Dr Niels Boender

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, African History

Biography

Background

I am a scholar of African global history, with a specialisation in the political and intellectual history of East African decolonisation. I am currently part of the AHRC-funded GLOSOC project, with Professor Emma Hunter here at Edinburgh and Dr Julia Moses at Sheffield. We are collectively looking at the global history of socio-economic rights in relation to work in the period after the Second World War. Before coming to Edinburgh I completed my doctorate at the University of Warwick on the legacies of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, especially as it related to the politics of reconcilliation. I am also working with the Imperial War Museum on their forthcoming Empire and Conflict exhibit.

CV

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Qualifications

PhD, History, University of Warwick, 2024

MPhil, World History, University of Cambridge, 2020

BA, History, University of York, 2019

Responsibilities & affiliations

Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Curatorial Consultant, Imperial War Museum

Research summary

African History, Comparative & Global History, Colonialism, Labour, Politics, Decolonisation, Intellectual History

Current research interests

Global Socio-Economic Rights, Local Contexts (GLOSOC), my current project, investigates how contemporaries since the late nineteenth century, and especially in the critical period between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and global economic downturn in 1973, have understood and expressed socio-economic rights: in particular, rights related to work (or choosing not to work), to earn one’s own money and to maintain certain ‘living standards’. I am focusing on how these ideas were articulated, internalised, and transformed in the East African context.

Past research interests

My PhD project, successfully examined in May 2024, concerns the aftermath of the Mau Mau insurgency in late- and post-colonial Kenya. The thesis takes the latter stages of Britain’s brutal counterinsurgency forward to a revitalised understanding of Kenya’s independence. The focus is post-war reconciliation and the simultaneous creation of Kenya’s post-colonial social contract. Grassroots activism and local politics are foregrounded, whereby radicalised ex-insurgents continued articulating alternative visions of independence. To achieve this, the thesis critiques and employs political science methodologies and takes full advantage of recently released archival documentation and primary testimony of the survivors of Kenya’s abortive anti-colonial struggle.

Affiliated research centres

Organiser

  • Panel Convenor, “28: Logics of violence in insurgency and counterinsurgency”, Society for the History of War Annual Conference, Lisbon, November 2023.
  • Conference Convenor (Doctoral Fellow), ‘Homecoming’ after war: Comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives (May 2023). Funded by Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick. 
  • Panel Convenor, Hist02 “Colonial (counter)insurgency as African future-making”, European Conference on African Studies in Cologne, Germany (May 2023).
  • Principal Organiser, Warwick History Department Postgraduate Conference (May 2022).

Papers delivered

  • ‘Decolonisation, the Highest Stage of Counterinsurgency? Making the Post-Colonial State in Kenya’ (Institute of Historical Research/Kings College London History of War Seminar, London, October 2024).
  • ‘The Myth of the Forgotten Fighter: Ex-Mau Mau in the Kenyatta State’ (International Conference on the Mau Mau Movement, University of Nairobi, October 2024).
  • ‘Grassroots Resistance, Resettlement Schemes, and the Making of International Development in Kenya’, (Historical Challenges to International Development Workshop, King’s College London, September 2024).
  • ‘Peacebuilding as a Paradigm for Studying Historical Decolonisation: The Case of Kenya’, (British International History Group Annual Conference, King’s College London, September 2024).
  • ‘The African Independent Pentecostal Church and the Politics of Kenya's Decolonisation’, (African Studies Association of the UK Conference, Oxford Brookes University, August 2024).
  • ‘Truth or Reconciliation?: Mau Mau and post-colonial state-making in Kenya, 1963-1969’, (Transnational and Global History Annual Conference, University of Oxford, June 2024).
  • ‘Ethnicity, Memory and Reconciliation in a Decolonising State: The Case of Mau Mau in Kenya,’ (Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism Conference, University of Edinburgh, April 2024).
  • ‘Resurrecting the African Independent Pentecostal Church: Land, Education and the Local Politics of Kenyan Decolonisation, 1952- 1978’, (African Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, December 2023).
  • ‘Counterinsurgent violence beyond war and independence: the case of Kenya’, (Society for the History of War Annual Conference, Lisbon, November 2023).
  • ‘Uhuru Chiefs and Emergency Headmen: Local politics in postcolonial Central Kenya, 1963-9,’ (Africa: New Perspectives in Social, Political and Economic History Conference, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City, November 2023). 
  • “Neo-Mau Mau’ and ex-loyalists: Oppositional politics in Central Kenya, 1960-69’, (Decolonization’s Discontents Workshop, Harvard University/Tufts University, Boston, September 2023)
  • ‘Coercive Reconciliation: Rethinking the Kenya Emergency’, (European Conference on African Studies, Cologne, June 2023).  Also presented for Fellows at the Kluge Centre of the Library of Congress, August 2023.
  • ‘Heroes and Hooligans: Reframing Mau Mau’s legacies through a reconciliatory lens’, (International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of the British Declaration of State of Emergency in Kenya in 1952, University of Nairobi, October 2022).
  • ‘The local politics of late colonialism: resistance and repression in Central Kenya, 1956-1963’, (Comparing ‘Late Colonialisms’ in Africa Conference, Northumbria University/University of Coimbra, September 2022).
  • ‘A plethora of potentially subversive activity: Wanjohi Mungau, “neo-Mau Mau” and the local politics of Uhuru in Nyeri, 1959-1965’, (University of Nairobi Department of History Muted Histories Research Seminar, March 2022). The link is available.
  • ‘Grassroots Politics in the Aftermath of the Mau Mau Rebellion’ (Kenyatta University (Nairobi), Department of History Staff Seminar, March 2022).

  • “Kenyan Politics and the Historical Imagination of the Mau Mau Uprising”, in The Cambridge History of African Political Thought, eds. Jon Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry Odamtten, Ayesha Omar, and Nana Osei-Opare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026). (Under Contract).
  • (as editor) Homecoming Veterans in Literature and Culture: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Warwick Series in the Humanities, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025) (Under Contract). [I will contribute the Introduction and a chapter entitled: “‘Have you forgotten that I am one of you?’: Mau Mau Homecomings in Late and Post-Colonial Kenya”]
  • “‘Neo-Mau Mau’ and ex-Loyalists: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Central Kenya, 1960-69,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East [Accepted for Publication September 2024].
  • ““The dregs of the Mau Mau barrel”: Permanent Exile and the Remaking of Late Colonial Kenya, 1954-1961,” Journal of Social History 57:1 (Fall 2023): 128-155, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad018
  • “From Federation to ‘White Redoubt’: Africa and the geographical imagination of Rhodesian propaganda, 1962-1970,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51:6 (2023): 1200-1228, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2023.2166380
  • “Mau Mau at the Museum: (Re)narrating colonial insurgency at the IWM,” Journal of Museum Ethnography 36 (March 2023): 110-130. 
  • ‘Rotting among the tsetse’, History Today 71, no. 6 (June 2021): 90-93.
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