Postcolonial Wars: Current Perspectives on the Deferred Violence of Decolonization

Speakers

Tippy Brar


Tippy Brar is a former lieutenant general, who was commissioned into India’s elite Maratha Light Infantry in 1966. He took part in the 1971 Indo Pak War. Later, as part of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, Brar commanded his battalion with distinction in Sri Lanka, where he was awarded the Yudh Sewa Medal for gallantry. Brar has held staff, instructional, and command appointments at several military academies in India and the United Kingdom, including a four-year tenure at the Support Weapons School of Headquarters School of Infantry in Warminster, England. He has commanded an infantry brigade and a mountain division, which was deployed in the mountains of northeast India in front of the Chinese, and commanded 16 Corps, the largest Corps of the Indian army, which played a vital role in combating insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. He then became the commandant of the Defence Services Staff College, from which he retired after 40 years of service. Brar is an alumnus of the National Defence Academy in Pune, India, and a graduate of the Defence Services Staff College at Wellington, India.

François Bugnion


François Bugnion, who earned a bachelor of arts and a doctoral degree in political science, is an independent consultant on international humanitarian law and humanitarian action. He joined the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1970 and served the institution in Israel and the occupied territories, Bangladesh, Turkey and Cyprus, Chad, Vietnam, and Cambodia. From 1989 to 1996, he was deputy director of the ICRC's Department of Principles and Law, and from 1996 to 1998, delegate general for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. From October 1998 to December 1999, he was diplomatic advisor, and from January 2000 to June 2006, director for international law and cooperation at the ICRC. He has published more than 50 articles on international humanitarian law and on the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and a major book on the ICRC, Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge et la protection des victimes de la guerre (ICRC, 2000), which was also published in English and Russian: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Protection of War Victims (MacMillan, 2003) and Mezhdunarodnii Komitet Krasnava Kresta i zachita jertv voiini (ICRC, 2005).

Edouard Bustin


Edouard Bustin is a professor of political science at Boston University and a member of its African Studies Center. He taught at the National University of Congo (Zaire) as a resident or visiting professor from 1959 to 1971 and has continued to conduct field research on that country over the past 30 years. His publications dealing with Congo include Lunda under Belgian Rule: The Politics of Ethnicity (Harvard University Press, 1975). He has been a guest lecturer at several American, African, Caribbean, and European universities. As the director of the interdisciplinary Francophone Africa Research Group/Groupe de Recherches sur l’Afrique Francophone (GRAF), which he founded in 1993, he has organized international conferences in Boston (1994) and Bordeaux (1997) on French-speaking Africa and Franco-African relations.

Manuel Carballo


Manuel Carballo is an epidemiologist, currently the executive director of the International Centre for Migration and Health (ICMH)—a research, training, and policy advocacy organization in Geneva—and a professor of clinical public health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He has worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) in a number of capacities and countries, including the WHO Global Programme on AIDS, through which he helped 22 countries set up their national AIDS committees, and a stint as WHO public health advisor in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. He has also worked as an advisor to the minister of health of Bosnia and led several United Nations missions: to Albania and Macedonia, to assess the needs of Kosovar refugees; to Iraq and the occupied Palestinian territories, for health evaluation missions; and to the Maldives, for a United Nations Population Fund relief and reconstruction mission. Since 2004, he has worked in Iran and Afghanistan to develop national emergency preparedness plans with special reference to women and children. Most recently, he headed an ICMH team to the Democratic Republic of Congo to prepare an accelerated plan to prevent sexual, gender-based violence; his plan is currently being implemented by a related organization.

John F. Clark


John F. Clark is an associate professor in and the chairperson, since 2002, of the Department of International Relations at Florida International University. He specializes in the state-society relations of African polities and the international relations of sub-Saharan Africa. He is coeditor of Political Reform in Francophone Africa (Westview Press, 1997), editor of The African Stakes of the Congo War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and author of The Failure of Democracy in the Republic of Congo (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008). He has also published 35 articles and book chapters since 1993, including articles in African Affairs, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and African-Spectrum. During the 1999–2000 academic year, he was a Fulbright lecturer and research scholar at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and he has made five research trips to the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1990. He currently serves as vice chair of the African Politics Conference Group. He holds a BA degree in political science from Georgia Southern University, and MA and PhD degrees in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia.

Alex de Waal


Alex de Waal is director of the Social Science Research Council program on HIV/AIDS and social transformation, a fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and a director of Justice Africa in London. He started his research career on the Horn of Africa in 1984 with a study of the famine in Darfur and subsequently studied the social, political, and health dimensions of famine, war, genocide, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 2006, de Waal served as advisor to the African Union mediation team for the Darfur conflict. He earned his PhD from Oxford University in 1988 and has written or edited 13 books, most recently AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis—Yet (Zed Books, 2006) and War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Harvard University Press, 2007). A completely revised and updated version of a previous book, coauthored with Julie Flint, was published in April under the title Darfur: A New History of a Long War (Zed Books, 2008).

Caroline Elkins


Caroline Elkins is the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies at Harvard University. She received her AB, summa cum laude, from Princeton University and her AM and PhD from Harvard University. Her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt and Co., 2005), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2006. It was also one of the Economist’s Best Books for 2005, an Editor’s Choice for the New York Times, and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. Her work has been profiled in newspapers and magazines around the world, as well on various television and radio programs including Charlie Rose and NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and the New Republic. She and her research have been the subjects of a BBC documentary titled Kenya: White Terror, which won the Prize of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. She has also held numerous fellowships, including from the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Max Glaser


Max Glaser worked with Médecins Sans Frontières–Holland (MSF-H) from 1992 to 2002, as an emergency desk manager, the head of mission in various countries, and the head of the context and evaluation department. As the latter, he supported operational context analysis and advised on operational strategy for various countries and was involved in security management (development and training) in MSF-H, including crisis management. In 2002–2003, Glaser was a visiting research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, doing research on non-state armed groups and humanitarian access. Currently, he operates Pax-Consultancy and is an independent consultant in humanitarian operations, and operational and security management, involved in both international nongovernmental organizations and in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Glaser holds a master’s degree in political science and international relations from the University of Amsterdam and is a member of the board of MSF-H.

Linda Heywood


Linda Heywood is a professor of African history and the history of the African diaspora at Boston University. She is the author of Contested Power in Angola, editor of and contributor to Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and coauthor, with John Thornton, of Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Her articles on Angola and the African diaspora have appeared in the Journal of African History, the Journal of Modern African Studies, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and Slavery and Abolition. Heywood has served as a consultant for numerous museum exhibitions, including African Voices at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, sponsored by the Merseyside Maritime Museum. She was also one of the history consultants and appeared in the PBS series African American Lives (2006) and Finding Oprah’s Roots (2007). Heywood earned her bachelor’s at Brooklyn College and her master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University and is writing a biography of Queen Njinga of the Kingdom of Matamba, in what is now modern Angola.

S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole


S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole is a professor of engineering and science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a fellow of the Scholar Rescue Fund. He has also been a professor of engineering at Harvey Mudd College and is on special leave as a senior professor of electrical engineering from the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, Hoole served on the University Grants Commission. After being appointed vice chancellor of the University of Jaffna, he had to flee because of death threats for his association with human rights groups. Besides authoring a large corpus of engineering books and papers, he has made significant contributions to issues of peace and human rights through formal papers, books, and weekly newspaper columns. He was elevated to fellow of the IEEE in 1995 “for contributions to computational methods for design optimization of electrical devices.” He earned his bachelor of science in engineering from the University of Ceylon, Katubedde Campus, a master of science in engineering from the University of London, a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University, and a higher doctorate from the University of London.

Abdelaziz Khalfallah


Born in Algeria in 1933, Abdelaziz Khalfallah became involved at a young age with the radical nationalist movement and, in 1955, joined the underground National Liberation Front (FLN). During the battle for Algerian independence, he rose through the ranks and was imprisoned more than once. In 1968, he left politics to work for the government. In 1985, he was appointed deputy director of the International Centre for Public Enterprises in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Khalfallah subsequently returned to Algeria and retired as a government employee, only to re-enter government service in 1992 when asked to become a member of two transitional councils with legislative responsibilities after the dismissal of President Chadli Bendjedid. Now fully retired, he still serves as a member of the Boudiaf Foundation and the Committee for the Defense of the Republic. Khalfallah studied economics and management in Algiers and in Paris, where he earned his MBA at IESTO.

Ngo Vinh Long


Ngo Vinh Long is a professor of Asian studies at the University of Maine, where he has taught courses on China, Japan, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Vietnam since 1985. His specialties include social and economic development in Asia and US relations with Asian countries. Long has been a military mapmaker for the United States, contributing to detailed maps of all of Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia, and an activist, helping to found the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and its Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (now called Critical Asian Studies) and Oxfam America. Since the end of the Vietnam War, Long has been active in US social causes and in Vietnamese reconstruction and development. He works with institutions and nongovernmental organizations in Vietnam and writes frequently for leading journals and papers there. He has also published English-language books and articles on Vietnam and other Asian countries, most recently Vietnam: The Quest for Independence and Freedom, 1945–2008 (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). During the past 10 years, Long has been conducting an oral history research project on social movements in the southern half of Vietnam since World War II.

Thomas A. Marks


Thomas A. Marks is chair of the Department of Irregular Warfare at the School for National Security Executive Education of the National Defense University in Washington, DC, and the author of Maoist People’s War in Post-Vietnam Asia (White Lotus Press, 2007), considered the current standard on the subject of “people’s war.” His book Maoist Insurgency since Vietnam (Frank Cass, 1996) was honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book selection and was complemented by Counterrevolution in China: Wang Sheng and the Kuomintang (Frank Cass, 1996). A former US government officer who is a member of the editorial board of Small Wars and Insurgencies, Marks previously served as the Brigadier General H.L. Oppenheimer Chair of Warfighting Strategy at the Marine Corps University. He is an adjunct professor at the Joint Special Operations University, where he was named Educator of the Year in 2006. Marks graduated from the United States Military Academy, and his PhD dissertation at the University of Hawaii, which focused on the relationship between popular upheaval and revolutionary crisis, was published as Making Revolution: The Insurgency of the Communist Party of Thailand in Structural Perspective (White Lotus Press, 1994).

Linda Melvern


British investigative journalist Linda Melvern, who specializes in international affairs, is the author of six books of nonfiction. For more than 14 years, she has investigated and written about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She is a consultant to the Military One prosecution team at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and her archive of documents on the planning and preparation of the genocide provides a part of the documentary evidence used by the prosecution in this trial. Melvern’s first book on the genocide, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (Zed Books, 2000) is in its seventh printing and is used as source material by students in universities throughout the world. Her second book about the genocide, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (Verso, 2004), is a detailed and exclusive account of the planning of genocide, those responsible, and how the genocide progressed. Melvern has also published articles, essays, and papers on this subject, including in the British Journalism Review, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Observer, and the Times. She has published journal articles in African Affairs, International Affairs, and Security Dialogue.

Thrishantha Nanayakkara


Thrishantha Nanayakkara’s current research interests are in legged locomotion of field robots that can learn, through interaction with humans and animals, to accomplish complex goals in an unstructured environment. At present, his main applications are in humanitarian land-mine detection in tropical environments. He has published his work in four book chapters, seven international journal papers, and 26 international conference papers. Nanayakkara earned his bachelor’s degree with honors in electrical engineering from the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka and his master’s in electrical engineering and doctorate in systems control and robotics from Saga University. He has been on the faculty of the University of Moratuwa, where he was the principal investigator of the Laboratory for Intelligent Field Robots and earned the outstanding researcher award in 2006. He has also been a visiting scholar in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Nanayakkara was the founding general chair of the International Conference on Information and Automation. He is a 2008–2009 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Catharine Newbury


Catharine Newbury is a professor of government at Smith College and a professor of government and African studies in the Five College African Studies program. Her research interests include ethnicity and the state in Africa, democratization, the politics of peasants and women, and the politics of violence in francophone Central Africa. She is the author of The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (Columbia University Press, 1988) and articles on multiple aspects of Central African political processes. Newbury teaches courses on African politics, women and politics in Africa, the Rwanda genocide in comparative perspective, and the politics of development. A former president of the African Studies Association, she is currently book review coeditor, with David Newbury, for the African Studies Review. She also serves as director of the Five College African Scholars Program, which brings African scholars to five colleges in western Massachusetts for research, writing, and classroom participation.

David Newbury


David Newbury, the Gwendolen Carter Professor of African Studies at Smith College, has taught in several universities in Central Africa and the United States. His research interests have ranged from precolonial topics to contemporary issues, including historiographical issues in Africa; transformations in ritual power, social transformation, and political consolidation in the construction of a precolonial kingdom in eastern Congo; social transformations in a forest society as colonial policies forced a shift from a trapping-gathering economy to agricultural production; the layered effects of a 1920s famine in eastern Rwanda; and the historical dimensions of the recent violence in Africa’s Great Lakes region. He has written Kings and Clans: Ijwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift, 1780–1840 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) and Vers le passé du Zaïre: quelques méthodes de recherche historique (Institut pour la recherche scientifique en Afrique centrale, 1973) and coedited Paths Towards the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina (African Studies Association Press, 1994) and African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa? (Sage Publications, 1986). With Catharine Newbury, he serves as book review coeditor for the African Studies Review.

John Nottingham


A native of Coventry, England, John Nottingham is a former British district officer in Kenya. He served the British army from 1947 to 1949, when he was drafted by the British Army’s Intelligence Corps. Later, in 1952, he joined the British Colonial Administrative Service in Kenya and served until 1962. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Nottingham was also a lecturer in the political science department at Makerere University in Uganda and the publishing director of the East African Publishing House in Nairobi. Since 1973, he has been publishing with Transafrica Press, his own company. Nottingham is the coauthor, with the late Carl G. Rosberg, of The Myth of “Mau Mau”: Nationalism in Kenya (Praeger, 1966). He was educated at the Shrewsbury School and earned a PPE degree from Hertford College, University of Oxford, in 1952.

Sue Onslow


Sue Onslow has lectured and taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) since 1994. She is a fellow in the LSE’s Cold War Studies Centre/IDEAS and program director for its Southern Africa Initiative. She is also a visiting lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She has published on British foreign policy and the informal empire in the Middle East and on party politics and decolonization in Africa. Her current research is on the relationship between South Africa and the Rhodesian Front government in the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) era. Her forthcoming monograph looks at the “unholy alliance” that developed between Pretoria and Salisbury in the UDI years, and the process of its disintegration. She is also the interviewer in a two-year oral history project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, featuring former members of the Rhodesian security forces and conducted by the Department of History at the University of the West of England.

Sophie Quinn-Judge


Sophie Quinn-Judge is the associate director of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture, and Society and a senior lecturer in history at Temple University. She worked in South Vietnam from 1973 to 1975 as the Saigon representative of the American Friends Service Committee. She is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (University of California Press, 2002) and coeditor, with Odd Arne Westad, of The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 (Routledge, 2006). Quinn-Judge has also served as a correspondent on Soviet-Asian affairs for the Far Eastern Economic Review and has contributed to other publications, such as the Guardian. Quinn-Judge earned her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and was research coordinator of the Cold War Studies Programme in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Sean Redding


Sean Redding is a professor of history at Amherst College. She has published numerous articles on revolt and supernatural beliefs in South Africa and the book Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Power and Rebellion in South Africa, 1880–1963 (Ohio University Press, 2006). Redding is currently working on a project about the history of violence in the rural areas of South Africa.

Robert I. Rotberg


Robert I. Rotberg is an adjunct professor of public policy and the director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the president of the World Peace Foundation and has been a professor of political science and history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, academic vice-president of Tufts University, and president of Lafayette College. His newest book is China into Africa: Trade, Aid, and Influence (Brookings Institution, 2008). He also wrote or edited Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations (Brookings Institution Press, 2007), which includes a biting chapter on Zimbabwe; When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2004); Ending Autocracy, Enabling Democracy: The Tribulations of Southern Africa, 1960–2000 (Brookings Institution Press, 2002); and other books and articles.

Witney Schneidman


Witney W. Schneidman is the president of Schneidman & Associates International, where he is active in a number of Africa-related projects. He also serves as cochair of the African policy group on the Obama presidential campaign and as a senior advisor at the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, where he worked on the Africa-China-US Trilateral Dialogue. During the Clinton Administration, Schneidman served as deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. He also coordinated the US-SADC Forum, the US-Angola Bilateral Consultative Commission, and the US-Nigeria Joint Economic Partnership Commission. Schneidman is the author of Engaging Africa: Washington and the Fall of Portugal’s Colonial Empire (University Press of America, 2004) and the principal author of the report “A Ten-Year Strategy for Increasing Capital Flows to Africa,” issued in June 2003 by the Commission on Capital Flows to Africa, sponsored by the Corporate Council on Africa, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for International Economics, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. He received a PhD in international relations from the University of Southern California, an MA in international relations from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and his BA, cum laude, in history from Temple University.

Scott Straus


Scott Straus is an associate professor of political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he also serves as the faculty director of the Human Rights Initiative. His primary research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of large-scale violence, human rights, and African politics. Straus is the author of two books on the Rwandan genocide: The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2006), and, with Robert Lyons, Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (MIT/Zone Books, 2006). The Order of Genocide received several awards, including the 2006 Award for Excellence from the Association of American Publishers for the best book published in political science and government that year. Straus also coauthored, with David Leonard, Africa’s Stalled Development: International Causes and Cures (Lynne Rienner, 2003), and translated Jean-Pierre Chrétien’s The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (MIT/Zone, 2003). He has published articles on violence and genocide in Foreign Affairs, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Journal of Genocide Research, Patterns of Prejudice, Politics & Society, the Wisconsin International Law Journal, and World Politics. Before entering academia, Straus was a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai


Hue-Tam Ho Tai is the Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History at Harvard University, where she specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Vietnam. She was born in Saigon, South Vietnam. Tai is the author of Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1992) and Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Harvard University Press, 1983) and the editor of The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (University of California Press, 2001). She has just finished translating the memoirs of her aunt, who has been described as Vietnam’s first female political prisoner. Tai holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MA and a PhD from Harvard University.

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