The study of post-independence defense links between new West African governments and former metropoles is a challenging task. The main problem lies in the source base. Even recent studies that attempt an ambitious enquiry in African archives, such as Riina Turtio's analysis of the creation of armies as social history (in State-Building and National Militaries in Postcolonial West Africa: Decolonizing the Means of Coercion), have ended up with relatively few local sources. Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire are among the most important new nation-states in the region, but access to Ivorian diplomatic correspondence is complicated at best, and the difficulties of finding top-level Nigerian governmental files from the 1960s have been discussed at length by Samuel Daly in his A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War. As a result, historians still have to rely on European archives discussing postcolonial contexts, forcing them...

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