Working Paper
Legal empowerment and horizontal inequalities after conflict

This article explores whether legal empowerment can address horizontal inequalities in post-conflict settings, and if so, how.

It argues that legal empowerment has modest potential to reduce these inequalities but that there are risks of strengthening group identities, reducing social cohesion, and, in the worst case, triggering conflict.

It uses a case study to examine how two legal empowerment programmes in Liberia navigated this tension between equity and peace.