Pambazuka - Evaluating the dual citizenship-state-building-nation-building nexus in Lib... - 0 views
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Liberia Rising 2030, a national vision whose aim is to make Liberia a middle-income country by the year 2030. This vision, projected to replace the Lift Liberia Poverty Reduction Strategy, has as its core macro-economic policy reforms, as well as lofty goals aimed at strengthening social cohesion, democratic consolidation, and governance reform.
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One of the problems with state-building as a post-conflict reconstruction agenda is its myopic focus on building state institutions, with the core assumption that no positive institutional practices existed before the ‘post-conflict moment’—a fallacy of terra nullius as articulated by Cliffe and Manning (Cliffe and Manning, 2008: 165).
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In this analysis, the post-conflict state represents a ‘blank slate,’ a tabula rasa to be foisted upon by donors who function as social engineers, in which policy makers conflate the ‘state idea’ (our imaginations of what the state should be) with the ‘empirical state’ (how the state actually functions in practice) (Abrams, 1988).
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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 markers of citizenship, narrowly defined in Liberia’s current Aliens and Nationality Law.
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Of course, Liberia’s history predates black settlement, with Liberian academics like Dr. Carl Patrick Burrowes challenging secondary sources that paint the country as a nation muddled in dichotomies without references to primary sources about indigenous life (Burrowes, 1989: 59).
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Liberia was ruled from 1847-1980 by the True Whig Party (TWP), an oligarchy of descendants of black settlers. During this time, the country flourished as an outpost for black migration, with migrants from other parts of Africa and the Caribbean flocking to the ‘land of liberty.’
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President Doe generated a hefty aid package of US$500 million between 1980 and 1988 from the U.S. government in exchange for Cold War loyalties (Huband, 1998: 35). Liberian exiles in the United States, led by former Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) President Amos Sawyer and current Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, lobbied against Doe’s authoritarian rule through the Association of Constitutional Democracy (ACDL), but their cries for regime change fell on deaf ears (Huband, 1998: 47).
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From 2003-2005, an interim government was established to pave the way for elections in 2005 in which Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was elected. It is worth noting that the leading three presidential candidates—Johnson Sirleaf, George Weah, Charles Brumskine—were all once diasporic Liberians (Liberian National Elections Commission, 2005).
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It is rumored that many high-level political appointees hold foreign passports, though Liberia’s Aliens and Nationality Law is very clear about the automatic revocation of citizenship status upon naturalization elsewhere (Sieh, 2012).
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The fact that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been the only African head of state to publicly welcome AFRICOM is indicative of her transnational loyalties to the United States that some argue was born out of her experiences in the high-powered walls of institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations.
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Despite public relations campaigns and the forecasts of transformation, most of Johnson-Sirleaf’s first-term development milestones have been mired by challenges and critiques, one of which is the overemphasis on state-building at the expense of nation-building.
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African governments have increasingly factored diasporas into domestic development projects, state-building, and nation-building exercises. This explicit acknowledgment of diasporas as transnational communities has manifested in legal instruments such as dual citizenship. Within the last decade alone, over one third of African countries have expanded constitutional reforms to grant dual citizenship to their diasporas, including, but not limited to: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Uganda. Liberia introduced its own dual citizenship legislation in 2008.
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Although Liberia did not experience European colonialism, it can be proven empirically that black settler colonialism mirrored the direct rule policies of the French or the Boers. That indigenous males and female Liberians were not granted citizenship until the mid-20th century illustrates how citizenship within Liberia has always been a tool of exclusion and privilege rather than an automatic entitlement.
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Denying a person citizenship because his/her father did not reside in Liberia prior to their birth discriminates against children whose fathers fled Liberia during the civil war, a major point of contention for Liberians abroad who advocate for dual citizenship.
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Rapid international migration and mobility, coupled with globalization, have ruptured state-centric conceptions of citizenship, identity, and belonging (Sassen, 2005; Jacobson, 1996), with legal scholars now asserting that dual citizenship (or multiple citizenships) are becoming the rule rather than the exception in the 21st century (Spiro, 1997; Rubenstein & Adler, 2000). Therefore, an interrogation of Liberia’s proposed dual citizenship legislation and the renewal of debates about diasporic involvement in post-conflict state-building and nation-building cannot be meaningful without an analytical review of how the concept of citizenship has evolved in the modern world over time.
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Using case studies from Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya, Whitaker argues that increased claims for dual citizenship in Africa may be driven as much by self-serving political interests as it is by concerns about national reconstruction, economic development, or security, especially with the advent of multi-party competition, the involvement of emigrants in homeland politics, and the need for African politicians to establish constituencies abroad for support and funding (Whitaker, 2011: 756).
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There is no empirical basis for claiming that dual citizenship necessarily enforces homeland-emigrant ties, rather dual citizenship simply enables “external populations to secure citizenship in their places of external residence without relinquishing the material and sentimental advantages of retained original citizenship” (Spiro, 2012: 319).
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Scholars who examine post-conflict reconstruction projects place a high premium on state-building, but less of an emphasis on its distant analytical twin, nation-building. A number of features defining state-building and nation-building position the two in binary trajectories. While nation-building is ‘people centric’ and domestically driven, requiring national agency, ownership and resources, state-building is ‘institution centric’ and externally driven, often soliciting international resources and involving some form of social engineering through a ‘one-size-fits’ all approach. Although both state-building and nation-building have their advantages and disadvantages, the two processes cannot be transformational if they are pursued in isolation. The Liberia case study has shown that policy makers must consider state-building and nation-building as mutually constitutive.
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ive major contributions supporting the need to strengthen state institutions and governance structures in war to peace transitions were proffered in 2004 by authors such as Francis Fukuyama, Simon Chesterman, James Fearon and David Laitin, Stephen Krasner, and Roland Paris, which transformed state-building into a growing topic of concern in peace-building scholarship (Paris and Sisk, 2010: 7-10).
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Legislation introduced in Liberia and other emerging countries in the Global South to extend citizenship to nationals abroad is a trend that has far reaching implications beyond the modern nation-state. Given that citizenship has been a site of contestation in Liberia because of its multiple meanings and contemporary manifestations, it is important to critically analyze how the enactment of dual citizenship legislation might reconcile or exacerbate age-old fissures within Liberia’s national fabric, further replacing the indigene vs. settler divide with the homeland Liberian vs. diasporic Liberian divide. Coupling state-building and nation-building as mutually constitutive elements in an an