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?

For example, In Monrovia's West Point, a promised seawall remains a skeletal ruin while residents' improvised protections are hailed as "resilience." This is not an anomaly but reveals a broader governance formation. Communities are caught in a paradox of official recognition without full incorporation, tethered by cycles of promise and postponement. Their survival labour is seen, named, and absorbed. Resilience is celebrated less for empowering communities than for relieving the state.

The project conceptualises this condition as tethered urbanism: an emergent logic of governance that operates through suspension rather than delivery, and through capture rather than exclusion. Drawing on ongoing longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, it argues that precarity is actively sustained through three interlocking mechanisms. Recursive saturation describes the cyclical announcement, suspension, and re-promising of infrastructural projects: a rhythm that sustains rather than exhausts expectations, keeping communities perpetually oriented toward a state that never delivers. Relational carcerality captures the immobilisation of residents through the weight of obligation, recognition, and partial incorporation, bound by the terms of their inclusion. Reproductive improvisation ties both together: the systematic capture of survival labour, repurposed as a renewable resource for governance.

The project advances three contributions. First, it reframes urban marginality as a governed condition rather than a failure of provision. Second, it develops tethered urbanism as a traveling analytic: the mechanisms of deferral, immobilisation, and capture are diagnosable in fiscally constrained cities beyond West Africa, including those shaped by austerity and managed decline. Third, it proposes an ethics of disentanglement: a reflexive orientation for asking what responsible engagement means when improvisation does the state's work.