Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- 1 The Nigeria-Biafra War: Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide -- SECTION I Genocide and the Biafran Bid for Self-Determination -- 2 Irreconcilable Narratives: Biafra, Nigeria and Arguments About Genocide, 1966-1970 -- 3 Marketing Genocide: Biafran Propaganda Strategies During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 -- 4 The Case Against Victor Banjo: Legal Process and the Governance of Biafra -- 5 The Biafran Secession and the Limits of Self-Determination -- SECTION II A Global Event -- 6 The UK and 'Genocide' in Biafra -- 7 France and the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 -- 8 Israel, Nigeria and the Biafra Civil War, 1967-1970 -- 9 Strange Bedfellows: An Unlikely Alliance Between the Soviet Union and Nigeria During the Biafran War -- 10 West German Sympathy for Biafra, 1967-1970: Actors, Perceptions and Motives -- 11 Dealing With 'Genocide': The ICRC and the UN During the Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967-1970 -- 12 Humanitarian Encounters: Biafra, NGOs and Imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967-1970 -- 13 'And Starvation Is the Grim Reaper': The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the Genocide Question During the Nigerian Civil War, 1968-1970 -- 14 'Black America Cares': The Response of African-Americans to Civil War and 'Genocide' in Nigeria, 1967-1970 -- SECTION III Trauma and Memory -- 15 Women and the Nigeria-Biafra War -- 16 'Biafra of the Mind': MASSOB and the Mobilization of History -- 17 Memory as Social Burden: Collective Remembrance of the Biafran War and Imaginations of Socio-Political Marginalization in Contemporary Nigeria -- 18 The Asaba Massacre and the Nigerian Civil War: Reclaiming Hidden History -- 19 Imagined Nations and Imaginary Nigeria: Chinua Achebe's Quest for a Country -- Index

This is the first textbook of its kind to amass cases of genocide and other mass atrocities across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that have largely been pushed to the periphery of Genocide Studies or “forgotten” altogether. Divided into four thematic sections – Genocide and Imperialism; War and Genocide; State Repression, Military Dictatorships, and Genocide; and Human-Caused Famine, Attrition, and Genocide – A Modern History of Forgotten Genocides and Mass Atrocities covers five continents, including case studies from Biafra, Yemen, Argentina, Russia, China, and Bengal. They range from the French conquest of Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century to the Yazidi genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, and show that at times of rising authoritarianism, military conquest, and weaponization of hunger, lines between what is war and what is genocide are increasingly blurred. By including genocides and mass atrocities that are often overlooked, this volume is crucial to the ongoing debates about whether “this atrocity or that one” amounts to genocide. By including key points, events, terms, and critical questions throughout, this is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students who study genocide, mass atrocities, and human rights across the globe.

This book is the first to recover and analyse at length the extent, complexity, and character of African American responses to the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Far from having only marginal significance, the Nigerian Civil War collided at full velocity with the conflicting discourses and ideas by which black Americans sought to understand their place in the United States and the world in the late 1960s. Black civil rights leaders offered their service as agents of direct diplomacy during the conflict, seeking to preserve Nigerian unity; grassroots activists organised food-drives, concerts, and awareness campaigns in support of humanitarian aid for victims of famine in the warzone; while other black activists warned of an imminent genocide and called for an united response from black Americans. Drawing on private papers, activist literature, government records, and especially the black press, it charts the way the civil war shaped, as well as challenged, the worldview of African Americans regarding black internationalist solidarities, territorial sovereignty and political viability, humanitarian compassion, and the political trajectory of postcolonial Africa. With a chronological approach, this study is the ideal resource for all those interested in the Nigerian Civil War and the history of black internationalism.

In 1961, Rosina 'Rose' Martin married John Umelo, a young Nigerian she met on a London Tube station platform, eventually moving to Nigeria with him and their children. As Rose taught Classics in Enugu, they found themselves caught up in Nigeria's Civil War, which followed the 1967 secession of Eastern Nigeria--now named Biafra. The family fled to John's ancestral village, then moved from place to place as the war closed in. When it ended in 1970, up to 2 million had died, most from starvation. Rose ('worse off than some, better off than many') had kept notes, capturing the reality of living in Biafra--from excitement in the beginning to despair towards the end. Immediately after the war, Rose turned her notes into a narrative that described the ingenious ways Biafrans made do, still hoping for victory while their territory shrank and children starved by the thousand. Now anthropologist S. Elizabeth Bird contextualizes Rose's story, providing background on the progress of the war and international reaction to it. Edited and annotated, Rose's vivid account of life as a Biafran 'Nigerwife' offers a fresh, new look at hope and survival through a brutal war.

A global history of 'Biafra', providing a new explanation for the ascendance of humanitarianism in a postcolonial world.

This Handbook provides a robust collection of vibrant discourses on African social ethics and ethical practices. It focuses on how the ethical thoughts of Africans are forged within the context of everyday life, and how in turn ethical and philosophical thoughts inform day-to-day living. The essays frame ethics as a historical phenomenon best examined as a historical movement, the dynamic ethos of a people, rather than as a theoretical construct. It thereby offers a bold, incisive, and fresh interpretation of Africa’s ethical life and thought.

An examination of the historical narratives surrounding humanitarian intervention, presenting an undogmatic, alternative history of human rights protection.

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

This volume is the first, comprehensive and balanced historical account of the momentous Nigeria-Biafra war. It offers a multi-perspectival treatment of the conflict that explores issues such as local experiences of victims, the massive relief campaigns by humanitarian NGOs and international organizations like the Red Cross, the actions of foreign powers with interests in the conflict, and the significance of the international public sphere, in which the propaganda and public relations war about the question of genocide was waged.

The reader covers key aspects of the most complex issues of genocide studies vis-à-vis the definition of genocide, theories of genocide, the prevention and intervention of genocide, and the denial of genocide.