This event is open to the public and a light lunch will be served outside the seminar room at 12.50pm.

This talk will outline some salient features of the separatist agitations by a groups which are reviving the movement for independence in eastern Nigeria, tracing its roots both in discourses of history and in contemporary politics, and drawing parallels with the conditions which have enabled other recent insurgencies.

Olly Owen is a political anthropologist whose doctoral study at Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology  was an ethnography of the Nigerian Police Force. Before that, he worked in London and Lagos with West African civil society groups, and then as an investment risk analyst covering the West Africa sub-region. He has also worked as a journalist and consultant. Olly's current research is a study of new transformations in revenue and fiscal governance in Nigeria. Alongside this, he continues a focus on policing practices in Africa and his recent co-edited book Police in Africa: The Street Level View is published this year by Hurst.