ABSTRACT

The nexus between natural resources, violent conflict, and sustainable development in the Niger Delta, which is the theme of the book, has gained currency in academic and policy circles in the past two decades. Scholars and practitioners have focused their searchlights on the impact of natural resources on human security and development. Elementary international politics conceptions of natural resource endowments as one of the sources of national power and effective instrument of foreign policy has been overtaken by perspectives with less sanguine views of the potential and actual contributions of natural resources to state building and human development. This demonization of natural resources is evidenced by the proliferation of epithets for resources both in the generic and specific senses. Wittingly or unwittingly, the social science and related policy lexicon is now awash with terms such as “resource wars,” “resource curse,” “blood oil,” “conflict diamonds,” ad nauseam. There is a strong suggestion in an influential strand of the literature on the political economy of contemporary conflicts that resources necessarily beget violent conflicts. The chapters in this book transcend this simplistic, deterministic, and ahistorical narrative. The underpinning argument of all the chapters is that Niger Delta conflicts derive from mal-exploitation and mismanagement of natural and human resource endowments rather than the resources qua resources. In fact, Obi (Chapter 2) poignantly captures the meat of our argument as follows:

It should be emphasized that the issue of whether oil becomes a curse or blessing depends on the activities of several actors: local, national and transnational, including the people, who ultimately determine what oil will represent for better or for worse. We cannot conceive of oil as a curse or a blessing outside of those forces that control it, and thereby shape the structure of global economic and political power.