This volume is the first, comprehensive and balanced historical account of the momentous Nigeria-Biafra war. It offers a multi-perspectival treatment of the conflict that explores issues such as local experiences of victims, the massive relief campaigns by humanitarian NGOs and international organizations like the Red Cross, the actions of foreign powers with interests in the conflict, and the significance of the international public sphere, in which the propaganda and public relations war about the question of genocide was waged.

A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. He is the author and editor of many publications on history, memory and genocide, including Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (2014, edited with Bart Luttikhuis) and the Journal of Genocide Research (senior editor).

Lasse Heerten is head of the project 'Imperial Gateway: Hamburg, the German Empire, and the Making of a Global Port' at the Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Human Rights at the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, a global history of the humanitarian crisis in Biafra, will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Introduction

1. The Nigeria-Biafra war: postcolonial conflict and the question of genocide

Lasse Heerten and A. Dirk Moses

Section I - Genocide and the Biafran bid for self-determination

2. Irreconcilable narratives: Biafra, Nigeria and arguments about genocide, 1966-1970

Douglas Anthony

3. Marketing genocide: Biafran propaganda strategies during the Nigerian civil war, 1967-1970

Roy Doron

4. The case against Victor Banjo: legal process and the governance of Biafra

Samuel Fury Childs Daly

5. The Biafran secession and the limits of self-determination

Brad Simpson

Section II - A global event

6. The UK and 'genocide' in Biafra

Karen E. Smith

7. France and the Nigerian civil war, 1967-1970

Christopher Griffin

8. Israel, Nigeria, and the Biafra civil war 1967-1970

Zach Levey

9. Strange bedfellows: an unlikely alliance between the Soviet Union and Nigeria during the Biafran War

Maxim Matusevich

10. West German sympathy for Biafra, 1967-1970: actors, perceptions and motives

Florian Hannig

11. Dealing with 'genocide': the ICRC and the UN during the Nigeria-Biafra war, 1967-1970

Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps

12. Humanitarian encounters: Biafra, NGOs and imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967-1970

Kevin O'Sullivan

13. 'And starvation is the grim reaper': the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the genocide question during the Nigerian civil war, 1968-1970

Brian McNeil

14. 'Black America cares': the response of African Americans to civil war and 'genocide' in Nigeria, 1967-1970

James Farquharson

Section III - Trauma and memory

15. Women and the Biafra-Nigeria war

Gloria Chuku

16. 'Biafra of the mind': MASSOB and the mobilization of history

Ike Okonta

17. Memory as social burden: collective remembrance of the Biafran War and imaginations of socio-political marginalization in contemporary Nigeria

Edlyne Anugwom

18. The Asaba massacre and the Nigerian civil war: reclaiming hidden history

S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser Ottanelli

19. Imagined nations and imaginary Nigeria: Chinua Achebe's quest for a country

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska