Resource curse? governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

Abstract

What might it mean to say that resources, and resource-dependency, have consequences for the conduct of politics? This article explores the research conducted under the sign of resource politics associated with the work of Michael Ross, Paul Collier and others through a detailed examination of the political economy of oil in Nigeria. Much of the resource politics work suffers from either too strong a commodity-determinism or an insufficient attention to the ways in which specific resource characteristics matter analytically with respect to politics, rule and conflict. I approach the oil question in Nigeria by using the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose and by identifying three different forms of governable space and rule (the chieftainship, the ethnic minority, and the nation state) associated with oil-based capitalism. Governable spaces as forms of rule, identity and territoriality are not necessarily fully governable (they may be almost ungovernable and wracked by internal dissent and conflict) and may not be compatible among themselves, but rather work against one another in complex and contradictory ways.