 Rydw i'n meddwl am hynny. Rydw i'n meddwl am y dyfodol i'r wych yn bach i'r newid. Llywodraeth yn esbytyd, gan yw'r gwaith. Felly mae'n cymdeithasol yma. Felly io wedi gweld yn robtel, rwy'n mynd i ddim yn ymddi'r cymdeithi hyn. Felly mae'n rhaid i'r cymdeithi hyn yn ymlaen nhw, nid yn y fydd. Rydw i'n mynd i ddim yn ymddi i'r cyfan ar y blynyddi. Dr Rob Tell Nearju Peili is Assistant Professor International Social and Public Policy at LSE, but more importantly than that she is a SOAS alumnus. Very pleased to have you. She joined the LSE Department of Social Policy in September 2022, teaches, as she was just telling me, development studies to social policy scholars, so they will at least know something about development. She is a Liberian scholar activist working at the intersection of critical development studies to critical African studies and critical race studies. That's a lot of critical. She centres her research on how structural transformation is conceived and contested. Her current book project is Africa's Negro Republics examines how slavery colonialism and neoliberalism in the 19th, 20th and 20th centuries respectively have shaped the adoption and maintenance of clauses barring non-blacks from obtaining citizenship in Liberia and Sierra Leone. She's conducted research in four continents and has authored this book, Development, Dual Citizenship and its Discontents in Africa, The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia. It's won multiple prizes, the 2022 African Politics Conference Group Best Book Award and the 2023 African Studies Association of Africa Pious Adesani Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing and also contributed to the passage of the Dual Citizenship Law in Liberia. She's published a lot of articles and has been a Leverhulm Early Career Fellow at Oxford, an Ibrahim Leadership Fellow at the African Development Bank Group and has a portion for working with presidents, which we'll probably hear some more about I think soon. So, very pleased to have you here, Rob Tell. We'd like to hear from you now. Good evening, everybody. I'm going to try that again. Good evening, everybody. That's better. Naomi, thank you so much for that very generous introduction. And as Naomi mentioned, I am an alum of SOAS of the Development Studies Department at SOAS. So it's a double honour to be back on home turf. I do miss SOAS tremendously, but I know you're just a stone's throw away from the LSE. And the book that I'm going to present is actually based on my PhD thesis that was written here. And I often tell people that I effectively came into my own as a critical development studies scholar activist right here on this campus. This department molded me into the person who's very curious about what are the intersections between development, socioeconomic transformation, structural transformation, and ideas about citizenship writ large, not only in the context of Liberia, but also across the continent and the world, as it were. So that is what I'm going to be presenting today. And for the purposes of this presentation, which doesn't seem to want to move, let's see. OK. For the purposes of this presentation, I have outlined the presentation in three parts. So part one essentially focuses on my main arguments. Part two focuses on what contributions I think I'm making, not only theoretically, but also methodologically and empirically. And then part three focuses on implications of the work for policymaking and practice. And before I delve into the actual presentation, I want to read an excerpt of the book because I think it will give you a sense of the texture of the kinds of things that I'm doing. In many respects, I think of myself as a scholar, but also a storyteller. And I think effectively that's what academics are, even though sometimes we don't think of ourselves as storytellers. So I infuse this book with vignettes. I infuse this book with block quotes from my interlocutors, who you will hear about a little bit later in the presentation. I infuse this book with lived realities of the people that I encounter and my own experiences of collecting this data. So this excerpt is from chapter one of the monograph and it's entitled Methodological, Theoretical, and Biographical Reflections. In mid-May 2013 at the Buruburam refugee camp on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana's capital, a petite seamstress hurled out of a one-room house to fetch rainwater pouring endlessly from her corrugated rooftop. I paused my audio recorder nearly four times during an interview with this 38-year-old former refugee who had opted in 2012 for local integration in Ghana after living there for 23 years. Torrential showers splash through her punctured window screens exposing us to the elements. Dripping wet, the woman re-entered the house holding a bright blue bucket on the crown of her head filled with what I assumed was water for washing clothes and bathing and placed it in a corner of the room. She sat down on a small wooden bench facing me and we continued the interview shouting to hear each other above the loud clamour of rain. Just one month earlier, I had sat comfortably in the refurbished rooftop office of a 48-year-old Liberian businessman and consultant in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. Exuding confidence and privilege, the man had lived and worked in similar settings across five different countries within sub-Saharan Africa for two decades. When he offered me a chilled orange phansa and a sleek hourglass bottle, I could not help noticing his form-fitting tailor-made suit. As the man walked to the single leather recliner facing me, his shiny shoes made a soft noise on the white porcelain tiles. I placed my recorder on his mahogany table and pressed play. So I'll end here because I think what this excerpt effectively is emblematic of is this book is very much about contrasts. It's very much about continuities and discontinuities of being Liberian and practicing Liberian citizenship from both domestically but also diasporic or transnationally. It's a book about contrasts between what I call the powerful and seemingly powerless. It's a book about contrasts between the prosperous and the poor, as you can see from the refugee woman and the businessman in Sierra Leone. It's a book about the diasporic and the domestic. It's a book about the contrasts between citizen and what we might deem non-citizen, young and old men and women. It's a book about contrasts. I started writing this book again when I was at SOAS, but the kernel of the book was really planted, Naomi mentioned or alluded to the fact that I work or have worked for presidents, both the president of the African Development Bank as well as the president of Liberia. When I worked for the president of Liberia in this really dynamic post-war moment between 2007 and 2011, one of the things I was tasked with having written a master's dissertation on the political, economic and social implications of Liberians moving back during the post-war period of Liberia, this really dynamic process. And President Sirleaf said, okay, great, you've written this master's dissertation. Now you come up with a diaspora engagement strategy for the government of Liberia now. That's a huge task for someone who's in their mid-20s, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, incredibly idealistic. But I took on this responsibility quite seriously because as someone who was diasporic and transnational in my own right, I wanted to find out how could we harness the political, economic and social potential of Liberians living abroad to contribute to post-war reconstruction. So I started doing a lot of interviews. I interviewed Liberians in Australia, I interviewed Liberians in parts of Europe, in parts of North America, in parts of West Africa, the subregion. And one thing that I kept hearing over and over again is why is the government now petitioning us to become engaged in post-war reconstruction when the government and the state has effectively told us that we are not citizens if we naturalize elsewhere at the time when I was doing these interviews in 2010, 2011, Liberia was one of a few countries in the West African subregion as well as across the continent of Africa that prohibited dual citizenship. And given its migratory history, it seems actually counterintuitive. So the seed of this book was actually planted when I worked for the Governor of Liberia and I was able to develop a PhD thesis proposal based on that. And thanks to Laura Hammond and a number of other development studies scholars and faculty members in the Department of Development Studies, the thesis eventually became a book after I did graduate from SOAS. So that's effectively what this book is about. It's about asking questions as my interlocutors did at the time. What does it mean to be a citizen in a post-war context when the state has effectively told those citizens, those who live abroad, who may have naturalized that they are no longer a part of the nation state formally through the sort of citizenship architecture that you set up? So without much ado, I'll move into my major arguments. And I think one of the things I want to do because I know not everybody in the room is familiar with Liberia and its historical trajectory, but I would say that one of the things that I find particularly fascinating and important in terms of my contributions is the fact is the case study of Liberia is quite unique, right? Liberia is Africa's first black republic and as a result it was really the first country in the continent of Africa to devise legal norms around membership, around citizenship, around belonging. And this book is also the first study that investigates not only domestic, but also diasporic constructions of citizenship across space and time. So I take a very historical kind of look at citizenship and how it's changed, configured and reconfigured across space and time, and then also the myriad implications of development, right? So what are the implications of this configuration and reconfiguration across space and time on processes of socio-economic transformation and structural transformation? And when I talk about development in this book, I'm talking about the sort of single-minded pursuit of economic growth. I'm not talking about the privileging of western whiteness and modernity, as is the case in mainstream development discourses. What I'm really talking about in this book is asking questions about how people's experiences of poverty, progress, privilege are mediated across time and space to affect some sort of change, right? And that change can be technological, it can be political, it can be economic, it can be social, so forth and so on. And so I do this by using a bill that was introduced in the Liberian legislature in 2008. At the time I was actually living and working in Liberia, right? A bill that was introduced in Liberia in 2008, that interestingly enough was suspended, it lingered in legislative limbo for about eight or about 10 years from 2008 until about 2018. And I'm investigating this book or this bill using it as an issue point to ask broader questions about what does it mean to be a citizen or a non-citizen in a post-war context. So before I go into the major arguments, I do want to say as a preface that the dual citizenship law in Liberia, there was a dual citizenship law that was passed after the book was published. So the book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021 and a dual citizenship law was passed in Liberia in 2022. So imagine between 2008 when the bill was introduced until 2022, you have a long kind of trajectory of suspension and contestations therein about what are the kind of merits or demerits of dual citizenship as it relates to Liberia, which is a migratory country. So what are my major arguments? The first is that mid-19th, while mid-19th century Liberian citizenship, mid-19th century to about mid-20th century Liberian citizenship was largely passive and constructed from above by a hegemonic state. Mid-20th century onwards Liberian citizenship has been largely active and reconstructed from below by citizens themselves, and this has usually been through processes of protest, right? Now why is this? In the book, I take three historical and contemporary factors that I believe have been fundamentally important in terms of this introduction of the bill but also the suspension of the bill. And I argue that these three processes of conflict, migration and post-war recovery, and then I have a separate chapter on globalization, have effectively configured and reconfigured Liberian citizenship across space and time and produced as a result this contestation around dual citizenship. So for the purposes of this presentation, I want to focus on the example of migration. So there's a whole chapter on migration. And what's interesting about Liberia is when Liberia was established as Africa's first black republic, it was in 1847, it was a country of relative immigration. I, MMI, right? It was a country where you had large waves of black migrant settlers who were coming from places such as the Congo River Basin, who were coming from places like the United States, who were coming from places like the Caribbean, and they were effectively fleeing. These are free black people. They were fleeing racial discrimination in these places, particularly the Caribbean and the United States, right? So Liberia was established in 1847. It's a country of relative immigration, large waves of people moving into the country. However, at the time, Liberia was a country whose laws, whose citizenship laws and regulations were biased against what I call the rooted indigen, right? The rooted indigen. A country of relative immigration, but its laws and regulations around citizenship biased against the rooted indigen. And what do I mean by the rooted indigen? So as is the case of human history, whenever a country is founded, and I put this in huge quotation marks, there usually are people already in that particular settlement, and Liberia is no different. So when these black migrant settlers came from the Congo River Basin and the Caribbean and the United States, they met people in this territory that would eventually become Liberia. Now, many of these people lived in the hinterland, so further north, they didn't necessarily settle on the coast, but there were coastal indigenous populations who encountered these black migrant settlers. For the first 100 years of the Republic's existence, citizenship was barred. These indigenous populations were barred from obtaining citizenship. A country of relative immigration, but biased against the rooted indigen. Now, in the 20th century, mid-20th century onwards, Liberia is considered a country of relative immigration, especially during processes of movement during the armed conflict and any sort of political upheaval from 1980 onwards. So Liberia is considered a country of relative immigration, EMI, right? However, its citizenship laws and norms before this dual citizenship law was passed in 2022, its citizenship laws and norms were biased against what I called the rootless immigrant, right? So effectively, Liberians who left during political upheaval, left during the armed conflict of 1989 to 2003, and naturalized elsewhere were barred from maintaining their Liberian citizenship, because the country did not recognize dual citizenship. Not only that, descendants or children of these Liberians who moved to other locales outside of the country, who either obtained citizenship by birth through another country, they were barred from dual citizenship as well. So a country of relative immigration from the 1980s onwards, and it still has norms, legal norms, around citizenship and membership were biased against the rootless immigrant. Now, this isn't surprising, because a lot of scholars, such as Bronwyn Menby, a colleague of mine at the LSC, as well as Moog Mamdani, whose work you might be more familiar with, the Seminole Text Citizen and Subject, have argued that citizenship is viscerally contested in countries that have experienced colonial era migration, right? Now, although Liberia wasn't formally colonized by European powers, or two countries in the continent that was not formally colonized by European powers, it did experience heightened levels of colonial era migration, of these black migrant settlers who were coming from these different places outside of the West African subregion. So that's my first argument. The second argument that I make is that this sort of 21st century impasse or gridlock on dual citizenship, where you have so much contestation around the merits or demerits of dual citizenship, is effectively emblematic of these enduring struggles over citizenship in Liberia across space and time. Now, before Liberia passed this dual citizenship bill in July 2022, it was one of only seven countries in the continent that are effectively, were effectively outliers, right? That prohibited dual citizenship. And the other six were Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Tanzania, right? So this 21st century contestation, gridlock on dual citizenship, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a sort of historical trajectory of contestations around citizenship from that very moment of Liberia's establishment as Africa's first black republic. The third argument that I make is, and this is where we bring the ideas of development into the fore, is that domestic Liberians, as well as diasporic Liberians, effectively have very, very different understandings or conceptualizations of citizenship, dual citizenship and their interactions with development, right? So what I discovered is that these domestic and diasporic Liberians interpret dual citizenship differently based on what the development sociologist Norman Long calls their life worlds, their lived experiences, and also their social locations, so their socioeconomic status. What I discovered when I was doing my interviews with 200 plus Liberians across five different cities, five different countries, three different continents, a bit about when I'm speaking about my methodological approach, is that domestic Liberians effectively saw dual citizenship as a zero-sum game, as effectively infringing upon their already very limited access to political, economic and social rights as privileging a seemingly privileged class of already privileged people, i.e. transnational Liberians, whether that rhetoric met the reality is a different matter altogether, right? However, on the other hand, the diasporic Liberians I spoke to, the transnational Liberians that I spoke to, saw dual citizenship as a development enabler, whereas many of the domestic Liberians that I spoke to were very fearful and had anxieties around the prospects of legislating dual citizenship. Those I spoke to abroad argue that dual citizenship would entrench the political, economic and social contributions that Liberians abroad are already making to socioeconomic transformation that are already making to post-war recovery, right? So you see that sort of dichotomy between the diasporic mystique around dual citizenship and the domestic kind of anxieties around dual citizenship. So there's two quotes that I've pulled up from my interviews and the book, which I think are very emblematic of this idea of the dichotomy. So it reveals the diasporic aspirations for dual citizenship but also the domestic anxieties. And if you read the book, a lot of people pick up on the fact that I'm very, very much interested in alliteration. I told you that I'm a storyteller and as much as I am a scholar. So diasporic aspirations versus domestic anxieties. So you see the alliteration there. The first quote is from Cletus Watterson. He was a senator at the time and also the sponsor of the dual citizenship bill when the interviews were conducted between 2012 and 2013. And he says, and I quote, a lot of them, meaning a Liberians abroad, had to change their lifestyle except the dictates from a strange country for survival. In some countries, it meant you had to become a citizen of that country to enjoy the benefits. But in taking that involuntary stance it qualified them for disqualification of their citizenships in their own country, i.e. Liberia, which I believe is unfair. So for me that quote is incredibly emblematic of the diasporic aspirations of what dual citizenship can do and the justification for legislating dual citizenship. The other quote is from Jewel Howard Taylor, who was a cosponsor of the bill. She was a senator at the time. She eventually became vice president in 2018. And for me her quote is effectively emblematic of the domestic anxieties even though she could recognize the domestic anxieties even though she was a cosponsor of the bill. And she says, you know Liberians here, meaning in the country of Liberia, working, they're unemployed and they feel as if Liberians coming from the diaspora who have had all of these opportunities want to come and take their space. Domestic anxieties. And I would even push this quote further and say it wasn't just the Liberians who were unemployed who were contesting the legislating of dual citizenship, it wasn't just Liberians who were poor, it was also prosperous Liberians who were doing relatively well and already privileged in their own right who were very, very much anxious about the prospects of legislating dual citizenship, right? And these are what I call homelanders and I'll talk about that term a little bit later. So you see the dichotomy already kind of play out in these two quotes and they certainly played out in my interviews with Liberians across these different sites that I will discuss a bit later. So what does the book do in addition to revealing these sort of dichotomies, right? These discontinuities. It provides a critical framing of development as I mentioned already. For me, development is more than just the sort of single-minded pursuit of economic growth. It's more than just privileging Western Whiteness and modernity. And it frames development as a process of both amelioration, betterment, movement, progress moving forward, but also a process of degeneration. So for those domestic Liberians who view dual citizenship as a development disenabler, you would see the introduction of dual citizenship as a development policy or policy prescription as degeneration, not as amelioration, right? And more importantly, I frame citizenship as a continuum of both inclusion as well as exclusion. In many respects, citizenship as is the case in the academic literature but also the policy literature is multi-layered, right? It's differentiated along so many different social qualifiers such as race, such as class, such as gender, such as ethnicity, such as ability, such as sexual orientation, so forth and so on. And even though people might experience or have formal legal citizenship, their experience of that citizenship will differ based on these different social qualifiers. So I'll give you an example in the context of Liberia, how Liberian citizenship is multi-layered. How is it differentiated? The case study that I want to give is the case study of race. So you may or may not be familiar with the fact that Liberia is one of two countries in the continent of Africa that has race-based citizenship clauses. Now, this is the subject of my second book, so I won't belabor the issue. I'm writing a book at the moment called Africa's Negro Republics and it talks about this race-based citizenship clause. So Liberia is one of those countries and then Sierra Leone is one of those countries. So this race-based clause effectively states that only people of Negro descent are entitled to Liberian citizenship. Now you might be actually quite appalled by that and say, well, that's a racist clause, but you have to understand the history of Liberia, right? Liberia, again, was founded by black settlers, free men and women who came from these different places, and what they were trying to do by inserting this clause in the Constitution and then it eventually made its way into the 1973 Aliens of Nationality law is to ensure that only people of Negro descent would be able to control the means of production, i.e. land, given the experiences in the United States and the Caribbean, so forth and so on, right? And so they instituted or inserted this Negro clause in the Constitution, particularly for economic reasons, right? For protectionist reasons. And one of the questions I'm asking is, in this day and age, in the 21st century, what kind of purpose does this protectionist clause serve given that you have large populations of South Asian nationals who've lived in Liberia, who've lived in Sierra Leone for long periods of time and have effectively settled there? So what are the socioeconomic implications of barring these non-black populations from obtaining citizenship in the 21st century? That's one of the questions that I'm asking. Is this clause considered racist? Is it protectionist? Is it neither? Is it both? To what extent does it assert black personhood? To what extent does it challenge white supremacy in the 21st century? Those are the questions that I'm asking. And then looking at the sort of historical trajectory. So Liberia is definitely, definitely fundamentally differentiated along the social qualifier of race. It's also differentiated along other social qualifiers, but I won't have very much time to talk about those. The other thing I do in the book is I interrogate the sort of presumed assumption that there is a symbiotic relationship between development and dual citizenship. So a lot of policymakers will argue and a lot of policymakers have argued that if you institute dual citizenship, economic development or socio-economic transformation will triple, right? It will quadruple. It will increase exponentially. So I interrogate this presumed kind of symbiotic relationship by demonstrating that in Liberia, in the Liberia context, as is the case in other contexts that had contestations around dual citizenship in the sub-region. Dual citizenship is actually viscerally contested as not only development intervention, but a policy prescription that has development implications or that has development dividends. The other thing that I do is I present critiques of dual citizenship. So, again, this idea of dual citizenship being a given, a public good. A lot of scholars have argued that dual citizenship effectively is about extending rights without necessarily extracting responsibilities. And I saw this manifest itself in a lot of the interviews where people talked a lot about the rights part of the equation, but not sufficiently enough about the responsibilities part of the equation, right? So extending rights without necessarily extracting responsibility. So that citizenship becomes a la carte, right? You choose it at will. It provides certain privileges, but you don't necessarily have obligations that you have to fulfil. Other scholars like Whitaker have argued that there actually is no direct correlation between establishing or legislating dual citizenship and increased kind of economic contributions of transnational actors. There is no permanent sufficient evidence to prove that this correlation exists, right? And then the third thing that I do is I'm very intentional, very, very intentional about centering domestic citizenship practice as effectively very, very key to socio-economic transformation. Quite often, the migration literature or the diaspora literature tends to centre the citizenship claims of immigrants or transnational actors. And I say no, domestic citizenship claims or diasporic citizenship claims. And the reason I do this is because I'm effectively challenging the literature that, again, privileges the citizenship claims of immigrants solely while paradoxally thinking about how do we change our conceptualisations of citizenship within the context of post-war immigration states like Liberia? Another thing that I do is I attempt in this book to offer a post-colonial critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea. You know, as a solution to post-war reconstruction. In the book what I demonstrate through my empirical analysis and data analysis is that diasporas citizenship claims, their development claims are incredibly, incredibly contested just as donors development claims are contested. I demonstrate that diasporas are both development enablers but they are also development spoilers and that diasporas might be a silver lining, especially in the context of post-war reconstruction or post-war change or development. They're not a silver bullet. Again, they're not the panacea to these processes of post-war economic transformation or post-war political transformation. So I do this throughout the book but particularly in a chapter that I've titled, it's a last empirical chapter of the book and it's titled The Dichotomy of Diasporic Developmentalism. I told you about that alliteration. It rears its ugly head throughout the book, right? The Dichotomy of Diasporic Developmentalism. What am I trying to do in this chapter of the book is I'm trying to demonstrate through the empirical analysis and the data that I present that diasporas can both help but they can also hender post-war development. In the case of Liberia, there were a number of Liberian transnational actors who moved back, myself included, they called us importees, who moved back during the post-war moment to work in the public sector. Many of them worked in other sectors, in the private sector, in the humanitarian sector but a large population of Liberians came back at the invitation of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf who in many respects is diasporic in her own right. So she invited a lot of these technocrats, a lot of these people who've worked in different sectors internationally to come and work in the public sector. What we found is that you had increased levels of public sector productivity because of the contributions of these Liberians who came back. There's an example that I often give of the first Minister of Finance, Antoinette Sayeh who's now the Deputy Manager, I think, of the IMF and she was able to secure Liberia's $4.1 billion debt relief right through the highly indebted poor countries initiative. Now, some people will argue that that's a very neoliberal initiative but the fact of the matter is Liberia was highly indebted after the war because of arrears that have been accrued through interests. There are commercial lenders but also from international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank and this woman comes in and she's able within a two-year period to get this debt completely erased both from commercial creditors as well as from the IFIs. So you have large levels of public sector productivity on one hand, right, diasporous help in terms of post-war reconstruction but you also have high levels of corrupt forms of post-war profiteering that is simultaneously where a lot of Liberians who were recruited ended up getting their fingers caught in the Treasury, right, and they were implicated in large levels of high levels of graft. Many of them were prosecuted but a lot of them weren't so what did they do? They just packed up and they left. So you have this sort of dichotomy between the public sector productivity of diasporous moving back, but also simultaneously corrupt forms of post-war profiteering taking place in the same kind of public sector space, right? Diasporous both help and they also hinder post-war development as an argument that I'm making. So in this book, in this chapter, I coined a term called diaspocracy. So if you intend to use this term please make sure that you cite my book. And this term diaspocracy is very, very emblematic of not only Ellen Johnson's administration but you can see diasporoses rear their, you know, you can see diasporoses in another context and diasporoses effectively the outsized influence of diasporos or even returnees in managing the affairs of the state, in managing the affairs of government, right? And this was certainly the case where you had more than 50% of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's cabinet recruited from abroad. And so the question that a lot of Liberians in country were asking is what about our skills? What about our talents? Do we not matter in terms of managing the affairs of the state, right? And it created a lot of tension, it created a lot of animosity towards these importees, these returnees, right? So what I argue is that by setting up a system where you have large numbers of diasporas, returnees managing the affairs of the state it wasn't just about them managing the affairs of the state it was about them being compensated significantly more than those who were domestically rooted than those who didn't have significant periods of time abroad who didn't go to schools like SOA as abroad, right? Who didn't have the sort of international prestige or pedigree, right? So what effectively happened is that you had a reproduction of the international system of unequal pay where you had the World Bank, the IMF, the UN pay people according to their passport you had this taking place and reproduced through the systems of bringing these returnees, these diaspora transnational actors back and working in government very lucrative positions not only in terms of the executive but also in state-owned enterprises what we call cash cows in Liberia for instance, right? So this reproduction of unequal pay, the international system of unequal pay was a parallel between diasporic hegemony and expat hegemony so in many respects diaspor as a returnees became the repats replicating this unequal system and what a lot of domestic Liberians argued is that if you legislate dual citizenship what you will effectively do is entrench this unequal system of remuneration you will entrench and in many respects institutionalize this unequal system of remuneration so I'm going to move now to my theoretical contributions in the book and one of the things that I try to do is to look at Norman Long's notion of actor-oriented analysis how many people are familiar with this conceptual framework actor-oriented analysis, I see a few hands the development scholars in the room will be familiar with this so Norman Long came up with this idea of actor-oriented analysis and what I try to do is I employ actor-oriented analysis as my conceptual framework but I also try to expand it and push it a little bit further so what Norman Long argues is that in a development ecosystem you have different actors operating and they all respond to development interventions it might be a development project or it might be a policy prescription like dual citizenship that has development implications they respond to these different development interventions differently based on their life worlds and also their social locations but I think the more interesting part of this conceptual framework is he argues that we can't assume that just because an actor is seemingly powerless, is seemingly poor is seemingly marginalized that that particular actor doesn't have the capacity, in fact he argues that even the most seemingly marginalized or seemingly powerless actors have the capacity, they have the knowledge ability they have the capacity to subvert the best laid plans of those who might be seemingly much, much more powerful than them and he says in this development ecosystem when this particular development intervention is introduced there is a process of negotiation so we don't assume that those who are seemingly powerless are ultimately marginalized or sidelined, that there is a process of negotiation taking place and in this process of negotiation you can have two things happen at the interface there can be a process in which there is divergence where these different development actors are unable to reconcile each other's differences they are unable to reconcile each other's different lived experiences or social locations where there isn't a consensus on the development intervention or you can have a process of convergence where there is an accommodation of each other's differences and there is an agreement about that particular development intervention and this certainly played out in my analysis this certainly played out in the data that I collected because what I discovered and what I ultimately argued is that domestic or diasporic librarians were fundamentally involved in the process of introducing the dual citizenship bill it was diasporic led, this bill was diasporic led even though it was taken up by domestic policy makers so they were fundamentally involved in the introduction of the dual citizenship bill however it was domestic librarians who were fundamentally responsible for the suspension of the bill for all those years so you see that sort of negotiation taking place where both actors are not able to reconcile each other's differences and you have this sort of impasse on dual citizenship for this long period of time so what I do throughout the book is I try to further the interface analysis I move beyond localized bounded encounters over actual development projects where Norman Long focuses on rural areas in the so-called global south I'm more interested in a transnational ideological exchange so I think of that as the interface, it's not a physical encounter it's an ideological encounter an ideological battle over the merits and the merits of dual citizenship as not only a development intervention but also a policy prescription that's supposed to have development implications or development dividends another thing that I do on the citizenship literature front because I'm also pushing the citizenship literature from the abstract and the Eurocentric to the more concrete and Afrocentric so I theorize citizenship as a triad, as a triangle and what I argue, taking on the work of a number of scholars of post-war reconstruction who've argued that identities, practices and relations between people actually transform fundamentally in the aftermath of armed conflict in the aftermath of any sort of political upheaval in the aftermath of any sort of rupture so obviously an armed conflict would be a part of that and what I argue throughout the book looking at Liberia historically is that Liberia's contested state formation in 1847 led to political upheavals of the 1980s and then eventually to all-out armed conflict between 1989 and 2003 and during this process of political upheaval during this process of rupture and during the process of the war itself and its aftermath, the ideas of identities the conceptualization of citizenship the conceptualization of belonging fundamentally transformed and what do we have as a result this Liberian citizenship triad so in many respects I asked a lot of my interlocutors who do you consider to be a Liberian citizen and they gave me all kinds of responses it was an open-ended response and after doing the data crunching I realized that these conceptualizations of Liberian citizenship fall within three different nodes so one node of the Liberian citizenship triad which I think can be applied in other contexts not just Liberia one of the nodes of the Liberian citizenship triad citizenship is identity and this is largely very passive right it's you are conferred upon your citizenship is conferred upon you by virtue of being born in a particular locale or perhaps by having ancestry of a particular locale and it doesn't really require anything of you so in many respects that node of the citizenship triad is about demanding rights right another node of the citizenship triad which I found to be particularly interesting in terms of the responses of my interlocutors is citizenship as practice right this is a more active form of citizenship it's what you do with that identity that makes you a citizen in fact there are so many of my interlocutors who talked about citizenship as contribution right it's what you contribute not only to your fellow citizen but also to the functionality of the state that's what makes you a citizen in fact one of my interlocutors said in sort of flippantly that it doesn't matter what passport you carry they're all blue nowadays it's what you do with that passport it's what you do with that identity that makes you a citizen are you contributing to building Liberian capacities are you contributing to state capacity by building by paying taxes right are you abiding by the laws of the state that's what makes you a citizen not that you call yourself a Liberian or your particular from a particular ethnic group that's the identity more passive form of the citizenship triad and then last but certainly not least I think of Liberian citizenship based on this data that I collected as a set of relations so it's about maintaining relationships, cultivating relationships citizenship as more interactive between citizens but also between citizens and the government or the nation state so we can think about this triad as identity passive as about claiming rights practice active as about fulfilling responsibilities interactive note of the citizenship triad as maintaining relationships rights responsibilities and relationships of three R's as well so what I do is I take this conceptualization even further and I think about or theorize citizenship as a political economy of belonging so that's why I bring a lot of the political economy analysis into the picture and this political economy of belonging is really when socio-economic transformation effectively depends on the provision of privileges and protections what we might deem as rights in exchange for the fulfillment of duties and obligations what we might think about as responsibility so it's this symbiotic relationship between rights and responsibilities and what I was actually quite curious to hear over and over and over again in my interviews was citizenship is about responsibilities as much as it is about rights and I would argue and I have argued throughout the book that it's the first war kind of conceptualization of citizenship that it's come out of the experience of the war that now people start to think of citizenship as more than just the rights part of the equation as more than just that identity passive form of that citizenship triad and as I mentioned early my intention in this book is to theorize citizenship from an African or Afrocentric perspective a post war African country of immigration and intending to sort of expand the contours of the citizenship literature which tends to be very abstract and Eurocentric so I'm moving it in the more concrete and Afrocentric direction so let's go to my methodological approach and my empirical contributions so this book is based on multi sided field work I alluded to the fact that I interviewed Liberans in five cities five countries three continents it's based on over 200 in depth interviews with primarily Liberian actors in the capitals of Liberia Sierra Leone, Ghana, the UK and the US and the reason I focused on capitals even though it could be argued that my work is quite urban biased and I take that fully on as a critique but the reason I decided to focus on capital cities is because of the work of Sassia Sassan in the global city and she argues that citizenship is most viscerally contested in urban centers because they happen to be the seats of power they happen to be the sites where you have again that dichotomy between the poor and the prosperous, privileged and nonprivileged powerful and seemingly powerless and I focus on capital cities because for instance Moravia is where you have the largest number of Liberians in Freetown and Sierra Leone you have a lot of Liberians who fled the war and crossed over international borders where you have Liberians who may have come before the war come to study or come to work and ended up staying because they weren't able to go back to Liberia during the armed conflict and the book presents extensive comparative analysis analysis amongst the different interlocutors that I spoke to so I'm very very interested in the book and analyzing the differences in terms of conceptualizations and practices of Liberian homelanders so those who may have never left the country or they left for very short periods of time and they consider Liberia their only home versus those who are more deasporic so the returnies, Liberians who might be circular returnies who come in, come out periodically or more permanent returnies who spent considerable amounts of time abroad and now have moved back to the country in the post-war moment what was interesting to me is the homelanders a small proportion or a small minority but very vocal minority of homelanders that I interviewed who are the most visually contesting dual citizenship those are the Liberians who said absolutely not, we cannot legislate dual citizenship because it will again privilege a seemingly privileged group of already privileged people and it was a returnies who pushed back against that and said well we've contributed we've contributed to agricultural productivity we've sent remittances we've adhered our services as doctors, as nurses many of us have come back and worked for the public sector on a voluntary basis we are already part and parcel of the nation state now what we expect from the state is to extend those rights by granting a citizenship because many of us have now naturalized abroad I also compare and contrast between executive as well as legislative policy makers and more importantly between what Nicholas Van Heer the scholar at Oxford calls the near and wider deaspers so in the case of my study the near deaspers were those Liberians who lived in Sierra Leone and Ghana and the wider deaspers would be those Liberians who lived in the UK here in London as well as in Washington DC where I grew up for me this was really important because I find that the literature the migration literature particularly tends to focus on especially amongst global south migrants tends to focus on global south migrants who end up migrating to the so-called global north when in reality the vast majority of global south migrants are not moving to the so-called global north many of them stay in their regions of origin so in the case of Liberia it's Liberians who moved to Sierra Leone or Liberians who moved to Ghana the other thing I wanted to push back against and fundamentally challenge is this idea that so-called global south migrants who do move to the so-called global north are clamoring for the citizenship of the so-called global north what I discovered in my research is a number of Liberians who lived in Washington DC a large number of my interlocutors and those who lived in the UK many of them never naturalized even though they were entitled to UK citizenship or US citizenship for the proportion who did naturalize a small proportion of those who did naturalize they naturalized long after they were actually eligible there was something about being Liberian there was something about belonging to this nation state that was embroiled in a conflict that was so important that they were able to forego the privileges that come with citizenship having a UK passport many of them talked about this fact that I did not naturalize for 10, 15, 20 years even though I was eligible because being Liberian was more important to me and the fact that Liberia didn't legislate or didn't recognize dual citizenship I needed to maintain my Liberian citizenship not every so-called global south migrant who migrates to the so-called north or global north citizenship even though we know that there are citizenship tiers and geopolitically there are some passports that will considerably more power and influence and more accessibility and mobility than those in the so-called global south so I was interested in comparing and contrasting all of these different actors within my responding pool and you see the breakdown in terms of who I interviewed, where I interviewed them and the numbers now I'm very clear about the fact in this book that it's intended to be explored it's me exploring different trends I certainly don't make any arguments that my sample is representative because it is not so I just want to say that as a caveat so this table, I'll wrap up in a few more slides this table basically is me trying to think about well what are the implications of this on policymaking and then also practice as it relates to citizenship and development and this table summarizes the kinds of responses that I received when I asked people about whether or not dual citizenship does have development ends so what are the dual citizenship perspective amongst the 202 Liberians that I interviewed what's interesting is I want to highlight two parts of the table, the first is looking at support for dual citizenship, now I've been speaking throughout this presentation about binaries about discontinuities, about dichotomies but in actuality about 61% of my interlocutors saw dual citizenship as a development good that it could potentially transform the country socioeconomically, politically if you enable Liberians who have naturalized abroad to maintain their Liberian citizenship in addition to another citizenship a lot of my interlocutors saw dual citizenship as a development good that it could potentially transform the country for the better and I contrast this with those who reject dual citizenship outrightly about 18% now can you tell or someone tell me where the largest number of people who reject dual citizenship reside Monrovia Monrovia, the largest number of interlocutors I spoke to who reject dual citizenship are those who live in Monrovia and it's very much aligned with what I said about homelanders being or having heightened levels of anxiety around dual citizenship whether they be privileged or not privileged whether they have certain levels of power or maybe seemingly powerless now again this is not a representative sample but what I did do was I triangulated what I discovered in this table with afrobarometer data afrobarometer is a pan-African survey that's been instituted for the past 30 years or so where afrobarometer recognizes political trends across the continent of Africa there was an afrobarometer survey that was conducted in Liberia in both 2012 as well as in 2018 and what's interesting about the afrobarometer survey is that there was a question on dual citizenship in each of those surveys and over two thirds of those who were surveyed rejected dual citizenship outright so in many respects if you see the trends in my representative sample and you compare that or triangulate that with the afrobarometer survey it's very very much aligned those who reside in Monrovia are the ones who are most viscerly viscerly in contestation or have serious anxieties around dual citizenship if you compare that to the other respondents in other locales so there was a national referendum in Liberia in 2020 now this referendum happened right before my book was published so this referendum took place in December 2020 the book was published in 2021 so the book does not capture the results of the referendum but it's interesting that a lot of the hypotheses that I have in the book came through in terms of the referendum results so there's a national referendum in Liberia and there are eight propositions the very first proposition is a proposition on legislating dual citizenship can you guess what happened in that referendum dual citizenship was rejected as a policy prescription it did not garner the two thirds majority required to legislate dual citizenship in some counties in some sub-political divisions where you had large numbers of people rejecting dual citizenship but what I argue throughout the book is that dual citizenship given Liberia's migratory history and then more importantly the trends across the sub-region the trends across the continent of Africa that dual citizenship would be an eventuality it's inevitable for Liberia is what I was arguing throughout the book and sure enough a year later the dual citizenship law is passed in terms of what I was hypothesizing what I argue throughout the book is that it is inevitable and this was definitely reflected in even the referendum results where you didn't have two thirds majority garnered for legislating dual citizenship now I have pulled up results from Montorado County Montorado County is Liberia's largest sub-political division we have 15 counties right 15 sub-political divisions and Montorado is the most populous thing to me is even though you had an outright rejection of dual citizenship in many respects you see the citizenry kind of warming up to the idea of a potential dual citizenship legislation right so even though you have afrobarometer results in 2012 and 2018 saying two thirds majority reject dual citizenship the referendum shows something slightly different taking place so in these results from Montorado do you see that there is an even split between yes and no votes in Montorado the largest most populous county in Liberia where Monrovia resides by the way where the capital city resides you have 96,356 yes votes for dual citizenship you have 97,089 votes against dual citizenship do you see how that margin is so small between yes and no votes in the most populous sub-political division in Liberia so what I argue throughout the book is yes Liberia is warming up or Liberians are warming up to the idea of dual citizenship and this is definitely emblematic of these referendum results even though the two thirds majority vote did not come or the two thirds majority was not garnered to legislate dual citizenship so yes dual citizenship is inevitable for Liberia however there's always a but right so this is a bit of a shameless plug that I'm making for a presentation that I made to the Liberian the plenary of the Liberian Senate in December 2021 so about six months before the dual citizenship law was actually passed and the president pro temp of the summer of the Liberian Senate Albert Chea basically called me up and said I'm hearing rumours that you've written this book on dual citizenship we have a new law that has just been passed by the House of Representatives and we in the Senate are a bit more skeptical about legislating dual citizenship can you come to Liberia and present the findings as well as the policy recommendations of your book so that we can deliberate we can make a decision that's informed that's based on evidence that's based on knowledge and not necessarily just on the sentiments of how we might feel now as a scholar activist you can imagine how excited I was by this right how often do you write a book that has policy relevance where you're actually invited to come back and speak to a particular policy issue that might or might not influence the policy making process so of course I said absolutely yes there were a number of things that I told the Senate during the presentation the first is that yes even though Liberia is warming up to the prospects of legislating dual citizenship that Liberia has to take a very gradual a gradual phased approach to this legislation given that you have based on my research such anxieties amongst those in the country about what the legislating of dual citizenship might do in terms of socioeconomic inequalities reproducing socioeconomic inequalities the other recommendation that I made to the Senate at the time was it was important for Liberia to recognize effectively contradictions between the 1986 constitution which is more permissive of dual citizenship seemingly so and the 1973 aliens and nationality law which explicitly prohibits dual citizenship so how do you reconcile those two forms of law now the final law I will say does reconcile those differences and I was happy to see that in the final law that was passed in July 2022 another recommendation that I made to the Senate is you have to reform the judiciary how do you ensure that rule of law prevails and not rule of man how do you enforce standing laws one of the things that I kept hearing over and over and over again is amongst diaspora and amongst mostly domestic Liberians but also some diasporic Liberians is we don't even have dual citizenship and people are passing around with two passports there's de facto dual citizenship where diasporic actors or transnational actors are effectively flouting our laws so if they're flouting our laws and the law has not been legislated imagine when you do pass the law what kinds of inequalities will be entrenched what kinds of enforcement challenges you might face in ensuring that people do abide by the laws of the state and then the last thing or next to the last thing that I was interested in having a conversation with the legislators about is how do we address inequalities, inequalities of income inequalities of land access because that's one of the things that tends to provoke forms of anxiety amongst diasporic and domestic Liberians and even transnational justice so you had a lot of Liberians living in diasporic hotspots who fueled the armed conflict through their financial resources so how do you bring these people to bear in terms of the responsibility of the armed conflict and ensuring that justice does prevail that there is a form of accountability that impunity doesn't reign supreme and then lastly I talked about the fact that it's important to extend rights to diasporic actors or transnational actors particularly those who want to maintain transnational lives and carry two passports or multiple passports but you also have to ensure that you extract responsibility so that you address the anxieties of those who live in the country and there are a number of ways you can do that you know give or grant Liberians the right to vote in national elections or legislative elections you restrict their rights to be able to hold certain offices so one of the things that made it into the eventually made it into the final law of 2022 is that all elected offices are limited so anyone who has two passports or has dual citizenship is not allowed to run for elected office and some appointed positions specifically those positions that are related to security, that are related to finance are restricted from people who have dual citizenship so it's one of the recommendations that I proffered another is definitely grant diasporic dual citizens the right to own land but perhaps you ensure that those that property is taxed and that property in terms of taxes comes back to running state functionality or perhaps you might even think about introducing income taxes as a form of extracting responsibilities from those who would be dual citizens so some of these suggestions or recommendations did make it into the final law and this is what the final law looks like this is sort of a snapshot of the final law now there's a new project that I'm working on called dual citizenship 2.0 and the reason I call it 2.0 is because the next phase of the project is to really think about how is now that we've got the legislation on the book how is it reproducing forms of inequalities because remember that referendum of 2020 didn't go away those anxieties didn't go away this notion that if you legislate dual citizenship you privilege an already privileged group of people those notions and those concerns have not gone away and in many respects you can think about the law as being very non-consultative very elite driven didn't necessarily take into account what those people who viscerally rejected dual citizenship in the national referendum of 2020 those particular concerns in many respects advances the aspirations of diasporic Liberians or transnational Liberians without necessarily reconciling or addressing the domestic anxieties of Liberia so I'm now interested in how does this sort of play out now that you have a law in the books last but certainly not least I want to leave you with a really really great in many respects eclipse notes version of the process of contestation around dual citizenship that was written by a Liberian journalist on the right hand side in Al Jazeera so if you want a summary, a nice summary of what I've presented read this particular piece because it does draw on a lot of my research and it references my work as well so I'm going to end there and say thank you I think I've gone over time but I look forward to the questions that come push them on I think as well research, I mean it really is quite remarkable but before I open to the audience I just want to, a few things really struck me while you were talking quite a few things actually and I think I'm reflecting now I think this is why I really wanted to hear you speak is the relationship between dual citizenship and development and all of these really interesting questions you know there's this whole area of literature on aid land of course and you know when you were talking I was remembering my own anxieties as someone of dual or perhaps even triple citizenship working in the aid world and the fact that people would look at me in Bangladesh in particular as somebody who was privileged but not necessarily through earned privilege it was just a kind of borrowed whiteness if you like from having been in the UK and having the accent that I have and those sorts of things and that's something that really struck me and you see now more and more in the aid world that people like us, people like you and me are at the top of these institutions and I noticed somewhere in your work you talk about the World Bank still being headed up by white people it's just not true it's full of people of colour and it doesn't make it any better it's not making it any better but it's kind of funny the way dual citizens are seen sort of as both having that power having the status in some ways not to the indigene of the global north certainly but seen in the countries that we come back to seems having that power and to the global north seen as having kind of inside a knowledge or inside a connections it is a kind of odd position of power but it's also a position of kind of seeing almost as traitors I think this comes out very interestingly in your work talk a little bit about that Can you hear me? Okay I'll just respond to the piece where I wrote and I mentioned the fact that the World Bank like those IFIs are structured in dominance because for instance the World Bank is always headed by an American and it's usually well actually that's changed because you've got Ajay Banda yeah that's a good point I see what you mean I see what you mean I see what you mean but they still wield power because of the US passports that's a very good point so that article that I wrote was written before Ajay Banda became the head of the World Bank and even Jim Kim to a certain extent but that's a good point so the idea is the US passport the US citizenship there was also a lot of contestation around was it Ngozi Awiella before she moved to the WTO she was very much someone who was favored to assume the headship of the World Bank but that never happened because she also had Nigerian citizenship so effectively what I'm saying and then the IMF for instance so I just went at Sayeh who used to be the minister of finance of Liberia will never assume the role of the head of the IMF because she exactly you must be European and I'm not a fan of these institutions by any stretch of the imagination but what I was trying to argue throughout this particular article is if you have a system that's institutionalized that says you will get a position by virtue of your passport for me that's fundamentally unequal and there's something really really wrong with setting up a system where that plays out and even my own experiences of working with some of these international organizations where they do pay you based on your passport not on your expertise not on how much experience you have or whether you might be the most qualified it's do you have a passport that is not that's an international passport that's unique to that particular institution so now to get to your question about sorry I've forgotten your question now it's not interesting nature of dual citizenship in relation to aid and aid land and what it's like to be that person and I think that the discomforts about being seen as a kind of a oh a trader yes so in the book there is a quote that I pulled out from an interview that I did with Augustine Gafwan who was a minister of finance at the time and he said one of the things that comes up in public discourse in Liberias and why there was so much contestation around legislating dual citizenship is those Liberians who left the country were often seen as those who chickened out because you weren't in the country during the war you don't have the in many respects the credibility to claim citizenship because you fled but then I also talk about another interlocutor who said quite forcefully I don't have to dodge bullets to claim Liberian citizenship that is not a marker of being Liberian right because a number of Liberians who perhaps didn't leave during the war would have left if they had the wherewithal so that should not be the marker of citizenship that should not be the marker of belonging that should not be the marker of who who maintains citizenship because they weren't in Liberia during the war they didn't feel the terrible experience of the war and the Americans felt the war secondarily right so there are different ways of kind of thinking about that contribution citizenship as contribution or the legitimacy of who can claim citizenship by virtue of having experienced a really terrible kind of rupture such as an armed conflict it was a particularly bad one wasn't it I'm going to open now to get some questions from the floor who would like to ask a question first thank you your name and what you know if you're student or faculty or what you're studying hi thank you for the presentation I'm Kylin I'm a student from LSE actually and my question is around the stereotype that dual citizenship is often of a developing country and sort of a combination of a developing country plus a non-developing country like is that sort of representative of the majority of people who do want to seek dual citizenship because I have heard of instances of my own country being China people wanting to seek Cambodian or Thai citizenship because of their ancestry or heritage but it was sort of restricted and that well according to my friend who does face this kind of barrier claims that most of the people who does want to seek dual citizenship is wanting to connect to their heritage instead of seeking privilege so how would you respond to that it's a really really good question and I talked about it in the form of the sort of neoliberal economic entitlement and so forth and so on well I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of Liberians wanted to reclaim their Liberian citizenship because Liberia was very very very important to them which is why they held on to their Liberian citizenship for so long even though they were eligible to naturalize in the UK or naturalize in the US another group of people not just Liberians born in Liberia for instance who wanted to claim the rights of citizenship it's also those who were not born in Liberia I interviewed a number of second generation Liberians who were born in the UK who were born in the US so it's very important to have that sense of connection with the country and one of the ways of operationalizing that was for them to be able to carry the passport so yes, citizenship is not just a sort of instrumental tool or commodity that we use to gain privilege whether it be economic privilege or political privilege or mobility privilege it can also be about that sense of belonging and that's why I termed the subtitle of the book the political economy of belonging because it's very very much about the economy and the political dynamics of that but it's also about this notion of belonging and that's something that you can't necessarily quantify so you're absolutely right it's more than just the kind of instrumentalizing of citizenship it's about what does that mean for connecting to a place whether that's an idea a place as an idea or a place that's more concrete in your mind Does that answer you? I wonder about those things myself there's another thing that struck me though very much is that your term the diaspocracy which I think is a really good one what we're doing here I think in this post war setting is seeing an effort to construct or reconstruct an elite is that right? Would you say that was right? Yes absolutely and I think beyond just studying it and interviewing people and then trying to come up with some sort of conceptual framework that makes sense within the context of Liberia is also experiencing it for myself so I saw firsthand how the diaspocracy manifested itself in terms of interactions between those who returned and those who probably never left or if they did leave they left for very very short periods of time and I saw a lot of Liberians come back with a sense of entitlement with the spirit of hubris and not humility there's that alliteration again with the spirit of contempt and not collaboration and that fueled the tension that fueled the animosity that fueled the resentment in as much as they were paid significantly more it was how do you treat your fellow Liberian when you come into a context in which you've been away for a very long time do you recognize that they also have something to contribute that their values and skills that their talent should also be recognized and validated and used in as much as those who may have left and for me this diaspocracy was this very very very much about constructing another hierarchy of elitism and so I kind of I even harked back to what happened in the 1800s and the 1900s of these Liberians moving or not even Liberians but these black migrant settlers moving back and I said that there is a parallel here where you do construct higher arcies of belonging where you do construct higher arcies of whose valued whose privileged replicating itself in the kind of 21st century moment and how we have to be very very careful about that history how we also have to be very very careful about not replicating that history because it's one that created the tensions that eventually led to the armed conflict of 1989 to 2003 but moving back itself is a really interesting term because of course we don't know where those Americans came from right? Yeah I mean some Liberians will trace their ancestry back to in fact there's a population of Bajans so those from Barbados who came from the Caribbean about 346 Bajans travelled to Liberia in 1865 and settled in Liberia and I think two presidents can trace their lineage to that 1865 migration of Bajans from Barbados to Liberia in fact right now the Barbados government and the Liberian government are having something called the year of return where those descendants of those original Bajans who came the 365 Bajans who came in 1865 are now going back to Barbados to reconnect with their family members so it's very very interesting because of this nature of the migratory history the nation that is a migratory migratory nation. Yeah I'm fascinating absolutely unique unique country I suppose the area is somewhat similar. So any more questions from the floor? Yes please. People online will want to hear your questions too and please don't forget to introduce yourself. Hi I'm Danielle master student at SOAS I was really curious about this dynamic between the Comland Liberians and the diaspora returnies particularly with your discussion on how I guess it seemed like it was kind of a bit of a contrast for the diaspora and returning Liberians have the sense that their contributions to the country should be recognized through citizenship but in contrast you have the homeland like anxieties about their privilege so I'm really just wanting to understand do the homeland Liberians see that those like returning and diaspora contributions just aren't enough to justify their the recognition of their citizenship and like what's kind of driving that because if to your point about like diasporosy as well like they are in some ways like the government ascending remittances there are a lot of ways that they are trying to contribute to the country but why aren't those contributions enough for homelanders to want them to have citizenship as well and like how do they perceive those contributions to the country's development? It's a good question so it's interesting because going back to that table where I said 61% of my interlocutors actually think dual citizenship is a development good right it will contribute to socio-economic political kind of transformation but there was a very strong and forceful minority of those homelanders who said absolutely not this is not going to work and I think one of the things that came up in my analysis and in the interviews amongst homeland Liberians those who were the most visually anti-dual citizenship is that they use the example of remittances whereas diasporic Liberians and transnational Liberians and even some domestic Liberians talked about remittances as evidence of why dual citizenship should be extended to those who live abroad these interlocutors argued that those remittances go to households those remittances are not used for broad based national level development right and in many respects if there's no trickle down it might deal with transient poverty at the household level but we're not talking about this sort of formal kind of transformation of the nation and so what they argued is that you can't use remittances as sufficient evidence to talk about why you should be granted dual citizenship because you're not contributing to the nation this idea of contribution you're contributing to the household the extended household in Liberia and in many respects those who migrate I mean the migration literature is replete with this evidence those who migrate are not the poorest of the poor they're usually the most privileged and then the remittances then also reproduce forms of inequalities between households because households that aren't getting remittances don't have the wherewithal to send their children to school or to pay for exorbitant healthcare costs when they're not receiving monetary transfers from abroad so they actually push back against that but what's interesting is I did speak to a Liberian in Washington DC and he argued okay if that's the argument then we'll stop sending remittances because that's how families fare so I mean I got so many interesting responses from people in which I would be in an interview and I would say but I heard this in one of my interviews so what do you think about this and sort of playing angels advocate to get people to think about things slightly differently beyond their own kind of immediate needs because what I found is that a lot of my interlocutors thought in silos so in many respects how is this going to affect me not necessarily what does this mean structural transformation so I saw arguments on all different fronts in terms of contributions versus non-contributions another example that was brought forward is yes these returnies or importees are contributing to public sector productivity but a lot of them steal they steal so that's why I showed that dichotomy between the corrupt forms of post war profiteering versus the public sector productivity and you saw both happening simultaneously in the same development ecosystem so it's almost like people will say well that that cancels the public sector productivity because they've stolen so much money and there's no accountability that really is quite depressing that bit of a story I have to say what which masters program do you want any other questions or comments from the floor yes thank you thank you so much my name is Halina I'm also at SOAS I'm a PhD student in development studies super interesting I need to get your book because one of the things I'm researching is how Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants to the UK understand the concept of belonging and so I'm looking at this idea of citizenship as well and how this group looks at that because there are two of the seven countries that don't offer dual citizenship and you know why yes and it's really interesting because a lot of the people that I've spoken to so far it seems to be the opposite kind of reaction it's a very administrative thing for them they say that it's just who I am on paper it doesn't affect my belonging so I was wondering if you could from people you've spoken to there were any other concepts of belonging so not just this kind of like top down institution tells me I belong because of my citizenship but rather I belong in Liberia because of XYZ for me that's why I was able to that's why I was very intentional about constructing that triad where I said the sort of administrative belonging would be that identity kind of passive note of the citizenship triad but then when you start going into the active practice based citizenship oh thank you when you start going into the active practice based citizenship that idea of contribution regardless of whether or not you have the legal status as a citizen the fact that you contribute that imbues you with a sense of belonging and more than just you thinking that you belong it also enables people to think of you as belonging because of that contribution so I really like this idea of citizenship as contribution not necessarily just citizenship as holding the passport or having the legal claims to citizenship because it can look it can look differently depending on the context right a lot of Liberians that I spoke to abroad even after I naturalized the fact that I would go to Liberia every year to render health services as a medical doctor I still felt a sense of belonging even though I wielded a UK passport the fact of the matter is nobody can take that Liberian nest from me right there was one interlocular policy maker who came up with and I talk about this in the empirical one of the empirical chapters about what does it mean to be a Liberian in the post war context and he says a Liberian is someone who provides time talent and treasure he is familiar with the Bible it's a biblical reference where it says where you place your time your talent and your treasure is where your heart is and that's how he conceptualized citizenship he said he's the one who said flimently I don't care what kind of passport you wield around they're all blue nowadays what I care about is are you contributing your time to Liberia are you contributing your talent to Liberia are you contributing your treasure to Liberia that's what makes you a citizen my idea of contribution came out through his own conceptualization of time talent and treasure and I was pleasantly surprised that so many interlocutors I spoke to thought of citizenship in these ways beyond the legal beyond the administrative beyond the identity beyond the passive they were really wetted to this idea of citizenship as practice and active based citizenship and I think this really comes out of the war that our configuration or conceptualization of citizenship changed as a result of this political rupture this moment of political rupture it's really interesting as well because in Ethiopia I think it was 2012 they introduced the Ethiopian origin card which gave you basically almost all of the same rights responsibilities in the country except voting rights so when that happened I'm looking at the data with that as well it seems like a lot of people took that as motivation to then naturalize wherever they were because it now gave them access to doing what they want to do back home except voting rights so I was wondering as well were there any discussions in Liberia about that kind of like middle ground so it's one thing that I proposed before they passed the law is if two thirds majority of the senate rejects this bill that had been passed by the house already what you think about is this gradual approach and I did give them examples of even the Indian card there's a card I forget NRI what does this stand for what does this stand for OCI that's it so I gave them examples from India I gave examples from Ethiopia from Eritrea where you have this sort of middle ground or happy medium until you eventually legislate dual citizenship where people have some rights but it stops short when it comes to political rights because that's where people start to get very anxious about can this person vote if they have two passports can they become president if they have two passports can they become the minister of national defense if they have two passports this idea of divided loyalties becomes very very very very challenging and concerning for a lot of people but they eventually passed the law six months later so I guess that wasn't really that happy medium wasn't really you know I will say something and I didn't say this during the presentation and that's why I kind of emphasize this idea of the law being very elite driven because the anxieties that the legislators had were really about challenges from transnational actors in terms of running for political office so once that was no longer in the equation they were okay with passing the law without even thinking about well what other anxieties exist beyond the political realm socioeconomic anxieties that exist beyond the political realm because they barred dual citizens from running for any sort of elected office so as far as they're concerned their political fiefdoms were secured so it's always about elite struggles at the end of the day isn't it always about elite struggles you scratch the surface of these of these contested and I also discovered that my presentation was about legitimizing they didn't insert a lot of my recommendations about addressing these domestic anxieties it was like oh the scholar from the LSE says you should bar dual citizens from running for elected office fine now we can pass the law so I realized wait I got bamboozled doing this presentation because they were able to then legitimize through scholarly research that the barring of dual citizens from holding elected office is actually legitimate for your next impact statement for your next research application but there's another thing that I was thinking about I have multiple passports and the ones that I do have don't necessarily connect to my sense of belonging very much but what happens when people are mixed race so you've gone off you've gone to England or the US or Ghana and you've got another kid this is also to do with the race based citizenship I think of my nieces and nephews who are a quarter Sierra Leonean and a quarter various other things and some of them don't look very African at all how will they get their Sierra Leonean citizenship what happens to the the people like us who don't really fit into the neat boxes yeah it's a really really good question and it's definitely delving to the new project so I was able to conduct archival research and then also semi-structured research I'm going back to Liberia in Sierra Leone to do focus group discussions with members of parliament in Sierra Leone and then members of the national legislator to see if there's an appetite for legislative reforms as it relates to these race based clauses but in addition to interviewing these people I also discovered in Liberia that there is a small population of mixed race Liberians who will never have access to the citizenship and have never held a Liberian passport because the law is very clear that if your father for instance is of non-negro descent then automatically your entitlements to Liberian citizenship are questioned and even though a dual citizenship law was passed that effectively would now administratively grant these people dual citizenship or grant these people the ability to hold Liberian citizenship that's different in terms of the practice or the enforcement so I interviewed about 2025 mixed race Liberians who have Lebanese and or Indian Lebanese or Indian fathers who've told me that when they go to the ministry of foreign affairs even though they can prove they have a Liberian mother or black African mother black Liberian mother they're given a hard time and there's actually a law that says you have to pledge an oath of allegiance even though you were born in Liberia you have to pledge an oath of allegiance to the nation state in front of the temple of justice and then you have to pay $1,200 to gain a Liberian passport and many of the mixed race Liberians that I spoke to have no connection whatsoever to their Lebanese father, their Indian father many of them are quite poor so think about it would they actually be able to afford that $1,200 to claim that citizenship very much so they can't vote having national ID it has all kinds of implications for the ability to travel so I'm focusing one of the chapters of the book is I'm focusing on these mixed race Liberians and mixed race Sierra Leoneans to a certain extent to ask questions about what does it mean to be a Negro in the 21st century that idea of Negrohood what does it mean how does it actually manifest itself in practice in terms of policy making but also the experience of living in this body in a country that effectively states that you don't belong even though you were born there that's really powerful stuff sorry there's a question from the young will you read it out to us thank you questions from the online we have a question from Tania Kaiser from the development studies she's saying thank you so much for your presentation absolutely fantastic and wonderful to have you back at SOAS I was interested to hear about it was very interesting to hear about this distinction in experience and perspective between people in the near and far diaspora is there anything specific or particular about the perspective of those who spend many years in Ghana given the GOG's these subsequent policy responses for former refugees in terms of residency rights and local integrations it's a really really good question Tania in fact it's funny I think I need to embed this in the presentation more because people are always curious about the near versus the far and how their conceptualizations of citizenship and practice of citizenship might differ and I do talk about that throughout the book so one of the things I discovered especially amongst Liberians who eventually moved and settled in Ghana and or Sierra Leone many of them were refugees not to say the vast majority of my interlocutors were refugees but a good number of them were there were some who might be deemed more so-called economic migrants who didn't come to Ghana or Sierra Leone as refugees but many of them did and because of the refugee status kind of protocol you as a refugee you cannot naturalize if you want to maintain refugee status you can't naturalize in fact it's prohibited in terms of the refugee the refugee protocol so just by virtue of being refugees the Ghanaian government and the Sierra Leonean government didn't enable these Liberians to naturalize and in order for them to continue to receive privileges from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees they couldn't naturalize what I discovered is that I think and I propose or hypothesize that it's because of that we are more wedded like strongly wedded to the idea of singular nationality and if I compare that to the more or the wider diaspora as many of whom left Liberia before the war and ended up naturalizing 10, 15, 20 years after being eligible to who are less stringent about this sort of singular citizenship as a marker of legitimacy as a marker of belonging as a marker of having more credibility so it was that experience of refugee hood it was that experience of refugee ness where ideas of Liberia as a singular kind of citizenship became more entrenched during protracted refugee during protracted refugee experiences in a refugee camp in Ghana or in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone in fact there was one refugee who spent some time in a former refugee because the status of refugees for Liberians was discontinued in 2012 because at that point UNHCR said now Liberia is stable you can move back to your country you either get repatriation or resettlement but you have to make a choice right so one of the former refugees that I spoke to at the Burubur refugee camp in Ghana argued that this idea of double nationality is one that was quite anathema to him he said you can't have two passports you can't serve two masters that kept coming up over and over again kind of parking back to kind of slave imagery you either choose one or you relinquish it and I found that that kind of rhetoric kept coming up over and over again amongst the refugees that I or the former refugees that I interviewed in Sierra Leone and in Ghana whereas I didn't hear that kind of rhetoric in the wider diasporas because many of them were eligible they weren't refugees they were eligible to naturalize they chose, they make a very clear kind of concerted decision not to naturalize so I think the ability to naturalize opens up all kinds of differences of how you might conceptualize citizenship versus the inability to naturalize so the question that I had is you know if these refugees in Sierra Leone or Ghana had moved to the US would they have had different understandings or conceptualizations of citizenship if the eligibility were part of the equation I mean I don't know but I did see those stark differences between the near and the wider so thank you for the question Tanya it was for your last chance no? well we look forward to welcoming you back with the new book when it comes out when are you thinking that's going to be done oh where what stage are you at everybody always asks that question it's like the old PhD question do you remember that question? yes I remember that, when are you going to finish? it's not the data collection phase but it's a project I will say that it's a project that I've been wanting to work on for a long time and I'm just taking my time and just having fun with it so I am very committed to coming back and presenting that body of work but I'm just not sure when ok well thank you so much for joining us my pleasure, thank you for the invitation Naomi