Second-Generation Liberation Wars: Rethinking Colonialism in Iraqi Kurdistan and Southern Sudan

This event was the launch of Yaniv Voller's latest book Second-Generation Liberation Wars: Rethinking Colonialism in Iraqi Kurdistan and Southern Sudan published by Cambridge University Press. The formation of post-colonial states in Africa, and the Middle East gave birth to prolonged separatist wars. Exploring the evolution of these separatist wars, Yaniv Voller examines the strategies that both governments and insurgents employed, how these strategies were shaped by the previous struggle against European colonialism and the practices and roles that emerged in the subsequent period, which moulded the identities, aims and strategies of post-colonial governments and separatist rebels. Based on a wealth of primary sources, Voller focuses on two post-colonial separatist wars: in Iraqi Kurdistan, between Kurdish separatists and the government in Baghdad, and Southern Sudan, between black African insurgents and the government in Khartoum. By providing an account of both conflicts, he offers a new understanding of colonialism, decolonisation and the international politics of the post-colonial world. Yaniv Voller is Senior Lecturer in the Politics of the Middle East at the University of Kent. Prior to this, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Voller received his PhD from the LSE, where he also taught courses in the International Relations and the International History Departments. In 2018-2019, Yaniv was a Conflict Research Fellow at the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme at the LSE and the Social Science Research Council. Voller's research broadly concerns the geopolitics of the Middle East, the foreign policies of Middle Eastern states, separatism/liberation, insurgency and the role of ideas, ideology and practices in shaping international politics. He is the author of The Kurdish Liberation Movement in Iraq: From Insurgency to Statehood (Routledge, 2014). Ponsiano Bimeny is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at LSE. He completed his PhD in Development Studies at SOAS University of London with his thesis examining the contradicting visions of the South Sudanese state and its implications for the processes of state formation within the country and in Sub Saharan Africa more broadly. Bimeny's thesis particularly focused on citizenship and identity in the context of conflict, violence and population displacement in South Sudan, drawing on the 2005 political settlement and the most recent conflict between the government's Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the different paramilitary and social groups. Bimeny has more than six years of experience working as a development professional in Northern Uganda, including delivering the UNICEF-funded Government of Uganda’s “Justice for Children” programme. Bimeny has also recently undertaken research work focusing on the post conflict settings of the Acholi and Karamoja regions of northern Uganda for the Deconstructing Notions of Resilience project at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. He has provided regional insights about Africa’s Great Lakes Region to the Centre of African Studies at SOAS since 2016.