Over the past decade, cities have passed an unprecedented number of laws seeking to drive undocumented immigrants from their jurisdictions. At the same time, however, large numbers of cities have passed policies seeking to incorporate recent immigrants into local civic and social life, regardless of immigration status. What explains why similar cities have responded so differently? Quantitative analysis tests the explanatory power of theories of political opportunity structure, labor market competition, demographic changes represented as threats, and the exclusionary tendencies of homeowners in predicting the passage of exclusionary and inclusionary ordinances in cities nationwide. The predictors of the passage of exclusionary ordinances are consistent with the salience of political opportunity structure, demographic changes represented as threats, and the exclusionary tendencies of homeowners. The predictors of the passage of inclusionary ordinances are most consistent with theories of political opportunity structure and the relative absence of the exclusionary tendencies of homeowners in cities with lower levels of owner-occupied housing. Case studies in two sets of paired cities that passed diverging ordinances examine the social and political processes on the ground. This qualitative research finds that residents in exclusionary cities expressed anxieties over the effects of demographic change on home values and neighborhood character. Diverging processes of framing and mobilization emerge as central to the development of local collective identities that include or exclude new immigrant residents. Network analysis of the connections between local civil society organizations in each of the four case study cities identifies the architecture of local civil society networks as a significant factor correlated with the divergent responses to demographic change. The networks in exclusionary cities score highly on measures of density, clustering, and closure, suggest that the network is broken into cliques and that local elites are isolated both from recent immigrants and from non-elite, native-born residents. The high levels of network closure facilitate the creation of rigid group boundaries, the high levels of clustering reinforce pre-existing beliefs within those groups, and the network density aids in the enforcement of sanctions against those who deviate from group norms. By contrast, the networks in inclusionary cities are characterized by multiple organizational bridges between immigrant and native-born communities that facilitate the creation of relationships necessary to craft inclusive policies and a sense that local resources can grow with the population. The research suggests that the local laws seeking to drive out undocumented immigrants are an example of a broader category of exclusionary property laws. The linked social and spatial processes involved in the enactment and enforcement of these laws are one way in which categorical inequalities, such as socio-economic disparities by race, ethnicity, immigration status, or gender become embedded in place.

This dissertation examines how colonial histories converge with models for capitalist futures in Sierra Leone, framed by ongoing debates around the governance, accumulation and distribution of social goods. It explores how managerial logics of risk, human capital, resilience and corporate social responsibility informed the remaking of the state following a decade of civil war and military intervention. And it attends to the politics of reconstruction pursued in contexts of radical upheaval, examining material infrastructures and subjectivities as sites of transnationally mediated cultural transformation continuous with colonial memory and practice. An ethnographic and historical study based on 18 months of field and archival research in the Western Area (or Freetown Peninsula) of Sierra Leone, the dissertation contributes to debates around care, agency and social value, as well as the fraught relationship between knowledge and expertise in contexts of political, spatial and economic experimentation. Developing an approach that denaturalizes calamity and foregrounds long-term structural violence, chapters trace the growing cognizance of the relation between ecological risk and speculative practices in land and real estate markets in the country, briefly hailed as “Africa’s fastest growing economy” between 2012-2015. Examining the role of financial institutions, humanitarian agencies and contractors from the perspective of numerous stakeholders—including flood survivors and ex-combatants, builders and land brokers, urban planners and architects, World Bank officials and local conservationists—I demonstrate how reconstruction in Sierra Leone intensified dynamics of financialization under conditions of questionable sovereignty, reflecting entrenched hierarchies of rank within global labor and commodity markets and the long-term vulnerability of marginalized citizens to increasingly quotidian forms of harm. The dissertation argues for a methodological shift that understands official demands for citizens to embody their “resilience” as an enduring anticipation of catastrophe, one that has developed in tandem with normative aspirations for the “good life” in Sierra Leone. In contrast with the universal claims of liberal community, democratization and material renewal that accompanied the end of war, I track how manual work involved in excavating the foundations for residential sites in the new suburbs of Freetown coincided with a broader panic around the rising value, obscure origins, and growing scarcity of property, examining moral accounting around the relationship between prosperity and the uneven distribution of social injury. By situating ethnographic material on building, work and wealth alongside debates on global inequality, disaster capitalism, race and the poetics of history, I demonstrate the variety of social factors that sustain the violent futurity of growth. More pointedly, I argue that Sierra Leone reveals a shrinking zone of accountability for the human costs of development “by any means necessary,” as disasters increasingly reflect the retreat of the state in its capacity to protect or preserve human life. Ultimately, the dissertation underscores the contradictions of liberal governance in the wake of empire, new imperial relations in the face of old, and the seemingly premature claim of freedom therein.

Map on lining papers Bibliography: leaves 425-435

Map on lining papers / Bibliography: leaves 425-435 / ix, 435 leaves : maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Anthropology, 1983