This chapter explores the methodology behind the attempts of Nigeria’s colonial administration to consolidate the complex patchwork of peoples, cultures, polities, and interests acquired throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with their conquests and acquisitions of Nigerian polities, the strategies used by colonial officials differed from region to region due to the differing conditions and extreme diversity of Nigeria. The chapter will detail these different strategies and why they were assigned to the regions in question. However, despite the great diversity in administrative techniques, the chapter seeks to contextualize the overarching strategies and policies implemented by colonial officials who wished to maximize control while minimizing costs. To this end, the British colonial government sought to promote local authorities who would bear the brunt of “less important” administrative responsibilities. This marked a shift from previous colonial policies, which sought to destabilize native power structures to make their acquisition easier. The process of administrative consolidation was far from a one-sided affair. The chapter details how native authorities, cultures, and people reacted to and influenced the activities mentioned earlier.

This chapter traces the origins of the NGO moment to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the Nigeria-Biafra War. It describes humanitarianism as a key component of the West’s response to decolonisation, linking imperial notions of charity, relief and development to the practices adopted by NGOs. The principle of ‘access’ is at the heart of this chapter. ‘Access’ was central to the public narrative of intervention in Biafra: through the NGO-inspired model of ‘people-to-people’ action that drew so much popular support for the region, and in the televised images of the aid airlift that brought supplies into the region. It was important in a practical sense, too: in the continuities of personnel (missionaries and former colonial officials) from empire that were vital in the operation of non-governmental aid. And, this chapter argues, it also offered a reminder of the importance of Third World governments in shaping the territory of emergency relief. In Biafra, the relationship that NGOs cultivated with the local regime lay at the heart of their claims to legitimacy in the West, while also granting considerable agency to local authorities in setting the agenda of non-governmental aid.

This chapter traces the origins of the NGO moment to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the Nigeria-Biafra War. It describes humanitarianism as a key component of the West’s response to decolonisation, linking imperial notions of charity, relief and development to the practices adopted by NGOs. The principle of ‘access’ is at the heart of this chapter. ‘Access’ was central to the public narrative of intervention in Biafra: through the NGO-inspired model of ‘people-to-people’ action that drew so much popular support for the region, and in the televised images of the aid airlift that brought supplies into the region. It was important in a practical sense, too: in the continuities of personnel (missionaries and former colonial officials) from empire that were vital in the operation of non-governmental aid. And, this chapter argues, it also offered a reminder of the importance of Third World governments in shaping the territory of emergency relief. In Biafra, the relationship that NGOs cultivated with the local regime lay at the heart of their claims to legitimacy in the West, while also granting considerable agency to local authorities in setting the agenda of non-governmental aid.

The North American and Israeli scholars who founded Genocide Studies in the 1980s and 1990s also insisted on genocide’s Holocaust archetype. These scholars successfully resisted the “conceptual stretching” of genocide to include political criteria in its definition. Domestically, they advocated an apolitical “toleration” pedagogy as genocide’s antidote. The US victory in the Cold War in the early 1990s sidelined the lively critique of the US national security state and gave rise to a new age of interventions. Vietnam-induced doubts were left behind as “the indispensable nation” became the world’s hyper-power. Although the founders of Comparative Genocide Studies were liberals who opposed the Vietnam War, they eagerly adopted the role of academic handmaiden to US global aspirations: the field anointed the US as the benign force to police the non-West in the form of humanitarian interventions to prevent genocide, other “atrocity crimes,” and to wage “war on terror.”

Chapter 3 analyzes how forged documents and fraudulent identities emerged in Biafra, considering how they overlapped with “legitimate” forms of official practice that the war had thrown into flux. These records show how the logics, tools, and skills of the battlefield inflected confrontations in Biafra, leading some people to survive in ways that the norms of war permitted, but the law classed as “crime.”

Chapter 2 moves into the later period of the war, when Biafra was cut off from the outside world and its carefully constructed legal system began to unravel. It traces the emergence of vigilantism, the blurring of lines between the battlefield and civilian life in Biafra, and the Biafran state’s loss of its monopoly on violence.

Chapter 4 analyzes the political, legal, and social problems of reintegration, starting with the minority areas that fell to Nigeria early in the war and moving into the central Igbo provinces that held out until 1970.

Chapter 1 gives a short general history of the war, after which it describes the Biafran state in the early stages of the fighting, paying particular attention to the important place that law and order occupied in Biafra’s national imagination.

On 26 July 1946, in court room 600 of the majestic ‘Palace of Justice’ (Justizpalast) in Nuremburg, Germany, Sir Hartley Shawcross (1902–2003), the British Chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal, presented his closing arguments on the 187th day in the case against the twenty-two high-ranking Nazi defendants, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess. The British team had met with French professor René Cassin (1887–1976) in preparation for the landmark trial,1 and Shawcross’ speech had in large part been drafted by British law professor Hersch Lauterpacht, though he went off-script to include the charge of ‘genocide’, the term coined by Polish legal activist Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959).2 As the British case also covered the charges of ‘Crimes against Peace’, Shawcross’ arguments would have also touched upon the work of Soviet international law scholar Aron N. Trainin (1883–1957), author of ‘Hitlerite Responsibility under International Law’, a small pamphlet that apparently had been read by many in preparation for the trial in Nuremberg3 and which, uncharacteristically for Soviet discourse by the end of the war and after, was very explicit in its treatment of the Jewish identity of many of the victims of the Holocaust.4

Come the middle of the 1960s, the moral vigilante system of the British establishment collapsed. This chapter chronicles how this came about. It was instigated partly through the demise of the Public Morality Council and its reincarnation as the Social Morality Council under the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church. The evidence is given here for regarding this as something of a putsch, organised by Edward Oliver who deliberately dismantled the PMC and, against the wishes of the Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, reinvented it as an organisation with international and educational agendas. Vigilantism was then picked up by new leaders – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford and Moral Rearmament. This amounted to a privatisation of vigilantism, with pirates who stole it from the mainstream churches. This transformation of the landscape of religious morality thus produced a system divorced from the British establishment.