The scene of two devastating civil wars since 1989, Liberia was widely considered a failed state until Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was democratically elected president in 2005. This book investigates the political economy of civil war and democratic peace, arguing that the civil wars did not represent state decay, but exhibited dynamics characteristic of state formation. In the analysis of postwar developments, which emphasizes the intertwining of corruption and democracy under the new regime, Felix Gerdes details both political progress and persistent structural deficits of the polity.