The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism
Spectacles of Suffering

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

Lasse Heerten (Author)

9781107530423, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 March 2019

412 pages, 21 b/w illus. 3 maps
23 x 15.3 x 2.5 cm, 0.65 kg

In the summer of 1968, audiences around the globe were shocked when newspapers and television stations confronted them with photographs of starving children in the secessionist Republic of Biafra. This global concern fundamentally changed how the Nigerian Civil War was perceived: an African civil war that had been fought for one year without fostering any substantial interest from international publics became 'Biafra' - the epitome of humanitarian crisis. Based on archival research from North America, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, this book is the first comprehensive study of the global history of the conflict. A major addition to the flourishing history of human rights and humanitarianism, it argues that the global moment 'Biafra' is closely linked to the ascendance of human rights, humanitarianism, and Holocaust memory in a postcolonial world. The conflict was a key episode for the re-structuring of the relations between the West and the Third World.

Part I. The Emergences of Biafra: 1. The end of empire and the coming of postcolonial conflict
2. The Biafran campaign for self-determination in a postcolonial world of states
3. The transnational internationalization of the Biafran campaign
Part II. Biafra on a Global Stage: 4. Creating 'Biafra': the discovery of a civil war as humanitarian crisis
5. 'Biafran Babies': humanitarian visions of postcolonial disaster
6. Auschwitz in Africa? Biafra, Holocaust memory, and the language of rights
7. Distant suffering and close concerns: Biafra and the Third World in the global Sixties
Part III. The Ends and Afterlives of Biafra: 8. Biafra, the internationalism of states and the question of genocide
9. The end of Biafra, the end of the lobby
10. The afterlives of Biafra.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], African history [HBJH], General & world history [HBG]