ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the politics of oil in Africa. It provides the historical background of the oil industry and surveys the momentous transformation since the discovery in West-Central Africa of major ultra-deepwater oil reserves in the mid-1990s. The chapter outlines the relationship between the major players in the political economy of oil, including the international oil companies, the oil-producing states, and the industrial importers of oil in the West and, more recently, in Asia. The political economy of oil, and its character, have been structured: the oil-producing state itself, in the form of its governing elite; the foreign oil companies; and the oil-importing states in the industrial world, which until the 1990s essentially meant the West. The chapter concludes that the oil-and-politics nexus is likely to exacerbate conflict and produce non-developmental outcomes in the new oil states, with existing patterns of domestic and international relations prevalent in the established producers being replicated.
