Where will the conference be held?

The conference will take place in Nsukka, NGA.

What is the primary focus of the conference?

The conference focuses on the Nigerian Civil War and the resilience demonstrated in its aftermath, sixty years later.

What is the duration of the conference?

The conference spans several days, from the middle to the end of January.

The Nigerian Civil War and Resilience: Sixty Years After

Name: The Nigerian Civil War and Resilience: Sixty Years After
Start: 2027-01-13T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-01-15T00:00:00Z
Location: Nsukka

Jan 13–15, 2027Nsukka, NigeriaIn-person

Registration open

The conference, "The Nigerian Civil War and Resilience: Sixty Years After," convenes in Nsukka, NGA, to critically examine the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, six decades after its conclusion. This event serves as a crucial platform for scholars, policymakers, and civil society to reflect on the conflict's enduring impact on NGA's national identity, social structures, and political landscape. The discussions will delve into the multifaceted aspects of resilience demonstrated by communities and individuals in the aftermath of the war.

Committees & topics

Topics
Trauma, Healing, and Memory of the Nigerian Civil War · Biafra and the Citizenship Question in Nigeria · Civil Wars and Resilience in Africa · The Igbo Presidency Question Sixty Years after the Nigerian Civil War · Arts, Culture, and Creative Expressions as Tools for Postwar Resilience · The Role of the Intellectual in Building and Sustaining Peace in Nigeria · Rethinking Federalism: Viable Models for Nigeria · Social Media, Toxic Narratives, and Nigeria's National Question

Why it matters

The Nigerian Civil War remains a pivotal event in NGA's history, shaping its trajectory and influencing contemporary challenges. Understanding its causes, conduct, and consequences is essential for comprehending the nation's present-day dynamics, including issues of national unity, ethnic relations, and governance. By revisiting this period, the conference aims to foster a deeper appreciation of the complexities involved and to draw lessons that can inform current and future peacebuilding initiatives.

This gathering is particularly significant as it moves beyond a mere historical recounting to explore themes of resilience. It seeks to highlight how communities and individuals have navigated the trauma and disruption of war, rebuilt their lives, and contributed to the ongoing process of national healing and reconciliation. Such an examination offers valuable insights into human adaptability and the capacity for recovery in the face of profound adversity. The insights generated from this conference can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of post-conflict societies globally.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes of this conference, a thorough understanding of the historical context of the Nigerian Civil War is paramount. This includes familiarizing oneself with the political climate leading up to the conflict, the key actors involved, and the international responses from countries like GBR, FRA, IRL, and USA. Examining the socio-economic conditions and ethnic tensions prevalent at the time will provide a robust foundation for understanding the war's origins.

Beyond historical facts, participants should consider the broader implications of civil conflict on national development and societal cohesion. Lessons such as the 'Power-Interest Grid' can be valuable for analyzing the various stakeholders and their motivations during and after the war. Additionally, the concept of 'Hidden Stakeholders' can help in identifying less obvious but influential actors whose roles might have been overlooked. Preparing to engage with diverse perspectives, including those of victims, perpetrators, and peacebuilders, will enrich the discussions and contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of resilience in post-conflict settings.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Nigeria

As the host nation, NGA's perspective is central, focusing on national unity, reconciliation, and the long-term impacts of the war on its diverse population.

Role in topic

NGA was the primary theater of the civil war, and its government and people were directly involved in the conflict and its aftermath. The conference directly addresses NGA's historical trauma and ongoing efforts toward national cohesion.

United Kingdom

GBR, as the former colonial power, holds a complex historical position, with its actions and policies before and during the war often subject to scrutiny regarding their influence on the conflict.

Role in topic

GBR had significant historical ties and influence in NGA, and its diplomatic and material support to the federal government during the war is a critical aspect of international involvement.

France

FRA's stance during the war was notably different from other major powers, offering some support to the Biafran side, which complicated international dynamics.

Role in topic

FRA's recognition and support for Biafra, though unofficial, played a role in prolonging the conflict and highlighting the internationalization of the civil war.

United States

The USA maintained a position of neutrality during the war but provided humanitarian aid, reflecting a cautious approach to intervention in post-colonial African conflicts.

Role in topic

The USA's policy of non-intervention and focus on humanitarian relief efforts during the war is an important aspect of the international response to the conflict.

Ireland

IRL, through its humanitarian organizations and public advocacy, played a significant role in raising international awareness about the humanitarian crisis in Biafra.

Role in topic

IRL's strong humanitarian response and advocacy for the Biafran cause, particularly through missionary efforts, brought international attention to the suffering caused by the war.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Trauma, Healing, and Memory of the Nigerian Civil War

The Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), fought between the Federal Military Government and the secessionist Republic of Biafra, killed an estimated one to three million people, the majority from starvation caused by the federal blockade of the Eastern Region. The war followed the January and July 1966 coups, anti-Igbo pogroms in the North, and the failure of the Aburi Accord to resolve the constitutional crisis between Lagos and Lt. Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu's Eastern Region. General Yakubu Gowon's 'No Victor, No Vanquished' declaration and the 3Rs policy of Reconciliation, Reconstruction, and Rehabilitation framed the official postwar narrative, but produced little formal truth-telling or psychosocial reckoning. Sixty years on, the war remains a largely unprocessed national trauma. Survivors and descendants carry inherited grief over kwashiorkor deaths, sexual violence, displacement, and the abandoned-property crisis that stripped many Igbo of their assets in Port Harcourt and elsewhere. The Oputa Panel (1999–2002) gathered testimony on rights abuses including the war years, but its report was never officially released or implemented. Memory of the conflict is uneven: suppressed in school curricula for decades, kept alive in literature by Achebe, Adichie, Saro-Wiwa, and Emecheta, and increasingly politicized online. Today the committee confronts how Nigeria should institutionalize remembrance, mental-health support for aging survivors, archival access, and a credible reconciliation process. Debate centers on whether a formal truth commission, official war memorials, curriculum reform, or community-level healing rituals are the right instruments — and on who has standing to speak for the dead.

Key players

Biafra and the Citizenship Question in Nigeria

The Biafran secession of 1967 grew out of a citizenship crisis as much as an ethnic one: after the 1966 pogroms in Northern Nigeria killed tens of thousands of Igbo and drove perhaps two million eastward, many Easterners concluded that the Nigerian state could not guarantee equal protection. Although the federal victory in 1970 restored territorial unity, the postwar settlement — including the £20 flat payment for pre-war bank balances, the Abandoned Properties Decree, and the indigene/settler distinction enshrined in successive constitutions — left many Igbo feeling like second-class citizens in their own country. The revival of Biafran agitation since 1999, through the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and later the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) under Nnamdi Kanu, has reframed the question for a new generation. IPOB's 2017 proscription as a terrorist organization, Kanu's extraordinary rendition from Kenya in 2021, the weekly 'sit-at-home' orders paralyzing the Southeast, and the rise of the Eastern Security Network have all sharpened the standoff. Underlying grievances — federal-character implementation, marginalization in security appointments, infrastructure deficits, and the indigeneship rule that denies full citizenship rights to internal migrants — extend well beyond the Igbo. The committee must weigh whether Nigerian citizenship is substantive or merely formal, and what reforms — constitutional, security, or political — could make belonging real for all groups without inviting fresh secessionist claims.

Key players

Civil Wars and Resilience in Africa

Since independence, Africa has experienced a recurring pattern of internal armed conflicts rooted in contested decolonization borders, winner-take-all politics, resource competition, and weak federal bargains. The Nigerian Civil War sat at the start of a long list that includes Sudan's two civil wars and the secession of South Sudan, the Ethiopian–Eritrean conflict and the recent Tigray war, Angola and Mozambique's Cold-War-era proxy wars, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide and the Congo wars, and current crises in the Sahel, Cameroon's Anglophone regions, and Sudan. Each conflict has produced its own architecture of recovery — DDR programs, truth commissions, power-sharing pacts, hybrid courts — with very mixed results. The African Union's framework, anchored in the 2000 Constitutive Act, the Peace and Security Council, the African Governance Architecture, and Agenda 2063's 'Silencing the Guns' initiative (originally targeted at 2020, extended to 2030), reflects a continental ambition to localize conflict response. Yet ECOWAS suspensions of coup states, the collapse of MINUSMA, the withdrawal of Sahel states from ECOWAS, and stalled peace processes in Sudan and eastern DRC suggest the resilience deficit is structural. Resilience here means not just ending fighting but rebuilding social trust, livelihoods, and legitimate institutions. The committee will examine what worked and what failed in postwar recovery across the continent, and whether African-led models — Rwanda's gacaca, South Africa's TRC, Liberia's reintegration programs, Nigeria's 3Rs — offer transferable lessons or cautionary tales.

Key players

The Igbo Presidency Question Sixty Years after the Nigerian Civil War

Since 1999, Nigeria's presidency has rotated informally between the North and the Southwest and South-South, with Olusegun Obasanjo (Yoruba), Umaru Yar'Adua and Muhammadu Buhari (Northern Hausa-Fulani), Goodluck Jonathan (Ijaw), and Bola Tinubu (Yoruba). No Igbo Nigerian has held the office since the war, even though the Southeast is one of six geopolitical zones and the Igbo are among the country's three largest ethnic groups. Proponents of an 'Igbo presidency' argue that the principle of federal character and the unwritten zoning convention of the major parties demand that the Southeast take its turn, both as a matter of equity and as a means of fully reintegrating the region into national political life. The 2023 election sharpened the debate. Peter Obi's Labour Party candidacy mobilized younger voters across regions but split the opposition; the PDP fielded Atiku Abubakar instead of zoning to the South, and the APC's Tinubu won with a plurality. Critics counter that ethnic zoning entrenches identity politics, that no group has a constitutional 'turn,' and that IPOB's separatist agitation complicates the case for Southeast leadership. Others argue that without an Igbo presidency the postwar promise of 'No Victor, No Vanquished' remains unfulfilled. The committee will assess whether a deliberate Igbo presidency in 2027 or 2031 would deepen national unity, what mechanisms (party zoning, constitutional rotation, or open competition) are appropriate, and how the question intersects with broader demands for restructuring.

Key players

Arts, Culture, and Creative Expressions as Tools for Postwar Resilience

Where official memory of the Nigerian Civil War has been thin, the arts have done much of the work of remembrance and repair. Chinua Achebe's 'There Was a Country,' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' Chukwuemeka Ike's 'Sunset at Dawn,' Buchi Emecheta's 'Destination Biafra,' and Wole Soyinka's prison memoir 'The Man Died' anchor a literary archive; Christopher Okigbo, who died fighting for Biafra, became himself an emblem of the war's cost. Highlife musicians like Celestine Ukwu and Oliver De Coque, and later Afrobeat under Fela Kuti, channeled grief and critique. Nigerian cinema, from the early Nollywood films of the 1990s to recent adaptations and documentaries, has gradually opened space to revisit the war. Globally, art has been central to post-conflict resilience: Rwanda's reconciliation theatre, South Africa's post-apartheid literature and music, Bosnia's Sarajevo Film Festival, and Colombia's Truth Commission's collaboration with artists all illustrate the model. UNESCO's culture-for-peace programs and the African Union's Charter for African Cultural Renaissance provide a normative scaffolding. In Nigeria, festivals such as Felabration, Ake, and the Lagos International Jazz Festival, and institutions like the new Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, are reshaping what cultural memory can do. The committee will consider how states, donors, and civil society can support creative industries as instruments of healing without instrumentalizing them, and how to protect artistic freedom in a polarized media environment.

Key players

The Role of the Intellectual in Building and Sustaining Peace in Nigeria

Nigerian intellectuals have been deeply implicated in both the making and the unmaking of national peace. The first generation — Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Tafawa Balewa, and the Ibadan and Nsukka university circles — helped imagine the federation, but also articulated the regionalist arguments that hardened into conflict. During the civil war, Chinua Achebe served as a Biafran envoy, Wole Soyinka was imprisoned for seeking dialogue, and Christopher Okigbo died in combat, while federal-side scholars produced the intellectual case for unity. The postwar decades saw the rise of the Ibadan-Zaria-Ife-Nsukka-Calabar academic networks, ASUU activism, and figures like Claude Ake, Bala Usman, and Chinweizu shaping debates on dependency, federalism, and identity. More recently, public intellectuals — from Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Niyi Osundare, Attahiru Jega, and a growing cohort of younger scholars and columnists — have engaged questions of corruption, electoral integrity, insecurity, and constitutional reform. Think tanks such as the Centre for Democracy and Development, the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, and Nextier have institutionalized this role, while social media has both amplified and coarsened intellectual discourse. The brain drain ('japa') is now stripping universities of mid-career scholars at a critical moment. The committee will examine the obligations and limits of intellectual engagement: the line between advocacy and partisanship, the role of universities as peace infrastructure, and the protection of academic freedom amid political pressure and economic precarity.

Key players

Rethinking Federalism: Viable Models for Nigeria

Nigerian federalism has evolved from the three-region structure of 1954, through the four-region phase of 1963, to the twelve-state structure created on the eve of the civil war by General Gowon — a move that helped defeat Biafra by isolating the Igbo heartland from the Niger Delta minorities. Successive military regimes expanded the federation to the current 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, while concentrating revenue and security powers at the center. The 1999 Constitution, drafted under military rule, entrenched this centralization: the federal government controls the police, mineral resources, and the bulk of national revenue, distributing allocations through a formula that critics say discourages state-level productivity. Demands for 'restructuring' or 'true federalism' have grown across regions: the Southwest's Amotekun security network, the Southeast's calls for regional autonomy, the South-South's resource-control campaign rooted in the Niger Delta struggles, and Northern arguments about agricultural and security devolution. The 2014 National Conference produced a substantial set of recommendations that were never implemented; the Justice Uwais electoral reform report and successive constitutional amendment cycles have nibbled at the edges. State police, fiscal federalism, devolution of the exclusive legislative list, and local government autonomy are the main reform pressure points. The committee will weigh competing models — regional federalism, asymmetric federalism, confederation, or incremental devolution — against the imperatives of national cohesion, minority protection, and economic viability.

Key players

Social Media, Toxic Narratives, and Nigeria's National Question

Nigeria has one of Africa's most active social media publics, with tens of millions of users on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram. Platforms have democratized political voice — from #BringBackOurGirls in 2014 to #EndSARS in 2020, which mobilized a generation against police brutality before the Lekki tollgate shootings on 20 October 2020. They have also become vectors for ethnic and religious incitement, disinformation around elections, recruitment by separatist and jihadist movements, and coordinated harassment campaigns. The federal government's seven-month suspension of Twitter in 2021–2022, after the platform deleted a presidential post, illustrated the tension between state regulation and civic space. The 2023 election cycle exposed how AI-generated audio, doctored images, and ethnically targeted disinformation can inflame the 'national question' — the unresolved debate about how a multi-ethnic, multi-religious federation should organize power. IPOB's online ecosystem, Northern influencer networks, and partisan 'e-armies' all weaponize platform algorithms that reward outrage. Meanwhile, the Nigerian Data Protection Act 2023, the National Broadcasting Commission's social media guidelines, and proposed hate-speech legislation raise concerns about overreach and selective enforcement. The committee will balance freedom of expression, platform accountability, electoral integrity, and the protection of vulnerable communities, drawing on the EU Digital Services Act, the UN's 'Our Common Agenda' code of conduct on information integrity, and African Union frameworks on cybersecurity and data protection.

Key players

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

The Power-Interest Grid

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Country dossier

Ghana

Country dossier

Canada

Country dossier

Nigeria January 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

The Nigerian Civil War and Resilience: Sixty Years After

Jan 13–15, 2027Nsukka, NigeriaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Trauma, Healing, and Memory of the Nigerian Civil War · Biafra and the Citizenship Question in Nigeria · Civil Wars and Resilience in Africa · The Igbo Presidency Question Sixty Years after the Nigerian Civil War · Arts, Culture, and Creative Expressions as Tools for Postwar Resilience · The Role of the Intellectual in Building and Sustaining Peace in Nigeria · Rethinking Federalism: Viable Models for Nigeria · Social Media, Toxic Narratives, and Nigeria's National Question

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Nigeria

As the host nation, NGA's perspective is central, focusing on national unity, reconciliation, and the long-term impacts of the war on its diverse population.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

GBR, as the former colonial power, holds a complex historical position, with its actions and policies before and during the war often subject to scrutiny regarding their influence on the conflict.

Role in topic

GBR had significant historical ties and influence in NGA, and its diplomatic and material support to the federal government during the war is a critical aspect of international involvement.

France

FRA's stance during the war was notably different from other major powers, offering some support to the Biafran side, which complicated international dynamics.

Role in topic

FRA's recognition and support for Biafra, though unofficial, played a role in prolonging the conflict and highlighting the internationalization of the civil war.

United States

The USA maintained a position of neutrality during the war but provided humanitarian aid, reflecting a cautious approach to intervention in post-colonial African conflicts.

Role in topic

The USA's policy of non-intervention and focus on humanitarian relief efforts during the war is an important aspect of the international response to the conflict.

Ireland

IRL, through its humanitarian organizations and public advocacy, played a significant role in raising international awareness about the humanitarian crisis in Biafra.

Role in topic

IRL's strong humanitarian response and advocacy for the Biafran cause, particularly through missionary efforts, brought international attention to the suffering caused by the war.