In the same way that dual citizenship signifies a central topic of twenty-first century public discourse, Liberia’s official seal is subject to constant scrutiny because it reflects the exclusion that permeated the first 100 years of the country’s existence as a nation-state. Having never been formally colonised and more recently emerging from a protracted armed conflict, Liberia represents a stark case study in African citizenship construction because of its idiosyncratic history of black settler state formation and historical trajectory as a country of both immigration and emigration. In outlining the book’s rationale, unique contributions, scope, and organisation, this introductory chapter establishes how Liberian citizenship—and, by extension, the political economy of belonging to Liberia—has evolved since the founding of the nation-state in 1847 because of qualitative factors such as conflict, migration, and post-war recovery, with proposed dual citizenship legislation in 2008 serving as a contemporary manifestation of that reconfiguration across space and time.

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

Chapter 5 indicates that migration to and from Liberia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries profoundly modified the meaning and practice of citizenship by creating categories of Liberians that have defied the legal definition of citizen. In 1847, Liberia was a country of relative immigration yet citizenship norms were biased against those considered ‘rooted’—primarily the 16 ethnic groups already occupying the territory were formally excluded from the institution of citizenship. In 2019, however, while Liberia exemplified a country of relative emigration citizenship norms were biased against those deemed ‘rootless’—essentially jus soli Liberians who naturalised abroad and jus sanguinis Liberians who maintained their birthplace citizenship remained excluded from formal Liberian citizenship. This chapter moves beyond the rhetoric of politicians and policy makers to underscore that ordinary Liberians’ contemporary notions of rootedness and rootlessness represent a continuum of sedentarist and nomadic metaphysical thinking thereby simultaneously challenging and strengthening claims for dual citizenship. While motivations for not naturalising abroad—largely based on sedentarist metaphysics—have challenged core assumptions about the necessity of dual citizenship for Liberia, motivations for naturalising—largely based on nomadic metaphysics—have galvanised proponents of such a policy prescription and development intervention.

This concluding chapter maintains that Liberia’s battle to eradicate Ebola from 2014 to 2016 represented an interface wherein state-, nation-, and peace-building objectives converged. Whereas counterparts across Africa had waged nationalist struggles decades before against European colonialism, Liberian domestic and diasporic actors for the first time collaborated to fight a common enemy, Ebola, outside of themselves. As a direct response to deeply embedded inequalities in primary care, non-government Liberian actors at home and abroad embodied active citizenship by engaging in public health measures that reshaped how we envisage public authority in conflict-affected states. Their relatively successful struggles against an existential threat illuminated how the political economy of belonging to Liberia could be made manifest. This chapter demonstrates further that the 2020 referendum proposition based on Liberia’s Dual Citizen and Nationality Act of 2019 would be moot without reconciling disputes over the meaning and practice of Liberian citizenship amongst actors of divergent social locations and life-worlds. It contends that a Liberian citizenship triad—which frames citizenship as identity (passive), practice (active), and a set of relations (interactive)—could be used as a model for theorising citizenship generally since it moves citizenship from the abstract and Eurocentric to the concrete and Afrocentric.

Chapter 3 argues that while globalised liberal citizenship norms—including universalised notions of citizenship as a human right—generated a politics of inclusion thus boosting dual citizenship advocacy for Liberia, the transmission in Africa of transnational belonging—dual citizenship diffusion in the continent—has had varied outcomes for the country. It also reveals that the bundle of visceral responses to dual citizenship as a proposed development intervention in Liberia signifies an interface wherein actors negotiate the discontinuities and continuities in their lived experiences of being Liberian, with homeland actors particularly resistant. Viewed as both promise and peril for diasporic and domestic actors, respectively, dual citizenship represents an instrumental tug-of-war in which homelanders prefer to protect their privileges while transnationals wish to expand their rights.

Chapter 6 interrogates the underlying assumption that Liberian diasporas and returnees are the remedy to reconstruction, with expanded discussions on post-war recovery challenges and successes, remittances, capital flight, and public sector graft. It demonstrates that while dual citizenship legislation was proposed with the intention of incentivising emigrants to contribute their time, talent, and treasure, backlash against the 2008 bill escalated due in part to fraud allegations implicating some returnees. Although recovery requires the active participation of Liberian transnationals in the political economy of belonging, a disproportionate number of diaspora recruits implicated in public sector graft cases has severely hobbled socio-economic transformation thereby justifying restrictions on non-resident citizenship.Moreover, post-war reconstruction as a political project has exposed the inherent tensions between external state-building agendas and internal nation-building aspirations which have produced conflicting outcomes for Liberian citizenship construction and practice. This chapter contends that one-size-fits all approaches to post-war recovery are fundamentally flawed because context matters.

Chapter 2 employs the unique backstories of respondents interviewed for this book to begin to identify the twenty-first century features of Liberia’s political economy of belonging. It demonstrates that contemporary constructions of Liberian citizenship are part of a continuum—moving from passive, identity-based citizenship emphasising rights and entitlements (and based on birthplace, bloodline, and blackness) to more active, practice-based citizenship privileging duties and responsibilities—thereby transcending the legal definition enshrined in the country’s 1973 Aliens and Nationality Law and 1986 Constitution at least until mid-December 2019. While homeland Liberians embody citizenship practices that are domestically rooted and territorially confined to Liberia, diasporas and returnees engage in transnational pursuits that attempt to positively alter citizen-citizen and government-citizen relations abroad and within Liberia. The chapter also shows that relations between the Liberian government and diasporas have been strengthened or weakened depending on the levels of engagement of embassies and the immigration status of nationals abroad. Whereas the homeland state provided limited to no privileges/protections to nationals abroad in London, Washington, Freetown, and Accra, thus shirking its role in the political economy of belonging, Liberians abroad implied that they had more meaningfully fulfilled duties/obligations through their varied individual and collective efforts.