Conclusion

Summary

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.