ABSTRACT
In the wake of an amnesty program that mitigated insurgency in the Niger Delta, new forms of contestation have emerged to challenge the state over its governance of the region’s huge oil resources. This essay examines artisanal oil refining in the Bodo community in Ogoniland, where youth operate a makeshift oil refinery. The essay tells the story of how oil infrastructures have become contested sites. Close analysis of the artisanal refining process makes it difficult to dismiss these activities as forms of sabotage organized by brigands and bandits. Instead, the politics of crude oil governance in Nigeria reveal complex, integrated, and innovative forms of hybridized governance that are reshaping community relationships and state and corporate extractive structures.
