ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the basis and processes by which such discourses arise or why and how the transformational impacts of development on humans and non-humans come to meet with resistance. It argues that since, in conventional development, resource exports traditionally provide the fastest means to growth for poor countries, development should be conceived as oil extraction. Proceeding from the premise that development is inherently conflictual, it observes that the best approach to such development is not as impersonal phenomenon or structure but as a process involving identifiable actors and associations among people and places across spatial scales. The history of the nexus between capital and the Niger Delta has been one of alteration and production of the socio-physical topography of the region. Erik Swyngedouw remarks on the general conflictual nature of the process of landscape transformation when he posits that the resultant socio-physical landscape instantiates 'historical-geographical struggles and social power geometries'.
