Since the 1990s, commercial sites across Asia and the Middle East have seen an uptick in visits from Nigerian importers, tens of thousands of whom are now passing through every year. In this context, in which circulatory South-South migration has intensified and transnational commercial links have strengthened, Nigerian mass commercial markets have remained strikingly resistant to monopolies. This is largely shaped by traders' associations, which defend against corporate and non-Black foreign actors. This article situates these defensive market practices in longer histories of decolonial "indigenization" efforts, postcolonial anxieties of the petrostate economy, and ethnoregional mobilizations undertaken by Igbo people in Nigeria's post-civil war era. Transnational importers mobilize a distinct politics of "emplacement" in Nigeria, where market actors explicitly attempt to create and control the conditions of exchange. They do so by making political claims to profit and by using the rhetoric of citizenship. [capitalism, emplacement, citizenship, transnational

In the context of shifting global geographies of labor and political volatility, Nigerian migrant associations play a significant role in organizing diasporic life. Yet, far from being a culturally static feature, Igbo Nigerian associations emerge through diasporic agitations, or dynamic mobilizations around particular events, crises, and projects that deliberately engage the postcolonial state. Lu first reconsiders the significance of 1970s post-civil war reconstruction in southeastern Nigeria before tracing subsequent transformations in flexible diasporic organizations within Global South locations such as China and Dubai. These agile and multi-scalar diasporic mobilizations enable their members to negotiate the nexus of postcolonial politics and transnational capitalism.

Samuel Fury Childs Daly’s A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War focuses on the remarkable legal inner workings of the postcolonial African secessionist state of Biafra (1967-70). Drawing from extensive and original archival research, ranging from official archives to previously abandoned local court backrooms, interviews, and private collections, Daly considers the complex and troubled phenomenon of criminality during and after the Nigerian Civil War by tracing how Biafran law itself morphed and expanded under war conditions to incorporate the extraordinary. Law was not practiced as simply an enforcement of abstract rules but rather a mediating force amongst desperate citizens during brutal times; Biafran judges, lawyers, soldiers, and civilians remained consistently committed to the legal system and state-building despite dire and violent war conditions. Daly traces the production of criminality as a legal category, social problem, and public anxiety through the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath, ultimately situating Nigeria’s contemporary international reputation for fraud and violent crime in the context of being a postwar society.

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