Liberian Peace Huts as Archetypes of Neotraditional Practices Advancing Gender Justice in Transitional Societies

This chapter analyses Liberian peace huts, a women-led neotraditional justice mechanism, examining efforts to address various forms of gender-based violence (GBV) in Liberia. It argues that the Liberian example shows that traditional temporalities of the transitional justice (TJ) period become blurred and less distinct when pursuing gender justice because the continuum of GBV can blur the temporality of a ‘transition.’ Conflict-related GBV percolates, evolves, and persists in the ‘post-conflict’ period and continues as everyday violence rather than as the exceptional, time-bound phenomena constructed in the TJ field. The continuum of GBV in Liberia and the work of peace hut activists challenge the boundaries of the dichotomy between conflict-related and post-conflict violence. The peace huts also illustrate the role of non-state actors in meeting TJ goals, especially in cases where violence persists during ‘peacetimes’ and is perpetrated outside the state's purview, that is, in fragile states with limited capacity to address this violence. The chapter concludes that the peace hut activists’ interventions for addressing GBV are geared towards achieving both negative and positive peace outcomes, that is, those aimed at continuously tackling all forms of violence (direct, structural, and cultural) and creating peaceful coexistence, if operational and resource challenges are redressed.