Book Talk with Robtel Neajai Pailey: Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa
Book Talk with Dr. Robtel Neajai Pailey, author of Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia
DISCUSSANTS:
Dr. Carl Patrick Burrowes, Distinguished Historian and Executive Director of Know Your Self Press
Zirra Banu, PhD Student in African Studies, Howard University
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa
Does dual citizenship reproduce inequalities? Robtel Neajai Pailey grapples with this question and more in her engaging monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Drawing on rich life histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, she examines socio-economic change in Liberia, Africa’s first black republic, through the prism of citizenship. Marking how historical policy changes on citizenship and contemporary public discourse on dual citizenship have impacted development policy and practice, Pailey reveals that as Liberia transformed from a country of immigration to one of emigration, so too did the nature of citizenship, thus influencing claims for and against dual citizenship. Her book develops a new model for conceptualising 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.
AUTHOR BIO:
Robtel Neajai Pailey is Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. A Liberian scholar-activist working at the intersection of Critical African Studies, Critical Development 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. Pailey completed BA degrees in African Studies and English Literature at Howard University in 2004, an MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford in 2007 and a PhD in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, in 2014.
