Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Permissions
- 1 Introduction: Conflict & Security in Africa
- Section One Global Economies, State Collapse & Conflicts
- 2 Ironies of Post-Cold War Structural Adjustment in Sierra Leone
- 3 Timber Booms, State Busts: The Political Economy of Liberian Timber
- 4 Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta
- 5 Oil as the ‘Curse’ of Conflict in Africa: Peering through the Smoke & Mirrors
- 6 Defence Expenditures, Arms Procurement & Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Section Two Global Security Governance
- Section Three Cultures of Conflict & Insecurity
- Index
4 - Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta
from Section One - Global Economies, State Collapse & Conflicts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Permissions
- 1 Introduction: Conflict & Security in Africa
- Section One Global Economies, State Collapse & Conflicts
- 2 Ironies of Post-Cold War Structural Adjustment in Sierra Leone
- 3 Timber Booms, State Busts: The Political Economy of Liberian Timber
- 4 Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta
- 5 Oil as the ‘Curse’ of Conflict in Africa: Peering through the Smoke & Mirrors
- 6 Defence Expenditures, Arms Procurement & Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Section Two Global Security Governance
- Section Three Cultures of Conflict & Insecurity
- Index
Summary
[I]f low income and slow growth make a country prone to civil war … why [?]. … low income means poverty, and low growth means hopelessness. Young men, who are the recruits for rebel armies, come pretty cheap … Life is cheap and joining a rebel movement gives these young men a small chance of riches … [People in the Niger Delta] with a sense of grievance were no more likely to take part in violent protest than those who were not aggrieved. So what did make people more likely to engage in political violence? … well, being young, being uneducated, and being without dependants … [There] was no relationship between social amenities that a district possessed and its propensity to political violence. Instead the violence occurs in the districts with oil wells. … [A]lthough the risk of violence jumps sharply if there is at least one oil well, if there are two oil wells in the district it starts to go down. And with twenty oil wells it is lower still … To my mind this looks more like a protection racket than outrage provoked by environmental damage. In the absence of an oil well there is no scope for extortion and so no violent protest. With an oil well the protection racket is in business. But the more oil wells … the greater the incentive for an oil company to pay up and buy peace. … [O]ver time the situation has evolved. There is now a huge amount of money being directed by the Nigerian federal government to the Delta region and the oil companies are desperately paying protection money ... Within the region local politicians are fighting it out for control of all this money and violent protest has become an orchestrated part of the political rent seeking. Grievance has evolved, over the course of a decade, into greed (Collier 2007:30–31, emphasis added).
Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both (Anderson 2001:30).- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Conflict and Security in Africa , pp. 41 - 64Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013