School of Social and Political Science

Description

Edinburgh Centre for Global History  in a joint session with the Centre of African Studies are delighted to invite you to the following seminar:

'Soldier's Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire'

Speaker: Professor Samuel Daly, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies (University of Chicago)

Across Africa, the late twentieth century was a time of military coups and martial “revolutions.” The men who staged them had utopian visions. In Nigeria and other former British colonies, army officers remade their countries along martial lines. Some soldiers tried to drum colonialism’s bad habits out of people through military-style discipline, or condition civilians to think more like they did. Others believed that making their countries into vast open-air barracks was what would make them truly “free.” They saw judges and lawyers as allies in that mission, but law wasn’t the disciplinary tool they thought it was. Military regimes found that people could turn law back against them, and only some judges shared their world-making aspirations. Using an original collection of legal records, archival documents, and memoirs, Soldier’s Paradise shows how law facilitated militarism, and, at times, worked against it. Long submerged by more hopeful ideological currents, militarism is resurfacing in African politics. Soldier’s Paradise describes where it came from, and what it meant.

When: Wednesday 31st January 2024 (4pm-5:30pm)

Where: Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building (CMB)

Format: In-person. Please register your attendance via Eventbrite

Speaker Biography:

Samuel Fury Childs Daly is a historian of twentieth century Africa. His research combines legal, military, and social history to describe Africa's history since independence. His recent book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connects the crisis conditions of the Nigerian Civil War to the forms of crime that came to be associated with Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, it traces how technologies, survival practices, and moral ideologies that emerged in the context of the fighting shaped how crime was practiced and perceived after Biafra’s defeat. By connecting the violence of the battlefield to violent crime, it provides a new perspective on law and politics in Africa after colonialism. This book won the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association and the Fage & Oliver Prize from the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. It also received honorable mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History.

He is currently writing three books: a book about militarism’s legal forms, a global history of military desertion, and a history of military imposters.