The Political Ecology of Oil and Gas in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea: State, Petroleum, and Conflict in Nigeria
Publisher: The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy
Author(s): Michael Watts
Date: 2016
Topics: Extractive Resources, Governance
Countries: Nigeria
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the dynamics of the largest oil producer in the Gulf of Guinea (Nigeria), and to offer a political–ecological analysis of the recent history of an archetypical petro-state. Nigeria is a poster-child of the so-called resource curse, a ‘fragile and conflicted state’ condemned to embark upon a ‘postconflict transition’. Exclusionary political settlements and extractive institutions of the sort found in Nigeria are associated with high levels of violence and political conflict. However, the inventory of institutional failures of ‘oil development’ must not blind us to the fact that the combination of oil and nation-building has produced a durable and expanded federal system, a democracy of sorts (albeit retaining an authoritarian and often violent cast) and important forms of institution building. I argue that the state has been informalized for particular purposes, vested with certain capabilities and made ‘functional’ while at the same time generating considerable civic and political violence including an insurgency and endemic conflict in the oil-producing Niger Delta region. Oil and its political logics are central to this complex and contradictory picture of uneven state capabilities coupled with spatial fragmentation and conflict.