Conflict over oil and natural resources

Oil exploration and production activities are directly linked to global climate change (GCC) and we cannot overlook how oil-producing communities are affected by the presence of oil companies. Paying attention to these sites enable us to understand the intricacies of the stage where oil companies act out their neoliberal scripts that directly impact GCC. Through its focus on an oil producing community in Southeastern Turkey, this chapter shifts the attention from meta-narratives to the narratives of micro-sites by moving beyond the local/global binary, thereby addressing an important gap in current literature and articulating the intimate human experience linked to GCC. I seek to detangle some of these narratives by problematizing the local/global binary through the global intimate (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006), taking an intersectional approach (Collins, 1998), and using a postcolonial feminist theoretical lens (Sharp, 2003).
The comprehensive analysis provided in this chapter through in-field experiences and the oil discourse suggest that GCC is co-produced and co-sustained by transnational companies and coerced local communities. Any action to transition out of the catastrophes of GCC will have to address the local complexities and inequalities, as the case of Şelmo shows their multifaceted entanglement.

The Niger Delta conflict, for many years, was blamed on myriad forces, including greed, economic exploitation, pollution and ecological damage, resource appropriation and distribution disputes, ethno-religious antagonisms, poverty, unemployment, large-scale infrastructural deficits, corruption, militarization of oil producing communities and election processes, sociopolitical marginalization, cultism, and weapons proliferation. While all of these issues are important, they are not nearly as important as the deliberate roles played by high-level social, economic, and political interests who activated violence as a means to secure economic advantage from the delta’s oil industry. This study shines the light on this small, exclusive, and very powerful group whose actions triggered off the violence and yet are at the center of efforts to institute peace including the current disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) program. I argue that unless the contributions of these powerful interests are carefully teased out and the structures they have built to advantage themselves from the conflict are dismantled, peace will remain elusive in the Niger Delta.