Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Samuel Fury Childs Daly writes about law, warfare, and the politics of military regimes. Most of his work describes the history of Africa since independence. He asks how soldiers and judges think: how do military dictatorships use law, and how do judiciaries check their powers – or enable them? He also studies what warfare does to legal systems. Armed conflict degrades normative orders, and sometimes it creates new ones. How do people make order and resolve disputes in wartime? His first book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connects the Nigerian Civil War to the fraud and violent crime that wracked Nigeria in its wake. Using an original body of legal records from the secessionist Republic of Biafra, it traces how technologies, survival practices, and moral codes that emerged during the fighting lasted long after the war was over. The line between martial violence and violent crime can blur on the battlefield, and once that line is gone it is hard to redraw it.

His latest book, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire is available for free online (https://uchicago.box.com/v/soldiersparadise) and describes one of the twentieth century’s most widespread ideologies – militarism.