Omolade Adunbi investigates the myths behind competing claims to oil wealth in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Looking at ownership of natural resources, oil extraction practices, government control over oil resources, and discourse about oil, Adunbi shows how symbolic claims have created an "oil citizenship." He explores the ways NGOs, militant groups, and community organizers invoke an ancestral promise to defend land disputes, justify disruptive actions, or organize against oil corporations. Policies to control the abundant resources have increased contestations over wealth, transformed the relationship of people to their environment, and produced unique forms of power, governance, and belonging.
How do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from them economically, they have yielded dramatically the same environmental outcome for communities around them that included pollution with precarious effects on the health of the populations in the regions, and displacement of population from their livelihood practices.
Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producing country. Oil generates enormous wealth but also extensive and devastating conflict in the country. High Stakes and Stakeholders critically explores the oil conflict in Nigeria, its evolution, dynamics and most significantly, the interplay and consequences of high stake politics for the reproduction and persistence of the conflict. It presents a conceptual anatomy of state-oil industry-society relations and demonstrates how the embedded material interests and accumulation patterns of different stakeholders underlie, shape and complicate both the oil conflict and security. In addition, the book provides key insights into comparable conflicts elsewhere in the global south, developing a logical framework for resolving the oil conflict in Nigeria and for reforming the security sector. This book is valuable reading material for courses in international political economy, social ecology, development studies, African politics, conflict and security studies, and environmental law and management. It will also be of interest to policy practitioners, civil societies and the oil industry.
The recent escalation in the violent conflict in the Niger Delta has brought the region to the forefront of international energy and security concerns. This book analyses the causes, dynamics and politics underpinning oil-related violence in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. It focuses on the drivers of the conflict, as well as the ways the crises spawned by the political economy of oil and contradictions within Nigeria's ethnic politics have contributed to the morphing of initially poorly coordinated, largely non-violent protests into a pan-Delta insurgency. Approaching the issue from a number of perspectives, the book offers the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis available of the varied dimensions of the conflict. Combining empirically-based and analytic chapters, it attempts to explain the causes of the escalation in violence, the various actors, levels and dynamics involved, and the policy challenges faced with regard to conflict management/resolution and the options for peace. It also examines the role of oil as a commodity of global strategic significance, addressing the relationship between oil, energy security and development in the Niger Delta.
One of the major policy challenges for the US following the events of September 11 2001 and their aftermaths has been how to reduce the country's dependence on oil from the Middle East. There have been suggestions of policy shifts in Washington in which Africa's share of US oil imports will rise dramatically over the next few years. Nigeria, one of the world's largest producers of crude oil, is believed to have more than 30 billion barrels of crude oil reserves, mostly in the Niger Delta areas. Despite this huge reserve however, crude supplies from the country remains at best erratic largely because of conflicts, violence and the rise of ethnic militias in the oil-producing areas of the country. The book explores the causes, sources and dynamics of the conflicts between the oil-bearing communities and oil companies in Nigeria. Taking its point of departure from the social interaction paradigm, it argues that the conflicts in the Niger Delta are embedded in the triangular relationship between the government, the oil companies and the host communities. ________ Austin Onuoha, studied History at the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, Nigeria and did graduate studies in Conflict Transformations at the Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. He has worked on issues of human rights and conflict resolution in, and around the Niger Delta of Nigeria for over 10 years, including as the Executive Secretary/Head of Conflict Resolution at the Human Rights Commission, Abakaliki, Nigeria. He was also a consultant to the Centre for Social and Corporate Responsibility (CSCR) based in Nigeria's oil capital, Port Harcourt. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and USA.
