For their history of abuses, continued abuses, and the system of unaccountable violence they represent, the December “Employee of the Month” award goes to the Nigerian Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS).
A fixture of life in Nigeria since the 1990s, SARS gained international notoriety in October 2020 after a video documenting a SARS officer Continue Reading →
Alex de Waal has a new essay in the London Review of Books (39:12, 15 June 2017, pp. 9 – 12), which they titled, “The Nazis Used It, We Use it.” Below is an excerpt, the full essay is available with a subscription to the LRB.
In its primary use, the verb ‘to starve’ is […]
Continue Reading →The ‘conventional’ understanding of corruption in arms procurement is that it takes the form of bribes or kickbacks. In return for being awarded an arms contract, often as a result of having selection criteria manipulated in its favour, the supplier company pays bribes to officials involved in the decision-making process. Payments typically are channeled through […]
Continue Reading →Chinua Achebe, who died today at 82, was a giant amongst the world’s literary figures of the twentieth century. As someone who studies the effects of war on and intentional targeting of civilians, I find that at a certain point our theories, data and narratives simply cannot capture massive violence with equal precision as a […]
Continue Reading →In the February 8, 2013 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, Alex de Waal reviews Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra. You will need a subscription to access it.
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