Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T05:11:47.617Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Give Me Your Land or I’ll Shoot!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2021

Robtel Neajai Pailey
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Get access

Summary

Chapter 4 chronicles how conflict—manifested in physical and structural violence—simultaneously ruptured and sealed government-citizen and citizen-citizen relations thereby casting citizenship as a site of enduring struggle for Liberia. It employs Long’s notion of the interface as well as Galtung’s conflict triangle to designate conflict as a dynamic process in which the ‘incompatibility of goals’ of different actors (contradiction) fuels their perceptions and misperceptions of themselves and each other (attitudes) thereby influencing actions (behaviour) that may range from opposition to accommodation.Specifically, the chapter maintains that Liberian citizenship has been constructed and reconstructed because of conflicts precipitated by four major interfaces between a range of actors beginning with the indigenous wars of resistance during Liberia’s state formation in the nineteenth century and climaxing in twenty-first century post-war rivalries over income, land tenure, and transitional justice. While strained government-citizen relations engendered dissent and divergence, improvements in those relations also ushered in intervals of consent and convergence. This chapter demonstrates that a decade-long impasse on dual citizenship reveals how Liberian citizenship has changed across space and time through conflict and crisis and is still undergoing transformation.

Type
Chapter
Information
Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa
The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia
, pp. 110 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×