From ‘Warlord’ to ‘Democratic’ President: how Charles Taylor won the 1997 Liberian elections

For the best part of seven years, an increasing number of warring factions fought a vicious civil war for control of the West African state of Liberia. In August 1996, the fourteenth peace accord led to presidential and parliamentary elections in July of the following year. Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Party (NPP), formed out of the original invasion force, emerged victorious with a landslide 75 per cent of the vote. Given the international reputation of Taylor as a brutal warlord whose sole aim had never wavered from the capture of power in Monrovia, Taylor's across-the-board victory appears difficult to explain. Having concluded that, despite problems and allegations, the election did seem more free and fair than not, the article examines the factors that probably influenced the electorate's choices. The results of this research show an election heavily dependent on an uncertain security situation. However, it suggests that, although a former ‘warlord’ has been rewarded, the voting was a reasoned ploy by the electorate to maximise the possibility of improved living conditions

Post-Conflict Elections or Post-Elections Conflict: Sierra Leone 2002 and Patterns of Voting in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sierra Leone is just one of a growing number of countries that has experienced the current globally popular tool of conflict resolution, the multi-party election. This method of endeav- ouring to put a final cap on a peace process has a mixed record in Africa. There have been some successes, but the installation of unsuitable over-powerful governments and/or the return to war have more often been the case. The article examines firstly the outcomes of the 2002 Sierra Leone elections, and then situates these consequences on a spectrum of African post-conflict elections outcomes. Finally, possibilities for avoiding or mitigating the negative effects of post- conflict polls, particularly those emanating from the inevitable lack of security, are examined and posited

Liberia 2005: an Unusual African Post-Conflict Election

The 2003 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and the ensuing two-year-long National Transitional Government of Liberia (NTGL), which brought together two rebel forces, the former government and members of civil society, justifiably had many critics but also one positive and possibly redeeming feature. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the realpolitik nature of the CPA and the barely disguised gross corruption of the members of the coalition government, the protagonists in the second Liberian civil war (2000–03) complied with the agreement and the peace process held. The culmination of this sequence of events was the 11 October 2005 national elections, the 8 November presidential run-off and the 16 January 2006 inauguration. In several ways, this was the African post-conflict election that broke the mould, but not just in that a woman, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, won the presidential race, and a football star, George Weah, came second. The virtual absence of transformed rebel forces or an overbearing incumbent in the electoral races, partially as a result of the CPA and NTGL, gave these polls extraordinary features in an African setting

Distributed local approximation algorithms for maximum matching in graphs and hypergraphs

We describe approximation algorithms in Linial's classic LOCAL model of distributed computing to find maximum-weight matchings in a hypergraph of rank $r$. Our main result is a deterministic algorithm to generate a matching which is an $O(r)$-approximation to the maximum weight matching, running in $\tilde O(r \log \Delta + \log^2 \Delta + \log^* n)$ rounds. (Here, the $\tilde O()$ notations hides $\text{polyloglog } \Delta$ and $\text{polylog } r$ factors). This is based on a number of new derandomization techniques extending methods of Ghaffari, Harris & Kuhn (2017). As a main application, we obtain nearly-optimal algorithms for the long-studied problem of maximum-weight graph matching. Specifically, we get a $(1+\epsilon)$ approximation algorithm using $\tilde O(\log \Delta / \epsilon^3 + \text{polylog}(1/\epsilon, \log \log n))$ randomized time and $\tilde O(\log^2 \Delta / \epsilon^4 + \log^*n / \epsilon)$ deterministic time. The second application is a faster algorithm for hypergraph maximal matching, a versatile subroutine introduced in Ghaffari et al. (2017) for a variety of local graph algorithms. This gives an algorithm for $(2 \Delta - 1)$-edge-list coloring in $\tilde O(\log^2 \Delta \log n)$ rounds deterministically or $\tilde O( (\log \log n)^3 )$ rounds randomly. Another consequence (with additional optimizations) is an algorithm which generates an edge-orientation with out-degree at most $\lceil (1+\epsilon) \lambda \rceil$ for a graph of arboricity $\lambda$; for fixed $\epsilon$ this runs in $\tilde O(\log^6 n)$ rounds deterministically or $\tilde O(\log^3 n )$ rounds randomly

The Reality of Racial Disparity in Criminal Justice: The Significance of Data Collection

Criminologists have long debated the presence of racial disparity at various places in the criminal justice system, from initial on-the-street encounters between citizens and police officers to the sentencing behavior of judges. What is new is the use of statistics designed to persuade the public, and not just other academics and researchers, that grave racial disparities exist in the system, and that these disparities necessitate significant policy changes

Some results on chromatic number as a function of triangle count

A variety of powerful extremal results have been shown for the chromatic number of triangle-free graphs. Three noteworthy bounds are in terms of the number of vertices, edges, and maximum degree given by Poljak \& Tuza (1994), and Johansson. There have been comparatively fewer works extending these types of bounds to graphs with a small number of triangles. One noteworthy exception is a result of Alon et. al (1999) bounding the chromatic number for graphs with low degree and few triangles per vertex; this bound is nearly the same as for triangle-free graphs. This type of parametrization is much less rigid, and has appeared in dozens of combinatorial constructions. In this paper, we show a similar type of result for $\chi(G)$ as a function of the number of vertices $n$, the number of edges $m$, as well as the triangle count (both local and global measures). Our results smoothly interpolate between the generic bounds true for all graphs and bounds for triangle-free graphs. Our results are tight for most of these cases; we show how an open problem regarding fractional chromatic number and degeneracy in triangle-free graphs can resolve the small remaining gap in our bounds

Deterministic parallel algorithms for bilinear objective functions

Many randomized algorithms can be derandomized efficiently using either the method of conditional expectations or probability spaces with low independence. A series of papers, beginning with work by Luby (1988), showed that in many cases these techniques can be combined to give deterministic parallel (NC) algorithms for a variety of combinatorial optimization problems, with low time- and processor-complexity. We extend and generalize a technique of Luby for efficiently handling bilinear objective functions. One noteworthy application is an NC algorithm for maximal independent set. On a graph $G$ with $m$ edges and $n$ vertices, this takes $\tilde O(\log^2 n)$ time and $(m + n) n^{o(1)}$ processors, nearly matching the best randomized parallel algorithms. Other applications include reduced processor counts for algorithms of Berger (1997) for maximum acyclic subgraph and Gale-Berlekamp switching games. This bilinear factorization also gives better algorithms for problems involving discrepancy. An important application of this is to automata-fooling probability spaces, which are the basis of a notable derandomization technique of Sivakumar (2002). Our method leads to large reduction in processor complexity for a number of derandomization algorithms based on automata-fooling, including set discrepancy and the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma

The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission: reconciling or re-dividing Liberia?

After 14 years of civil war and violence followed by the momentous and rather unusual elections of 2005, in which a woman defeated a footballer for the presidency, Liberia has seen over six years of state reconstruction and relative peace. Two recent announcements have, however, served as a warning to the extent of progress. The most recent is President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s declaration that she will, despite previous statements to the contrary, stand for re-election in 2011 due to shortcomings in progress. The announcement preceding Johnson-Sirleaf’s was made in the form of the report of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It recommended that Johnson-Sirleaf, and indeed many others accused of involvement in the war, should be barred from public office for the next 30 years, and still more should stand trial on charges of war crimes. Four important questions arise. First, what was the mandate and findings of the TRC? Second, how has Liberia and the wider international community reacted to the final report? Third, has the TRC fulfilled its mandate and contributed to a process of reconciliation? Finally, and in a much broader sense, where does the TRC stand relative to the much wider liberal peace model