Dr Phillip Innis
Independent Scholar Fellow
Tethered Urbanism: An Emergent Logic of Suspension in Post-Conflict West Africa
This project investigates how urban marginality is systematically produced in post-conflict West Africa. It moves beyond narratives of state failure to ask: what happens when the celebrated resourcefulness of marginalised communities becomes a technology of rule?
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Biography
Phillip Garjay Innis is a scholar-practitioner: a diplomat and development researcher. His work explores urban marginality, infrastructure, and post-conflict governance in West African cities. His ongoing research develops two interrelated frameworks: tethered urbanism, theorising the active production of precarity through governance-by-suspension, and tethering as a planning leadership logic of recursive promise and postponement. He has worked across multiple sectors in Liberia, including the Foreign Service as Minister-Counsellor and Chargé d'Affaires ad interim. He holds a PhD in Geography (University of Bonn), an MSc (Lund University), and an MA (King's College London).
Biographical details correct as of 09.04.26