Monrovia – Mr. Aaron Weah of the Search for Common Ground, ‘Talking Drum Studios’, has been awarded a three-year Vice-Chancellor PhD Research Project at Ulster University. The scholarship is offered on condition that awardees obtain an (Academic) English qualification with an overall grade of 6.0 and a minimum of 5.5 in each component.
The letter written to inform Mr. Weah says: “We hope that you will take up this offer of a PhD studentship.”
Weah, a civil society actor, few years ago obtained the Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Liberia.
The excited Weah told this newspaper that such opportunity of obtaining a PhD will help his work in Traditional Justice, which is going to payoff for Liberia in the future.
“In the last ten years in Liberia, we have had non Liberians impacting knowledge on Transitional Justice to Liberians. Secondly, civil society space has always had people with limited skills, unlike in other African countries, where you have people with PhD in Transitional Justice, Political Science and Peace Studies all working in civil Society. Therefore, I see this as an opportunity to change the course of civil society in Liberia. Therefore, this opportunity is coming at the time, when I take a sabbatical for three years to go back to school after 16 years of my work in Transitional Justice including the TRC,” he said
Weah, who is one of the major players in the civil society arena, further said many people who come into the field have not looked at it as a career but have used it to move onto government. But he has remained working in the field for nearly decade.
“I am excited, because I will be bringing more value and better standards to the field of Civil Society. Civil Society has been overlooked because many of those in civil Society do not bring in expertise to the field. Do not get me wrong because there are some civil society actors with expertise that have done some good works. I think civil society would get the attention if more civil society activists with careered intention can come back to the sector to work and make it more vibrant,” Weah said
Weah’s Abstract
A portion of his abstract which helped him win the award spoke about the reason for the establishment of the TRC, to address impunity.
“In 2009, the TRC submitted its final report and recommended a wide range of measures to address underlying causes and impacts of the war. While there have been attempts to implement the report recommendations actual implementation is yet to happen. Liberia’s political elites are implicated in much of its findings and thus embarrassed and unwilling to implement the measures it identifies. As a consequence, 15 years after the conflict has ended, Liberians have not experienced healing nor is there an acceptable public accountability to teach the young generation about what happened. The Liberian State’s official silence on the past contributes in implicit and explicit ways to the everyday transmission of violent memory; from one ethnic household to the other as the older generation passes on its memories and biases to the new. Some transmissions of these memories are based on community-led memorial undertakings, while others are grounded in direct oral transmission of the violence.”
Another part of Weah’s advocacy has been to help craft messages of peace, and he did this as a peace and justice activist, in the Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG).
He and others drafted the Act establishing Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (LTRC) and campaigned for its passage at the Legislature.
Later in the TRC process, he also worked as a Program Associate with the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), which provided technical support to the Commission and victim communities.
As a research, he has written and published on Liberia’s postwar recovery and experiment with transitional justice, including a book he co-authored: “Impunityunder Attack: Evolution and Imperatives of the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” The book was an ambitious project done with fellow activists from the TJWG.
In December 2018, Weah was commissioned by the Scotland Yard Security—Crown Prosecution Services(CPS) Division to write a Reference Report and to serve as Expert Witness for Agnes Taylor (former Liberian President, Charles Taylor’s ex-wife) Trial in the United Kingdom.
Also as a Policy Analyst, he worked at Liberia’s Governance Commission (GC) and co-drafted Liberia’s Strategic Road Map for National Healing, Peace Building and Reconciliation, a post-TRC instrument concerned with restorative justice measures of the TRC. The GC is Liberia’s think tank mandated to develop framework for governance reform.
Based on his research and publication record, Oxford University press made Weah in 2017, a Part Time faculty, lecturing at the University Kofi Annan Institution for Conflict Transformation, (KAICT). He departs Liberia, soon for the UK to begin his PhD program.
