Niels Boender began a AHRC Collaborative Doctoral War project entitled “Mau Mau’s Unquiet Ghosts: Coercive Reconciliation and local politics in Central Kenya, 1956-1969” in October 2020.
A partnership between IWM and the University of Warwick, the project investigates the interactions between colonial counterinsurgency and post-colonial politics in the wake of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. It pays particular attention to dynamics of reconciliation and violence which played out in the aftermath of Britain's colonial emergency, and the lived experiences of participants therein.
To this end Niels has conducted extensive research in the so-called Migrated Archive, files illegally removed from colonies in the run-up to decolonisation. Within Kenya he has conducted significant archival research, and a number of interviews with survivors of Britain's brutal counterinsurgency. Beyond his thesis, he has been working in the IWM's Cold War curatorial team to tabulate the museum's current holdings on the Kenyan conflict, and think of strategies to improve public dissemination.