In 2008, four senators proposed amendments to the Alien and Nationality Law that would usher in dual citizenship in Liberia. That the bill languished for ten long years begged questions that revealed the changing meanings of political subjectivity and the implications it held for Liberian postwar reconstruction and development policy. Because these concerns served as a point of departure for politicians, development practitioners, and scholars alike, Oxford University intellectual and Liberian national Robtel Neajai Pailey moved to center them in her book, Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa (2021). Pailey explores the continuous reconfiguration of Liberian citizenship across different periods to understand the meaning of citizenship in the twenty-first century for a country emerging from a period of war. She argues throughout the book that a combination of rights, duties, and interpersonal connections distinguishes what she calls the “Liberian citizenship triad” from other forms of citizenship.
Pailey sets the book apart by using Liberia as a case study: this country is emblematic of Africa’s most enduring struggles but also differs in significant ways. Liberia’s early nineteenth-century beginnings as a colony created by the American Colonization Society (ACS) for free Black American immigrants established its initial distinctiveness. Emerging as a space of “relative immigration” for distinct groups of people racialized as Black—West Indians, African Americans, African re-captives, and indigenes—embedded the complexities of citizenship in Liberia’s birth. Being the first independent African republic to establish a framework around the meaning of citizenship also provided a unique position from which to examine the limits of Black citizenship within the Atlantic. Pailey notes that American and Caribbean settlers, concerned about the potential resurgence of the kinds of racial inequality from which they had fled, added a “Negro clause” to the country’s constitution to prevent non-Black individuals from obtaining citizenship (p. 5). Yet, even then, the framers of the constitution adopted a hegemonic structure of citizenship with limits and preconditions, such as land and property ownership, that proved oppressive to the “rooted Indigenous.”
Connecting Liberia’s early history of “immigration” to the “emigration” of the modern post–civil war era provides a necessary context for understanding issues related to Liberian citizenship. Pailey shows that twenty-first-century Liberia transitioned from a country of immigrants to emigrants as the civil war produced an outpouring of its nationals. With the war creating a more global diaspora, Liberia’s citizenship dilemmas became even more complicated, creating socioeconomic struggles that called for novel changes. The citizenship laws in Liberia then appeared to hold a certain bias against a group Pailey calls the “rootless emigrant,” who may have left the country during or after the war. As they sought stability in other countries through naturalization, they automatically lost their Liberian citizenship because of the absence of dual citizenship. Pailey views citizenship as a continuum of inclusion and exclusion. Just as earlier constitutional amendments appeared to have erased the earlier injustices of colonization, others believed that dual citizenship would exorcize other long-standing grievances with policy.
In contemporary times, policy changes concerning dual citizenship became an extension of development policy discussions, and dual citizenship became a solution for development challenges. Here, Pailey offers a necessary and significant extension of these debates. Even though dual citizenship emerged as a contemporary policy mechanism to address diasporic claims, Pailey argues that, as a development model, it provides diminishing returns for democracy. A considerable number of Liberian locals whom Pailey interviewed came to see the new post–civil war government and the scattered diaspora as setting Liberia on a course that had contributed to the war in the first place. Pailey points to development as a process of amelioration and degeneration. The perceived symbiotic relationship between dual citizenship and development presupposed that the contributions of the diaspora would have a positive impact on development. Yet, Pailey critiques this “neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction” (p. 4). As she notes, the process of development might not necessarily result in positive outcomes but instead produce a form of deterioration.
Moreover, Pailey shows how development praxis has implicated various realms of life in Liberia. The once-tiered hierarchy of immigrants that defined Liberia in its early history was reconfigured in contemporary times as “homeland Liberians, returnees, and diasporas” who sought to stake a claim in the development process (p. 7). Socioeconomic transformation in the country became tied to providing citizenship-like provisions and protections in exchange for returns that would improve the country. Indeed, the postwar reconstruction and development era afforded displaced Liberians a degree of latitude and a permissive atmosphere to become part of national growth. Ellen Sirleaf’s tenure solidified what Pailey calls a “diaspocracy,” given that those who occupied positions of power in her administration were from the diaspora. In a replay of Liberia’s founding, Liberian homeland citizens perceived that dual citizenship would violate their already restricted access to political, economic, and social privileges. The Liberian diaspora, in contrast, saw dual citizenship as strengthening their ties to the nation by enabling them to become more effective participants through remittances and other political activities. This neoliberal economic model of development that depended on an overreliance on the expertise of returnees, according to Pailey, served to bolster historical inequities and bitterness. Thus, the question of citizenship reemerged, centered around national belonging and rebuilding. Pailey uses other African countries for comparison (such as Eritrea, which extracts a diaspora tax as a way of extending rights with ties to responsible development practices) and Senegal (which allows voting from the diaspora and holding of political office or equivalent abbreviated version).
Pailey’s book is an important and innovative analysis of citizenship, postwar development, and reconstruction policies in Africa. It should be read alongside Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject (1996) and Bronwen Manby’s comparative study of citizenship law in Africa. It also adds to Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid (2009), which points to the ways foreign aid—whether through the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, private charitable organizations, or “voluntourism”—harms receiving countries. Yet, where others explore development and citizenship issues from a global, top-down perspective, Pailey’s research takes a different approach. Pailey outlines the kinds of epistemic violence that have historically excluded local Liberian works from the scholarly canon. She thus situates her work alongside Liberian scholars from Edward Blyden and Clarence Zamba to Carl Patrick Burrowes. While outlining the global developmental constraints that Africa faces from international organizations, government, and structural issues, Pailey centers the voices, policies, and actions of Africans through extensive fieldwork, primary sources, and more than 200 semistructured interviews in places such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, London, and Washington, DC.
Pailey’s theoretical work emerges from a multidisciplinary framing and a deep exploration of Liberia’s history. This is one of the best aspects of this book. She expertly combines history, politics, and development analysis with her empirical data in ways that broaden, trouble, and critique existing theories. This expands both the fields of political science and Liberian studies, as well as making the book both accessible and suitable for praxis. Pailey’s work does not retell the history of Liberia’s colonization and civil war. Instead, she asks us to think differently about these events not as part of the narrative arc of justice and progress in Liberian history but as an affirmation of a kind of deeply constrained and compromised conception of democracy and citizenship in the first place, which inevitably then gave way to constrained and compromised visions of it when creating the dual citizenship legislation.
