.
Four Ways Local Ownership Was Weakened
Authority. UNMIL operated under a UN Security Council mandate that gave its head, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, sweeping oversight of the mission, while donor funding rules kept reform priorities answerable to international budgets rather than Liberian needs. The police were rebuilt under a model designed largely by DynCorp International, a private US security contractor regularly hired by the American government to train foreign police and military forces (Devex, n.d.), with little input from Liberian security culture (Search for Common Ground & SIPRI, 2011). The LNP remained 60% donor-dependent in its operational budget by 2024, relying primarily on funding from the United States through USAID, along with support from European partners such as Sweden and Ireland (UNDP, 2018).
Inclusiveness. UNMIL’s outreach machinery was built for people already visible to international institutions: politicians in Monrovia, registered civil-society groups, English speakers. Rural communities, women’s and youth groups, and customary authorities like the Poro and Sande societies—which have long governed land and dispute resolution across rural Liberia (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 2016)—were treated as recipients of reform, not sources of it. Fifteen years was enough time to build a genuinely participatory process; the evidence suggests that effort never happened.”.
Institutional capacity. The police force was trained up to roughly 4,000 officers using a US-derived model, yet by 2024 only 30 per cent of officers had received adequate post-reform training. With only one officer for every 850 citizens across a predominantly rural country, police coverage remained thin and operational capacity limited. That thin, undertrained force is also part of why the 2014 Ebola outbreak hit so hard: the same reliance on external capacity that left policing hollow had also left the health system without enough trained staff and functioning local institutions to respond once a shock arrived. All ten primary healthcare indicators fell during the crisis, and more people ultimately died from the collapse of routine care than from Ebola itself (Wagenaar et al., 2018). The outbreak did not create this fragility; it revealed capacity that had never really been there.
Contextual alignment. Liberia’s post-war institutions were often built to look right rather than fit right. Land reform frameworks implemented throughout much of UNMIL’s mandate resulted in 40.9% of Liberia’s traditionally held land being formally unrecognised as of 2020. Anti-corruption bodies were established on paper, and Liberia’s score on the Corruption Perceptions Index rose to a peak of 41 out of 100 in 2012 before falling back into the mid-20s within a decade, as international oversight receded (Transparency International, 2024). Reintegration programmes for ex-combatants were designed around a formal job market that absorbed under 8.7 per cent of young workers (International Labour Organization, 2017). Also, Liberia held three credible elections without ever confronting the patronage politics, the exchange of political loyalty for jobs, favours and protection, that had helped fuel the war in the first place and continues to entrench corruption in Liberian politics today (ISS Africa, 2025).
Stabilization Without Transformation
The cumulative effect of these four ownership deficits was a peacebuilding architecture that functioned adequately while external support was present and fragmented progressively when it was reduced. A youth non-employment rate of 23 per cent, a Human Capital Index of 0.32, poverty exceeding 50 per cent — these are not post-withdrawal failures attributable to Liberian governance after UNMIL departed. They are the downstream effects of institutional designs that never built the social embeddedness, financial autonomy, organizational capacity, and contextual legitimacy that self-sustaining institutions require.
The argument I am making is ultimately not about UNMIL specifically. The structural logic of UN peace operations is based on how they are institutionally positioned: accountable to member states rather than the host population, evaluated on quantifiable outcomes rather than social integration, and organised around the assumption that international expertise is both superior to and replaceable by local knowledge. These assumptions did not originate with UNMIL. The liberal peacebuilding framework within which UNMIL operated includes these features.Evidence from Liberia, based on fifteen years of documentation across five institutional domains, illustrates their consequences with unusual empirical clarity. Changing these assumptions requires not better implementation of the existing model, but a fundamental rethinking of what ownership means in practice.
Lessons for Future UN Mission
Four changes could help. Mandates should set binding, time-bound targets for transferring real authority, over agendas, budgets and decisions, throughout a mission’s life, not only as an exit condition. Participation should be rebuilt around community and customary structures, not just urban, English-speaking counterparts. Security reform should start by mapping what security arrangements already exist and enjoy local legitimacy, rather than importing a foreign template. And financing strategies should build toward fiscal independence from day one, since donor dependence on Liberia’s scale never appears suddenly; it accumulates from choices made across a mission’s lifespan.