Dr Akali omeni
Senior Lecturer

Dr omeni’s research, with King’s College London and the Defence Academy of the UK (JSCSC, Shrivenham) was on counter-insurgency operations by the Nigerian Army against Boko Haram. He is interested in the roles of doctrine, culture and historical experience in determining the nature of military operations. He expanded on that research area to include policing and the Nigeria Police Force, which is the focus of his third book, Policing and Politics in Nigeria, published by Lynne Rienner and available now.

More broadly, his interests are in small war theory and how it explains, or fails to explain, historical and contemporary instances of civil wars and insurgency in Africa since the pre-colonial era. This underpins the compilation of case studies and evidence-based illustrative stories in his fourth book, Rebel, under contract with Oxford University Press.

Other areas of interest include Martial Race theory and ethnic armies, the emergence and roles of the colonial military and police in Nigeria, and Nigerian military history from the colonial era, through the Civil War of Nigeria (1967-1970) to the military interregnum that lasted mostly between 1966 and 1999. The collective themes feature in his fifth book also under contract with Oxford University Press, Picking Sides: Race, Ethnicity and Recruitment in the Colonial Nigerian Army. 

Finally, he hopes that his research on the Nigerian military is crystallized in a sixth work-in-progress to be pitched as the most comprehensive single volume on Nigeria’s tri-services: the Army, Air Force and Navy.