Nigerian Civil War
Known by this time for his work in the fields of pedagogy and development studies, Curle was consulted by governments and charities, and provided mediation in the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70 as part of a group of three Quakers alongside John Volkmar and Walter Martin. Prior to becoming a mediator in Nigeria Curle had been involved in establishing a model school in Ayetoro, Nigeria. On their initial trip in 1967, their intention was to listen to the parties in conflict and to aid them through conciliation or relief. Arriving before the war began, Curle, Martin and Volkmar met with C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, Hamzat Ahmadu and Okoi Arikpo, and remained hopeful that peace could be maintained; a week after the team left, however, Ojukwu declared the secession of the Republic of Biafra. In early 1968 Curle and Volkmar hosted initial informal talks and met with Yakubu Gowon.
In March 1967 Curle and Martin visited Biafra, where they met with Louis Mbanefo and again with Ojukwu and Gowon. When the Commonwealth Secretariat arranged for public talks to be held in Kampala, Uganda, in May, Curle and his wife Anne were selected to attend as a Quaker delegation. The Curles' role in the Kampala talks involved mediating between Commonwealth Secretary-General Arnold Smith and the Biafrans and proposing possible terms of settlement. In Making Peace Adam described his and Anne's role as involving "persuasion, clarification, message carrying, listening, defusing, honest brokering, encouraging, and liaison with the Commonwealth Secretariat". The Curles then returned to Nigeria, where Adam met again with Gowon. In August 1967 Curle and Volkmar attended the continuing negotiations in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. When Gowon announced a "final push" against Biafra, the Quakers turned their attention to relief operations.
Curle, Volkmar and Martin embarked on another series of trips in September and October 1968. In the continuing impasse, the proposal made by Hamani Diori, the president of Niger, for a Quaker-sponsored meeting was taken up. Ojukwu's representatives expressed interest in Diori's proposal, and Curle discussed the proposal with Smith and a representative of the British government. The stalemate that continued through 1969, however, led the Quakers to once again turn their attention to providing relief. In October 1969, Curle met again with Gowon alongside Volkmar and Kale Williams. In London, Curle and Williams met with Smith and a Biafran representative to discuss issues including the possibility of the Commonwealth Secretariat again becoming involved in negotiations. In January 1970, however, the war ended with the Biafrans' surrender. Curle and Volkmar rejoined Williams on Nigeria days after the surrender, in order to observe the post-war climate and offer conciliation.
C. H. Mike Yarrow, in his study of Quaker reconciliation efforts, argues that the personal qualities and personalities of the Quaker contingent played a pivotal role in their success in building connections with Nigerian and Biafran leaders, though from mid-1968 Yarrow argues the Quaker organisation and the faith it engendered came to play a similar role. While Yarrow argues their listening process was a success, he describes their effectiveness at changing the parties' perceptions of one another in more ambivalent terms. In concluding, Yarrow argued that while the negotiated peace the Quakers sought was not achieved, Yarrow argues that "the peace terms resulting after the military solution were imbued with the spirit of conciliation."
Curle's experiences of the Indo–Pakistani and Nigerian conflicts contributed to his interest in the causes of war and informed his research on the relationships between violence, social transformation, and the goals of development. At Harvard he responded to the 1968 student protests and the emergence of the New Left by teaching history to schoolchildren in a working-class neighbourhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was struck by similarities to the "underdeveloped world".
