ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a case for the visibility and validation of Africa's contribution to the reshaping of international relations, by focusing on the role of non-state, trans-territorialized actors in Nigeria's Niger Delta. It locates the Niger Delta in the dialectics of globalized oil production. The chapter explores the centrality of the Niger Delta to the energy security of the world's emerging and established powers and the ways local resistance connect with transnational networks. The Nigerian state has attempted to play the role of the main actor both in relation to the oil companies and in suppressing what it considered an attack by local actors on legitimate authority. Globalization has been defined variously as 'a multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multi-form, and multicausal process'. However, in its current form(s) it can be understood in the context of growing trans-global 'meshing' and inter-dependence of the various locales and levels of a global 'whole', which is also 'present' in its various scales and spaces.
