Book Launch Event
Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa
Hosted by the Department of Social Policy
Thursday 25 February 2021, 5:00pm to 6:30pm. Online public event.
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.
Speaker: Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey (Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy in the Department of Social Policy at LSE).
Discussants: Professor George Klay Kieh (Dean of the Mickey Leland-Barbara Jordan School of Public Affairs and Professor of Political Science at Texas Southern University), Dr Bronwen Manby (Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE Human Rights).
Chair: Professor Coretta Phillips (Professor of Criminology and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy at LSE).
More information here