A Nation on Paper: Making a State in the Republic of Biafra

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 868-894
Author(s):  
Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Paper Making ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Form

AbstractWhat role did law play in articulating sovereignty and citizenship in postcolonial Africa? Using legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, this article analyzes the relationship between law and national identity in an extreme context—that of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). Ideas about order, discipline, and legal process were at the heart of Biafra's sense of itself as a nation, and they served as the rhetorical justification for its secession from Nigeria. But they were not only rhetoric. In the turmoil of the ensuing civil war, Biafra's courts became the center of its national culture, and law became its most important administrative implement. In court, Biafrans argued over what behaviors were permissible in wartime, and judges used law to draw the boundaries of the new country's national identity. That law played this role in Biafra shows something broader about African politics: law, bureaucracy, and paperwork meant more to state-making than declensionist views of postcolonial Africa usually allow. Biafra failed as a political project, but it has important implications for the study of law in postcolonial Africa, and for the nation-state form in general.

scholarly journals Saving the Nation by Sacrificing Your Life: Authoritarianism and Chiang Kai-shek's War for the Retaking of China

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-86
Author(s):  
Isabelle Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Authoritarian Government ◽  
The Republic Of China ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the role assigned to citizens by the ideology of authoritarianism in the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek's war to retake mainland China and the wartime regime constructed for fighting that war. Viewing Chiang's ambition of retaking China by force as an anti-communist nationalist war, this paper considers this prolonged civil war as Chiang's attempt at restoring the impaired sovereignty of the Republic of China. Adopting the concept of “necropolitics,” this paper argues that what underlay the planning for war was the manipulation of the life and death of the citizenry and a distinction drawn between the Chinese nation to be saved and the condemned communist Other. This manipulation and demarcation was institutionally enforced by an authoritarian government that violated citizens' human rights for the sake of winning the nationalist war.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter looks beyond the American Civil War to consider the ways evangelical space continued to shape how Americans saw the landscape and themselves in literary realism to the conservation movement. It mentions how Mark Twain became a representative figure of how a secularizing America remained haunted by a sense of sacred presence rooted in the soil itself. It reviews the story about the rise of white Protestant evangelicals within U.S. national culture and how their form of evangelical space became American space by the eve of the Civil War. The chapter explores the ironic story about how evangelical space escaped control as writers and artists from other traditions reconfigured the relationship between landscape representation, media, and the sacred to produce their own apocalyptic geographies. It recounts how William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Obookiah appropriated and adapted evangelical space.

Post-War Writing in Nigeria

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-54
Author(s):  
Ernest Nneji Emenyonu
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The People ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Right ◽  
Beliefs And Attitudes

The Nigerian civil war is now history. The Republic of Biafra lives in the pages of books, pamphlets, and newspapers. In that form, it is no threat to the people of Nigeria who, in a solemn oath of allegiance in January 1970, pledged to consign Biafra into oblivion and face the task of reconstruction and reconciliation. Biafra is now an issue only for historians who are plagued with the search for an answer to “what might have happened if…” But the war itself has left deep scars not only upon the lives of the survivors, but also on their beliefs and attitudes towards life. Unless he visits the right places in Nigeria, the visitor today may hear nothing and possibly see nothing to remind him of the war.

On Hostile Soil: Spanish Republican Diplomats in Berlin at the Onset of the Spanish Civil War

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
FRANCISCO MORENTE
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Relationship

German intervention in the Spanish Civil War was decisive for its development and result. Traditionally scholars have focused their attention on the support given by the Third Reich to the military rebels; however, they have widely neglected the study of the relationship between Germany and the Spanish Republic during the first four months of the war, when both countries maintained diplomatic relations. This paper aims at exploring a crucial aspect of that historical period, namely the circumstances of the Spanish diplomats in Berlin during those first four months, and the strategies that the German and the Spanish governments carried out in the harsh diplomatic battle that they ended up fighting. The author explains the difficult working conditions of the Spanish diplomats who were loyal to the Republic and stayed in Berlin in July 1936, when most of their colleagues deserted. Finally, he explores how the German Foreign Affairs Department, in collaboration with the Gestapo, managed to restrain the Spanish Republic diplomatic action in Germany.

scholarly journals The Changing Dynamics of Religion and National Identity: Greece and the Republic of Ireland in a Comparative Perspective

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne Halikiopoulou
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
Threat Perceptions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWhereas most of Western Europe experienced a separation between the political and religious spheres in the past decades, in Greece and the Republic of Ireland the process of secularisation has been inhibited due to close association between religion and national identity. This paper examines these countries in a comparative perspective and argues that the process of secularisation in Ireland has been explicitly linked to a shift in national identity, a development which has not taken place in Greece. The relationship between religion and national identity is contingent on two factors: internally, the degree in which a church obstructs the modernisation process and, externally, the level of threat perceptions.

Audits of international relief in the Nigerian Civil War: Some political perspectives

1975 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 501-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morris Davis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Cost Efficiency ◽  
Economic Data ◽  
Intrinsic Interest ◽  
Complex Operation ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
International Power ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
International Relief

Information from four audits, or audit-like reviews, of international relief programs in the Nigerian-Biafran war sheds considerable light on the financial sources, scope, timing of flows, and cost-efficiency associated with that complex operation. Beyond their intrinsic interest, which is heightened by two of the documents remaining unpublished, such economic data bear heavily on many political aspects of the relief effort. For example, they permit examination of the relationship, and partial disjunction, between dominance in contributions (which was mainly governmental and particularly American) and leadership in administration (which was chiefly continental European and private). They also facilitate an assessment of the massive or token proportions of these endeavors, their capacity to anticipate rather than just respond tardily to predictable catastrophes, and the extent of their entanglement in the domestic and international power fields that characterized the Nigerian conflict. For all their rather divergent modi operandi, the leading role in the relief process of the two private umbrella organizations is clearly apparent; but so too is the limited ambit of even such comparatively massive relief work within the context of an on-going civil war.

‘To the benefit of Africa, the world, and ourselves’: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) Mission to Nigeria, 1966–1968

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
James Austin Farquharson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Military Government ◽  
The World ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Conflicting Discourses

Abstract Far from having only marginal significance and generating a ‘subdued’ response among African Americans, as some historians have argued, the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) 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. One of the most significant aspects of African American engagement with the civil war was the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa peace mission that sought to bring the Federal Military Government of Nigeria and the secessionist leadership of the Republic of Biafra together through the mediation of some of the leading Black civil rights leaders in the United States. Through the use of untapped primary sources, this article will reveal that while the mission was primarily focused on finding a just solution to the internecine struggle, it also intersected with broader domestic and international crosscurrents.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Relationship

The Civil War marked a turning point not only in the history of the republic, but the history of citizenship in the United States as well. But there is more to this moment than might appear on the surface. What this book stakes out are a new set of questions about what it meant to be a citizen, how Americans thought about it, and just how much the rapid development of two warring nation-states brought the relationship between citizens and states into such sharp relief. By placing ideas about obligation at the center of a history of citizenship during the Civil War era, The Loyal Republic charts new ground.

The intersection of nation and gender in the Linguistic Landscape of Ireland’s Eighth Amendment referendum campaign

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Strange
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Multimodal Approach ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
Irish Identity ◽  
The Republic ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In May 2018, voters in the Republic of Ireland passed a referendum proposal to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, lifting the Irish state’s near-total ban on abortion. Scholars have argued that Ireland’s abortion ban has historically played a key role in the construction of Irish national identity along Catholic, traditional, and heteronormative lines, meaning the lead-up to the vote allowed for key insights into the discursive construction of national identity and gender in Ireland. Drawing on theoretical discussions in both the nationalism and Linguistic Landscape (LL) literature and adopting a qualitative, multimodal approach to analyse the referendum campaign’s LL, I argue that there was a dominant understanding of the relationship between women and Irish national identity, predicated on a positive stance towards Irish identity, while any dissenting voices which questioned whether advancing gender equality was compatible with nationalist ideology were confined to the margins of the debate.

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