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

Lasse Heerten is currently head of the 'Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, the German Empire, and the Making of a Global Port' project, funded by the DFG (German Research Council) at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds graduate degrees from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Oxford and the Freie Universität Berlin. His graduate studies were supported by a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

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.