LUCAS Seminar: Steven Pierce 'Murder and Identity: Culpability and the Politics of Shari'a Criminal Law in Late-Colonial Northern Nigeria'

Location: SSB Room 11.13

Dr. Steven Pierce, of the University of Manchester, studied political science as an undergraduate at Yale University and then received a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 2000. Before coming to Manchester in January 2006, Steven taught for five years in the history department at Tulane University. He is a specialist in sub-Saharan Africa, and my research centers in and around the city of Kano in northern Nigeria, focusing on issues of law, politics, colonialism, social theory, gender, and semiotics.

Steven's first book, Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2005) is a study of the colonial government of northern Nigeria, looking at the way in which rights in land became the primary idiom for governing small-scale farmers. His new research examines the politics of shari'a criminal law in colonial and postcolonial northern Nigeria. It concentrates on three periods in which Nigerian shari'a came to national and international attention: from 1900-1933, when flogging regularly caused international scandals; from 1948-1959, when capital cases of homicide proved a potent issue in nationalist politics and the shari'a courts lost criminal jurisdiction; and since 1999, when the courts regained jurisdiction. The book emerging from the research will examine the ways in which Islamic criminal law has been increasingly politicized, functioning across the century to define political communities and to determine the contours of state and communal violence.