Small Soldiers? Children in colonial insurgencies and counterinsurgency tactics, 1945-60

Chair: Dr Mark Condos, Lecturer, War Studies Department

Speaker: Dr Stacey Hynd, Senior Lecturer, University of Exeter

Bio

Dr Hynd is Co-Director of the Centre for Imperial and Global History and a member of the Centre for War, State and Society. Her primary research interests are in conflict and humanitarianism in Africa and she is working on a history of child soldiering that traces historical patterns in the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict across Africa, and also analyzes the evolution of humanitarian campaigning and transnational advocacy against children's involvement in conflict in 1970s to the present. She is interested more widely in African gender histories, histories of youth and childhood, violence and warfare in Africa, anti-landmine campaigning, and in global histories of humanitarianism and human rights. Other research interests are in the history of law, violence and punishment in Africa, particularly on the death penalty in British colonial Africa.Dr Hynd teaches on African twentieth century political and socio-cultural histories, civil wars, and child solidering.

Dr Hynd grew up in Scotland, Bulgaria, Russia and Tanzania. She read for a BA in Modern History at the University of Oxford, before going on to complete an MSt in Imperial and Commonwealth History at the same institution in 2003, where she wrote her dissertation on the Tanganyikan penal system, c.1920-45. After a year spent living in Egypt and Jamaica, she returned to Oxford to complete her DPhil in Modern History at St Cross College in 2008, where she was an AHRC Doctoral Scholarship holder and Beit Research Scholar. Her doctorate was written on the subject of capital punishment in British colonial Africa. She spent a year lecturing in African and World History at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Fellow of Wolfson College, before arriving at Exeter in September 2008.

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Next year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Department of War Studies by Sir Michael Howard, and provides an important opportunity to both reflect and build upon his remarkable achievements and legacy. Sir Michael Howard’s greatest contribution to the history of war was his insistence on moving beyond the battlefield in order to examine the wider political and social contexts in which wars were fought. He also wrote about the legal, moral, and philosophical implications of war, and throughout his distinguished career sought to develop new approaches to understanding the impact of war on society.