Robtel Neajai Pailey

• PhD Development Studies
• Professor (Assistant) at London School of Economics and Political Science

Within the last decade alone, large-scale emigration has emboldened approximately half of all African states to adopt constitutional reforms granting dual citizenship, with some provisions more limited than others. Given Liberia’s post-war prominence in the African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Mano River Union...

Attempting to reduce America's dependence on foreign-sourced rubber, Firestone established in 1926 the world's largest industrial plantation in Liberia under a controversial 99-year-lease agreement. Nearly a century later, backlash against the exploitative nature of corporate hegemony and economic globalisation crystallised in a transnational campa...

Race fundamentally structures the modern world and shapes the lived experiences of so-called Global North and South actors. Yet, the nexus between race and development is insufficiently addressed in critical development studies. This chapter analyses how development scholarship, policy, and practice are fundamentally raced, using a broad range of d...

Does dual citizenship reproduce inequalities? Robtel Neajai Pailey grapples with this question and more in her engaging monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Drawing on rich life histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews...

In its crudest form, development has traditionally been about dissecting the political, socio‐economic and cultural processes of black, brown and other subjects of colour in the so‐called global South and finding them regressive, particularly in comparison to the so‐called progressive global North. However, in the midst of a 21st century, de‐coloni...

Liberia’s 2017 elections represented a watershed moment in the country’s political history. In addition to completing the first democratic transfer of power from one president to another since 1944, it resulted in wide representation across many different parties and independents as well as high levels of legislative turn-overs. Additionally, these...

Though deeply contested, citizenship has come to be defined in gender-inclusive terms both as a status anchored in law, with attendant rights and resources, and as agency manifested in active political participation and representation. Scholars have argued that gender often determines how citizenship rights are distributed at household, community,...

Although most African migration is voluntary, safe, orderly, and regular, policymakers tend to pander to popular narratives of an irregular "swarm" of African nationals invading the West. African migration occurs primarily within the continent, representing broader processes of political, economic, and social development by contributing to growth r...

This report presents the comparative findings of research spanning two years on migrants caught in situations of crisis in destination countries. The research focused on the longer-term socio-economic impacts of these crises on migrants, on their families and on the countries affected by crises. While previous studies have examined crises and their...

Using the Ebola outbreak of 2014/2015 in Liberia as a case study, this article demonstrates that by converting 'private activities and resources' for public health service delivery, Liberian domestic and diasporic non-government actors effectively broadcasted public authority at meso-and micro-levels previously assumed to be the exclusive domain of...

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, diasporas have become a consequential force with which to be reckoned. Whereas diasporas were perceived by origin countries as ‘traitors’ and ‘deserters’ in the past, they are increasingly regarded as humanitarian and development actors, especially by net-emigration and conflict-affected countries like Liberi...

Between 2002-2003 and 2010-2011, Côte d’Ivoire experienced episodes of political violence in a longer-term crisis in which hundreds of thousands of migrants, particularly non-citizens from Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali, Liberia and Ghana (or those perceived as ‘non-citizens’), were not only...

Between 2013 and 2014, the Central African Republic (CAR) underwent a crisis during which the government was overthrown in a coup d’état following an armed offensive that began in December 2012. Hundreds of thousands of migrants—particularly citizens from Cameroon, Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—were not only implicated but als...

If successfully orchestrated, the October 2017 elections in Liberia will mark the first time in recent memory when a democratically elected Liberian president – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – will hand over power to a similarly elected head of state. This is very likely to be a close election and our Briefing investigates changes and continuities in the c...

This Research Brief evaluates the potential long-term socio-economic implications of return migration on countries of origin in the ‘post-crisis’ phase because both the circumstances and consequences of return during ‘ordinary times’ are likely to be different from crisis-induced return. Because of the dearth of available data on the micro-, meso-,...

This report contributes to a growing debate about how to prepare for and respond to the critical situation of international migrants who are caught up in crises in the countries in which they have settled. It presents emerging findings from ongoing research on case studies of various crises in six countries over the last two decades – Côte d'Ivoire...

As a twenty-first century post-war, emigrant-sending country, Liberia reflects global citizenship norms while simultaneously departing from them, and this unique positioning offers new opportunities to theorise citizenship across spatial and temporal landscapes. In this article, I examine ‘Liberian citizenship’ construction through a historical pri...

According to a 2007 World Health Organisation (WHO) report, infectious diseases tend to unmask already entrenched gender disparities in societies struggling to cope with them. When the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) struck Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in 2014, they were ill-prepared for a massive healthcare crisis. The breakdown of pre-existing wea...

As humanitarian needs continue to grow rapidly, humanitarian action has become more contested, with new actors entering the field to address unmet needs, but also challenging long-held principles and precepts. This volume provides detailed empirical comparisons between emerging and traditional humanitarian actors. It sheds light on why and how the...

Assessing Ebola from a political economy perspective, this Development Viewpoint contends that while the countries most affected have been urged in the past to prioritise conventional macro-economic policies of liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, they have not been similarly supported to build strong public health systems as a developme...

At an International Peace Institute speaker’s event in September 2012, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf shared this revealing anecdote about the gradually shifting gender roles in her country: A teacher asked one of her male pupils what he wanted to be when he grew up and he replied, “Vice President.” When the teacher prodded the student fu...

In August 2003, Liberia emerged from over 20 years of upheaval badly bruised and war weary, with 14 years of civil war fuelled primarily by ill-gotten wealth from its natural resources. In August 2013, the country celebrated ten years of uninterrupted peace. Although a major milestone in Liberia’s history, much of the last decade of peace has not f...

State-building and nation-building in Liberia cannot be fully operationalized without an interrogation of the meaning of citizenship, given that the nation-state of Liberia is fundamentally de-territorialized, with a sizeable number of Liberians scattered throughout the globe, yet still fully engaged as transnational beings. My article scrutinizes...

The book brings together twenty three new essays on aspects of literary stylistics, narrative and sign studies in the key literary genres of prose, poetry and drama. Using the views of leading exponents of literary stylistics, narratology and also semiotics, the essayists engage critically a range of representative works by major African writers su...

2005 saw a mass mobilisation around the world, calling for 'trade justice'. The campaigners were lobbying for the introduction and implementation of new world trade rules, ones that would work for all people, instead of benefitting those who already have the most. They argued that the global trading system should be rebalanced, taking into account...