Oil and conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta region: Between the barrel and the trigger

Abstract

Abundant oil endowment in Africa has largely been associated with high levels of violence and corruption based on the political economy of an oil curse. This article intervenes in the renewed debate sparked by recent oil finds across Africa between those who see oil as a resource for development and others that see oil endowment as presaging the curse of oil—authoritarianism, conflict, corruption in new oil states with dire prospects of replicating the same negative outcomes associated with older oil-endowed African states. It interrogates the “African oil curse” perspective, particularly the way it casts a spell of inevitability, often simplifying a more complex causal linkage between oil endowment and violent conflict and foreclosing the possibility of future change or non-violent developmental outcomes in oil-rich African countries. Drawing on the case of oil-related conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta region, the article critically examines the causes of one of Africa's complex oil ‘wars’, and comes up with an alternative perspective to the oil curse as the sole explanatory framework for violent conflict in petro-states.