The Rule of Oil: Petro-Politics and the Anatomy of an Insurgency

Michael Watts

Journal of African Development, 2009, vol. 11, issue 2, 27-56

Abstract: Thomas Friedmann’s "First Law of Petro-Politics" expresses the idea that political freedoms diminish in oil-producing states in direct proportion to increases in the price of oil; there is a whole petro-lexicon purporting to capture the dilemma of oil: of the “paradox of plenty," the "resource curse," "resource wars," Dutch Disease and so on. I wish to take on three aspects of this rather diverse and variegated body of work, as a way of opening up a larger argument about how to understand the dynamics of oil-states, and specifically the relations between oil, politics and forms of rule. The first-I shall call "rebellion as crime"-cpeaks to the work of Paul Collier and his World Bank colleagues who address the economics of civil war, and offer an argument that oil offers a ground on which rebels can finance a self-interested and criminal movement against the state through the looting of oil resources. The second-I shall call ‘the territoriality claim’-is associated with Philippe Le Billon’s (2005) important research, which turns on the fact that oil has a specific character and a territoriality, which shapes particular sorts of political outcomes (coups or successions for example). And the third-'the predation claim'-examines the idea that the violence of oil production-an oil insurgency or an oil rebellion-is associated with the 'lootability' of oil. In exploring (and departing from) these ideas I want to provide a rather different try and shed some light on Achille Mbembe's (2001) question, namely: why is oil so frequently the epicenter of violence?

Keywords: oil; petroluem; politics; insurgency; rebellion; Africa; natural resources; resource wars; Nigeria; Niger Delta (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.afeawpapers.org/RePEc/afe/afe-journl/wp ... AD_fallvol11_ch2.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:afe:journl:v:11:y:2009:i:2:p:27-56

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of African Development from African Finance and Economic Association (AFEA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Nsiah ().