The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea by Hannah Appel

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea by Hannah Appel Gisa Weszkalnys Hannah Appel. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 332 pp. There is a telling moment about two-thirds of the way through Appel’s monograph (200). In a reversal of roles, fostered by the intimacy of long-term fieldwork, the ethnographer becomes the (reluctant) informant. “[I]s this normal?” Appel’s friends demand to know at the end of an informal get-together during which they shared experiences of exploitation and racialized discrimination in Equatorial Guinea’s oil industry. “Does this happen in other places?” Appel’s discomfort is palpable as she scrambles for a truthful response. Are low salaries, the lack of job security, insurance, and other benefits unique to this country? How about neighboring oil producers such as Nigeria or Angola? Or is Equatorial Guinea’s story typical of an analytical “anywhere,” a story of exclusion and dispossession that applies to late liberal capitalism, generally, across the uneven geographies of the postcolonial world? The Licit Life of Capitalism sheds light on the operations of the international oil industry in Equatorial Guinea, in particular, prominent US corporations whose aim it is to extract oil for the largest profit possible while leaving an impression of benevolence, legality, and non-interference in sovereign matters. The result is deplorable. Poverty remains entrenched in the small state whose GDP per capita is among Africa’s highest. According to local activists and opposition members, since the discovery of hydrocarbons in the mid-1990s, oil companies have helped prop up a sinking authoritarian regime led by President Obiang Nguema without however assuming sociopolitical membership in the country (147). (The intriguing counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of [End Page 551] oil is unfortunately not pursued here.) This is not simply an expression of a common resource curse, as Appel is careful to point out. Rather, concepts such as the curse have become part of a local repertoire readily deployed by Appel’s corporate interlocutors who keenly point to corrupt behavior among the Equatoguinean rank and file but seemingly have no qualms doing business with them. How is this possible? How can a country like Equatorial Guinea at once appear so exceptional, with its failings openly denounced, and be “just another oil exporting place” (21)? This is the conundrum that The Licit Life of Capitalism aims to solve. Doing so, it builds on feminist approaches and a black radical tradition in political economy to reveal the epistemological grounding and far-reaching implications of key technical infrastructures and forms of economic expertise, which together give Equatorial Guinea’s economy an acceptable and comparable shape. Each of the book’s six chapters explores one of these building blocks of liberal capitalism, from the Offshore to the Enclave, the Contract, the Subcontract, the Economy, and the Political. Together, they generate a kind of dream space in which, as Tim Mitchell has argued, widespread forms of “leakage, network, energy, control, violence, and irrationality” (2002:300) are ignored. In this view, departing from post-Callonian economic sociology, economics does not so much enact its worlds than allow capitalism to press on under a “licit” veneer. This is a story, not about how capitalism fails, but about how it works regardless of its failures. Though focused on the hydrocarbon industry, this book is about much more than oil. Its incisive contribution is to show that the circumstances observed in Equatorial Guinea reveal something about the project of capitalism at large. Appel rejects both a reductive understanding that sees oil primarily in terms of petro-dollars flooding local economies and resource-deterministic approaches that hinge on the material properties of specific substances. Instead, she highlights the extensive web of institutional and infrastructural relations centered on transnational oil firms busy managing their uncomfortable entanglement in resource-rich locales. Rather than kinship diagrams of elite families or crony networks, Appel deploys complex organigrams and graphics to render visible the “corporate archipelago” with its stupefying capacity to sidestep financial and ethical accountability. Here the financial and the industrial offshore merge in a spatialized abdication of responsibility...