Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria [Hardcover]

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.

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Winner, Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology

Omolade Adunbi is Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Faculty Associate for Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan.

Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria offers a thoughtful new explanation for Nigeria's oil rebellions that will withstand scholarly scrutiny, and strip governments, corporations, and even many NGOs of their operative assumptions about the Niger Delta.

This book is well written and delivers what it promises to do at the outset. It details appreciably the different claims to Nigerian oil wealth and the consequences that follow when birthright claims go unmet. The growth in oil revenue, and the perception or reality that it has not been shared fairly, have no doubt been the major reasons for power contestation in Nigeria.

This ambitious book employs an anthropological approach to dissecting and understanding relationships among the Nigerian state, multinational corporations, natural resourcel³R