In Strong Commanders, Weak States: How Rebel Governance Shapes Military Integration after Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2025), Dr. Philip A. Martin investigates a fundamental political challenge faced by post-conflict states: how to create obedient national militaries from the remnants of insurgent forces.

When civil wars end, non-state armed groups often integrate into post-conflict militaries. Yet rebel-military integration does not always happen smoothly. In some cases, former rebels cooperate with new leaders, forming powerful national armies that underpin postwar stability. In others, they resist the authority of new leaders, maintaining clandestine armed networks that disrupt centralized state-building.

Dr. Martin argues that how field commanders of non-state armed groups governed during the war explains this variation. Rebel commanders who build accountable governance systems gain strong social support from rebel-ruled communities, becoming locally embedded. Thanks to these community ties, which persist after the war, these embedded commanders have the leverage to push the central government for concessions, resist directives to disarm fighters, or even orchestrate coup d'états. Conversely, rebel commanders who governed coercively are less likely to sustain community ties. Without the ability to mobilize collective action after the war, these non-embedded commanders have stronger incentives to cooperate with new regime leaders.

Wielding in-depth evidence from Côte d'Ivoire and cases of rebel-military integration elsewhere, Martin shows that good governance during wartime can—ironically—lead to poor postwar state consolidation. Rather than preparing insurgents to be successful state builders, effective rebel governance can hinder post-conflict state-building. As costly peace operations come under increasing scrutiny, Strong Commanders, Weak States offers fresh guidance on how transitions to peace can better succeed.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Today I talked to Kara Cooney about Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches (American U in Cairo Press, 2024). The book is a meticulous study of the social, economic, and religious significance of coffin reuse and development during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods, illustrated with over 900 images.

 Funerary datasets are the chief source of social history in Egyptology, and the numerous tombs, coffins, Books of the Dead, and mummies of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties have not been fully utilized as social documents, mostly because the data of this time period is scattered and difficult to synthesize. This culmination of fifteen years of coffin study analyzes coffins and other funerary equipment of elites from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-second Dynasties to provide essential windows into social strategies and adaptations employed during the Bronze Age collapse and subsequent Iron Age reconsolidation.

Many Twentieth to Twenty-second Dynasty coffins show evidence of reuse from other, older coffins, as well as obvious marks where gilding or inlay have been removed. Innovative vignettes painted onto coffin surfaces reflect new religious strategies and coping mechanisms within this time of crisis, while advances in mummification techniques reveal an Egyptian anxiety about long-term burial without coffins as a new style of stuffed and painted mummy was developed for the wealthy. It was in the context of necropolis insecurity, economic crisis, and group burial in reused and unpainted chambers that a complex, polychrome coffin style emerged.

The first part of this book focuses on the theory and evidence of coffin reuse, contextualized within the social collapse that characterized the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties. The second part presents photo essays of annotated visual data for over sixty Egyptian coffins from the so-called Royal Caches, most of them from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Illustrated throughout with high-quality images, the line drawings and color and black-and-white photographs are ideal for careful study, especially evidenced in the digital edition, where pages can be enlarged for close examination.

Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptology and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Specializing in social history, gender studies, and economies in the ancient world, she received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, she was co-curator of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her popular books include The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, and The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. Her latest academic book is Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches.

Lauren Fonto is a Master's student in the program Heritage and Cultural Sciences: Heritage Conservation at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a collections management intern in the public sector.

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In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke UP, 2022), Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people's thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region's deeper past.

Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History is available open access here.

Rhiannon Stephens is a Professor of History at Columbia University who specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. Her work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, Past and Present, and African Studies Review. Rhiannon’s current research is a collaborative project that focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University, M.A. in Climate & Society from Columbia University, and B.A. in Swahili & History from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network.

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In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa.

In The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Dr. Lindsay O’Neill brings to life individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade. Dr. O’Neill also shows how the princes’ experiences reflect the fragmented, chaotic, and often deadly realities of the early British empire. A fascinating and deeply researched historical narrative, The Two Princes of Mpfumo blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police.

War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Samar Al-Bulushi explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Dr. Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya's emergence as a key player in the "War on Terror" is closely linked—but not reducible to—the U.S. military's growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Dr. Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya's place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya's alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of the country's Muslim minority population.

How is life lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets? This book weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post-9/11 imperial warfare.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The road to Queen Elizabeth II’s implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the throne. In Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans (Leuven UP, 2024), Raphael Chijioke Njoku examines Queen Elizabeth II’s role in the African decolonization trajectories and the postcolonial state’s quest for genuine political and economic liberation since 1947. By locating Elizabeth at the center of Anglophone Africa’s independence agitations, the account harnesses the African interests to tease out the monarch’s dilemma of complying with Whitehall’s decolonization schemes while building an inclusive and unified Commonwealth in which Africans could play a vital role. Njoku argues that to gratify British lawmakers in her complex and marginal place within the British parliamentary system of conservative versus reformist, Elizabeth’s contribution fell short of African nationalists’ expectations on account of her silence and inaction during the African decolonization raptures. Yet ultimately, the author concludes, she helped build an inclusive and unified organization in which Africans could assert and appropriate political and economic autarky.

Kanayo Nomeh, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, specializing in Africa's diaspora relations, superpowers and geopolitical rivalry, and African-China sociopolitical dynamics.

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In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism.

Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana's support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nationalists did not simply resist or utilize imperial and Cold War pressures but drew strength from the example of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which Toussaint Louverture demanded the universal application of Europe's Enlightenment values. The liberationists of the postwar period wanted to redesign society in the image of the revolution that had created them.

The Ideological Scramble for Africa demonstrates that the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Communism was only one of two ideological struggles that picked up speed after 1945; the battle between liberation and imperialism proved to be more enduring.

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In Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931 (Princeton UP, 2024), A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment of the fortunes of African entrepreneurs under colonial rule. Examining the lives and careers of 100 merchants in Lagos, Nigeria, between 1850 and 1931, Hopkins challenges conventional views of the contribution made by indigenous entrepreneurs to the long-run economic development of Nigeria. He argues that African merchants in Lagos not only survived, but were also responsible for key innovations in trade, construction, farming, and finance that are essential for understanding the development of Nigeria’s economy.

The book is based on a large, representative sample and covers a time span that traces mercantile fortunes over two and three generations. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Hopkins shows that indigenous entrepreneurs were far more adventurous than expatriate firms. African merchants in Lagos pioneered motor vehicles, sewing machines, publishing, tanneries, and new types of internal trade. They founded the construction industry that built Lagos into a major port city, moved inland to start the cocoa-farming industry, and developed the finance sector that is still vital to Nigeria’s economy. They also took the lead in changing single-owned businesses into limited liability companies, creating freehold property rights and promoting wage labour. In short, Hopkins argues, they were the capitalists who introduced the institutions of capitalism into Nigeria. The story of African merchants in Nigeria reminds us, he writes, that economic structures have no life of their own until they are animated by the actions of creative individuals.

Thomas E Kingston is a Berkeley Fellow and PhD student at UC Berkeley where he works on histories of knowledge, empire and capital, in the context of colonialism in Asia. He is an Economic History Society Student Ambassador, the Editorial Director of the Association for Southeast Asian Studies and a passionate rugby player. His website can be found at www.thomasekingston.com

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In An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo (Duke UP, 2024), anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imagine and articulate alternative ways of living in a global regime of antiblackness.

Rachel Marie Niehuus is an anthropologist and a surgeon currently on faculty in the Department of Surgery at University of North Carolina. Her next project continues this study of world-making through an analysis of the role of medicine in what might come after the world of Man.

Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies.

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