Robtel Neajai Pailey is an IAD guest speaker who will speak to this question and more at a lecture based around her work in Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia.

Pailey is an assistant professor in international social and public policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). A Liberian scholar-activist working at the intersection of Critical Development Studies, Critical African Studies and Critical Race Studies, she centers her research on how structural transformation is conceived and contested by local, national and transnational actors from ‘crisis’-affected regions of the so-called Global South.(Cambridge University Press, 2021). Hers is the first book to evaluate domestic and diasporic constructions and practices of Liberian citizenship across space and time and their myriad implications for development. In this seminar drawing on rich life histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Pailey uses a contested dual citizenship bill, introduced in Liberia in 2008 but never passed, as an entry point to ask broader questions about how citizenship is differentiated by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc, and whether dual citizenship actually reproduces inequalities. She develops a new model for conceptualizing citizenship within the context of ‘crisis’-affected states while offering a compelling critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction.

Cosponsored by the Migrations initiative.