Professional History: ROBTEL NEAJAI PAILEY is an award-winning Liberian academic, activist and author with more than 20 years of combined personal and professional experiences in Africa, Europe and North America. She has worked across a broad range of fields supporting universities, governments, media institutions, multilateral, regional, non-governmental and community-based organisations.

Robtel centres her scholarly research on how structural transformation is conceived and contested by local, national and transnational actors from ‘crisis’-affected regions of the so-called ‘Global South’. She is author of the monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia, which contributed to the passage of Liberia's 2022 dual citizenship law. It also won the 2022 African Politics Conference Group (APCG) Best Book Award, the 2023 African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, as well as the 2025 London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) inaugural Rising Star Impact Prize.

Her Pan-African anti-corruption children’s books Gbagba and Jaadeh! were published to critical acclaim and endorsed by Liberia’s Ministry of Education and Ghana's Education Service as supplemental readers for 3rd to 5th grades. Gbagba and Jaadeh! have also been adapted into radio dramas, music videos and stage plays featuring all-child casts. In 2018, Robtel was recognised with an International Anti-Corruption Excellence (ACE) Award in the category ‘academic research and education’ by the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Centre (ROLACC).

In July 2024, she served as 177th Independence Day National Orator of the Republic of Liberia and was inducted into the Order of the Star of Africa, one of the country’s highest civilian honours, for her ‘distinguished service’.

Robtel completed BA degrees in African Studies and English Literature at Howard University in 2004, an MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford in 2007, and a doctorate in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, in 2014. She is currently Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Visit https://www.robtelneajaipailey.com/ for more information.

Academic and professional credentials: BA African Studies (Howard University)
BA English Literature (Howard University)
MSc African Studies (University of Oxford)
PhD Development Studies (SOAS, University of London)

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