Just Another Coup? What’s at Stake in Niger

 

Prof. William Miles, Northeastern University, led the webinar "Just Another Coup? What’s at Stake in Niger" on May 3, 2024.

William F.S. Miles (Ph.D., The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1983) is Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University in Boston.  In 2022-2023 he was a Fulbright Global Scholar in Israel (Tel Aviv University), Morocco (Université Mohammed V-Agdal, Rabat), and India (Jindal Global University).

Prof. Miles’s expertise on Niger goes back to the 1970s, when he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer and learned Hausa. He has been returning to West Africa periodically, most recently last summer when he was evacuated on a French military transport flight following Niger’s coup d’état of July 26, 2023.  He has participated in State Department seminars for four US ambassadors to Niger and has conducted Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership programming assessments for USAID in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and Mauritania. His consultations for other government agencies include the Department of Defense and Marine Corps, as well as the Niger military-Indiana National Guard state partnership program.   

Miles’s Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger (Cornell University Press, 1994) was cited in the Encyclopedia Brittanica Book of the Year for having made a "significant contribution to learning" in the History of Mankind field. His  ethnographic memoir, My African Horse Problem, was published in 2008 by University of Massachusetts Press. His latest solely authored book, Scars of Partition (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), examines contemporary legacies of French-British colonial partition in borderlands of the Global South. Journals publishing his Africanist research include African Studies Review, Africa Today, American Political Science Review, Journal of Modern African Studies, and ASMEA’s own Journal of the Middle East and Africa.

With Olivier Walther, Miles is contributing co-editor of African Border Disorders. Addressing Transnational Extremist Organizations (Routledge, 2018). 

Professor Miles’ newest article (“Niger’s Long Cycle of Poverty and Coups”) is appearing in the May issue of Current History.  He will gladly share PDF upon request.