Can you please give us an introduction to your work and tell us why you wanted to study in this field?

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of Critical Development Studies, Critical African Studies, and Critical Race Studies whose research centres on how socio-economic transformation is conceived and contested in ‘crisis’-affected regions of the so-called ‘Global South’. I investigate how disparate actors at multiple scales—local, national, transnational, and global—respond to development-oriented interventions and the extent to which said responses are shaped by historical processes of change. I remain intrigued by seemingly marginalised ‘Global South’ actors who employ their capacity and knowledgeability to subvert the ‘best-laid’ plans of the powerful and prosperous. My scholarship thus centres Africa as an important, though often underrepresented, site for theorising citizenship construction and practice across space and time and their myriad implications for development.

Could you please tell us about your contribution to knowledge over the course of your career?

Internationally recognised as a critical public voice on decoloniality, I have a record of research in the political economy of development, migration, conflict, post-war recovery, and the politics of governance, all with respect to Africa. I have published widely from scholarship that advances an alternative, emancipatory framework of structural transformation, including articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Liberian Studies Journal, Citizenship Studies, Review of African Political Economy, African Affairs, Migration Studies, Democratization, Development and Change and Third World Quarterly. A winner of two book awards, my monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia has been favourably reviewed in over a dozen scholarly, policy and media outlets, and contributed to the passage of Liberia’s 2022 dual citizenship law.

You’ve written a book on the evolution of citizenship in Liberia. How has it changed over time and what does that tell us about the country and its citizens?

When I published Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa in 2021, Liberia was one of seven countries in Africa that did not formally recognise dual citizenship. The country was attempting to buck its then-outlier status by introducing a dual citizenship bill in 2008 that was never passed. I argue throughout my book that citizenship has always been contested in Liberia, making the impasse on dual citizenship a 21^st century manifestation of the country’s enduring struggles over citizenship. For example, during the first century of Liberia’s existence as Africa’s first black republic from 1847 to 1947, laws and norms around citizenship generally excluded indigenous populations who had inhabited the territory before black migrant settlers arrived from the United States, Caribbean and Congo River basin. Back then, citizenship was biased against what I call the ‘rooted indigene’.

Historical and contemporary processes of conflict, migration, globalisation, and post-war recovery created prejudices against what I call the ‘rootless emigrant’: Liberians who left the country before, during or after a protracted armed conflict and naturalised abroad, or Liberians born abroad to Liberian citizen parents who opted for their birthplace citizenships after reaching adulthood. Before the passage of dual citizenship in 2022, these Liberians argued that they should be able to retain Liberian citizenship by birth and ancestry, respectively, because they had been important political, economic and social actors—sending remittances, lobbying for the cessation of armed conflict, investing in real estate and agriculture, etc.

On the other hand, many Liberians at home viewed (and still view) dual citizenship as a zero-sum game, deepening inequalities, infringing upon their already limited access to political, economic and social rights and prioritising a seemingly privileged class of transnational actors. So, while the 21^st century gridlock on dual citizenship was deeply socio-economic in nature, it is emblematic of contested forms of exclusionary citizenship from the 19^th century onwards.

**Can you tell us about your current book project Africa’s ‘Negro’ Republics?**

Africa’s ‘Negro’ Republics seeks to put Critical Development Studies and Critical African Studies into fluid conversation with Critical Race Studies. It investigates how legal clauses that prohibit non-blacks from acquiring citizenship in Liberia and Sierra Leone have impacted the two countries’ pre- and post-war development outcomes. Through mixed methods including semi-structured interviews, surveys, focus group discussions and archival data, I am examining how slavery, colonialism and neoliberalism in the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries, respectively, have shaped the adoption and maintenance of ‘Negro’ clauses; how these explicitly raced citizenship provisions assert black personhood; and what implications this has for contemporary patterns of ‘South-South’ migration, investment, trade, and aid. The project is especially relevant now in light of rising advocacy worldwide against anti-black physical and structural violence as well as racialised, anti-migrant scapegoating.

You describe yourself as an academic and an activist. What do you see as the relationship between those two terms and how do they feed off each other? Are there also aspects of those roles that you need to keep separate from each other?

In the indomitable words of African-American public intellectual Cornel West, I am fundamentally ‘maladjusted to injustice’ as a scholar-activist. My academic and activist work complement each other because, in both spheres, I attempt to challenge received wisdom and speak truth to power. I reject calls for scholars to remain ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ because the motivations and methods for pursuing research are inherently personal and political.

You also write extensively in the media, and you’ve also written books for children. Why do you think it’s important to work outside mainstream academia?

While going through old boxes in my mother’s house in the United States, where I grew up, I found a newspaper clipping of my very first by-line, when I was a 10-year-old student at Marie H. Reed Learning Centre in Washington, DC. This headline story in my school’s newspaper was about a Reed student from Somalia who had enrolled in a conflict resolution course developed by American University master’s candidates in peace studies. It reminded me how much of a lifeline writing has been, be it in my creative non-fiction, children’s fiction, scholarly analysis, or popular commentary. I think of myself as a storyteller first and foremost, so writing in varied genres and styles, for multiple outlets and platforms, has been such a powerful way of engaging with audiences across a broad spectrum and meeting people where they are.

What knowledge or insights have you gained from your research that you wish you’d known when you started?

Citizenship has come to represent, for me, a more appropriate framework for explaining broader processes of political, economic, social, and technological transformation (‘development’) in the continent of Africa because it defies primordial references to ethnicity, religion and region, especially within the context of conflict. Although contemporary forms of citizenship originated in Europe, Africa is a fascinating region for exploring political subjectivities because the continent inherited colonial legal systems with multi-tiered citizenships based on indigeneity, race and ethnicity that persist today. Contemporary contestations in Africa, violent and otherwise, centre primarily on claims for territorial legitimacy.

What about your area of study do you wish more people knew?

I am a scholar of development, but I eschew conventional notions of ‘development’ as being the province of the so-called ‘Global South’. By ‘development’ I do not mean mainstream pursuits of free-market capitalism, a singular quest for economic growth, or the privileging of Western whiteness and modernity; rather, I am referring to an alternative, emancipatory process whereby people’s experiences of poverty, power, privilege, and progress are constantly mediated to effect change. This is how I define ‘development’ in my monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa.

How has your background and ethnicity influenced your work?

The research questions I ask, the methods I employ, the insights I glean from the data collected, and the ethical commitments I have to my interlocutors are all part and parcel of my intersecting identities.

If you had infinite time and resources what understudied area would you want to research and why?

My scholarship has become increasingly comparative, with Liberia as my empirical anchor, so I am very keen to pursue research that compares not only Liberia and Haiti but also Liberia and Israel. Haiti and Liberia represent the Northern hemisphere’s and Southern hemisphere’s first black republics, respectively, and there is so much to unpack about their disparate development trajectories. The same could also be said about a comparison between Israel, whose controversial founding was a response to the holocaust as a crime against humanity, and Liberia, whose controversial founding was a response to slavery as a crime against humanity.

Which African thinkers and/or books by African authors would you recommend people read?

Because much of my scholarship is historically grounded, I tend to admire historians who demonstrate a real flair for putting different kinds of archival texts into conversation with one another while reading against the grain. The late Liberian historian Clarence E. Zamba Liberty did this brilliantly in his seminal book Growth of the Liberian State, based on his 1977 Stanford University PhD thesis, which is the most nuanced, compelling interpretation of Liberian state formation I have ever come across! I draw heavily on Liberty’s work in my monograph and consider it essential reading for anyone researching and writing about Liberia. I also highly recommend Carl Patrick Burrowes’ myth-busting book Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea: A History of the Liberian People before 1800 because it incisively demonstrates how pre- and post-settler Liberia were by-products of broader political, socio-economic, and ecological developments in Africa and its diasporas.

I am also inspired by African and diasporic public intellectuals who have intentionally straddled academia and activism on behalf of Africa – including Frantz Fanon of Martinique, Walter Rodney of Guyana, Samir Amin and Nawal el Saadawi of Egypt, Sylvia Tamale of Uganda, and Ayesha Imam of Nigeria. These scholar-activists have produced emancipatory, ethical, and subversive scholarship that serves Africa and its people, thus putting to shame careerist ‘decolonisers’ in the academy whose work remains largely detached from the day-to-day dilemmas of people in formerly colonised spaces and places.

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robtel neajai pailey

Citizenship and development