The National Archives of Malawi (NAM) is a member of the East and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA), a regional body that presently comprises fourteen countries (Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zanzibar and Zimbabwe). The state of archives in the ESARBICA region varies from country to country owing to the fact that the countries are at different levels economically, politically and otherwise.

The Liberian civil wars spanned fourteen years, from 1989 to 2003. It is estimated that during this time over 250,000 people were killed and more than 1,000,000 were displaced. The wars were covered regularly in American news. Reports characteristically represented the child militias, human sacrifices, and crazed army tactics, including but not limited to soldiers cross-dressing or using nudity as methods of intimidation. Initially, little attention was offered to the greater social and political implications of the war, but recent news coverage and critical research has demanded a change in the way that the civil wars were viewed and addressed, internally and internationally.

The first Liberian civil war was led by the conflicting political factions of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor. These men were backed largely by members of different groups, divided by existing ethnic tensions. These factions divided further as the war progressed, and the war continued long after Doe's assassination in 1990 and his party's defeat.

According to Ketelaar (1992:5) “archives - well preserved and accessible to the people - are as essential in a free democracy as government of the people by the people, for the people. Because archives are not only tools of the government, not only sources for historical research, access to public archives gives the people the possibility to exercise their rights and to control their governments, its successes, its failures.” The Dictionary of Archival Terminology defines access as “the availability of records or archives for consultation as a result of legal authorization and the existence of finding aids”. The same Dictionary defines privacy as “the right to be secure from unauthorized disclosure of information contained in records/archives relating to personal or private matters.” McCauseland (1993) on the other hand defines access to include “the terms and conditions of availability of records or information maintained by archives for examination and consultation by researchers”.