According to localcollegeexplorer, the territories of the Liberia between 12th and 18th century. they saw successive Portuguese, Spanish, French and English trade settlements. The American colonization society, established in 1816 with the aim of launching freed black slaves in Africa, in 1821 obtained from the local leaders the settlement of African-American colonists in the establishment at Capo Mesurado, which in 1824 took the name of Liberia with center in Monrovia. The colony grew rapidly and proclaimed independence in 1847. African Americans and their descendants gave birth to a privileged caste, settled on the coast, which concentrated political and economic power within itself, without integrating with the indigenous population of the interior. The True whig party, the only political formation allowed, from 1870 he held power for over a century under a constitutional system restricting the freedoms of the majority of the population. The link with the USA led to the inclusion of Liberia in the system of US international political and commercial relations. In 1945, Liberia was among the signatories of the UN Constitutive Charter. After the war, substantially stable governments followed one another under the leadership of W. Tubman (President of the Republic from 1943 to 1971) and WR Tolbert, who sought to achieve greater integration between Liberians of American descent and the local population.

In 1980 Tolbert was deposed and killed in a coup that overthrew the Free-American elite; SK Doe, who had led the uprising, was elected president in 1985. Against the government of Doe (executed in 1990) an insurrectional movement with a political and ethnic basis led by C. Taylor broke out in 1989; soon spreading to a large part of the country, it started a bloody civil war. Mediation attempts by the United Nations and the West African Economic Community (ECOWAS) followed each other unsuccessfully in the first half of the 1990s, while new divisions in the factions, also fighting for the illegal trade in diamonds, the main source of financing for the fighting groups, ignited the clashes. A further complicating factor was the direct and indirect intervention of Western powers and African states in the area. Only in 1996 the Abuja agreement (Nigeria) made it possible to disarm most of the warring factions. In 1997 Taylor won the elections, held under the control of international organizations, and imposed a corrupt and despotic regime; tensions with Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea complicated the situation, which housed the bases of opposition groups in Taylor, in turn accused of supporting the Revolutionary United Front armed movement in Sierra Leone. In 1999 the exiled opposition launched an offensive against Monrovia and the war raged violently until 2003, when Taylor was forced into exile.

The launch of a government of national reconciliation and the Accra agreements of 2003 marked the end of the civil war in a situation still conditioned by great uncertainties. In a context characterized by great insecurity, with an economy dependent to a large extent from the presence of a UN mission and international aid and the enormous difficulties of a country ravaged by a war that has produced over 250,000 deaths and an entire generation of child soldiers, the path to normality has found a significant moment in the election head of state in 2005 by E. Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman to rise to this post in Africa. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, Johnson Sirleaf obtained 45.5% of the votes in the presidential elections held in October of the same year in a climate of strong tensions; the opposition, which rejected the results of the counting denouncing fraud, withdrew from the consultations calling for a boycott of the voters, and in the second round Johnson Sirleaf was reconfirmed as president, obtaining 90% of the votes, albeit in the face of a very low turnout (37%). The presidential elections held in October 2017 were confronted by the candidate of the Congress for Democracy and Change G. Weah and the vice-president of the country J. Boakai of the Party of Unity, who respectively obtained 39% and 29% of the votes. ; the ballot, scheduled for November and postponed by the Supreme Court to the following month due to the need to investigate the irregularities that would have been made during the first round, confirmed the results, assigning the victory to Weah, who won with the 61st % of the votes on the government candidate.