Migration, Belonging and the Politics of Local Development in Eastern Nigeria

The proposed doctoral research aims to use Igbo Hometown Associations in Nigeria as a context to explore identity-based
associational groups that operate locally but with ties to transnational migration dynamics and their diaspora. Specifically, it will
examine how these ties enable their acting as non-state governance actors that self-organize to provide public goods, despite
weakness of the state. The research will work at the intersection of migration, development studies and conceptual framings of
belonging to ethnographically explore how migrant linkages with their place of origin create alternative spaces of governance and
realization of distributive development in eastern Nigeria. The research engages with the problem of state failure and is framed
around decolonial thinking of statehood in Africa. Its goal is to explore how migration sustains social dynamics that hold African
societies amid protracted weakening of state bureaucracy in post-colonial African states, and how these interactions decenter
Western notional construct of statehood in Nigeria and Africa.

Faculty Supervisor:

Vivian Solana

Student:

Partner:

University of Oxford

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Public Service, Policy, and Governance; Other

University:

Carleton University

Program: