Criminal Resistance?: The Politics of Kidnapping Oil Workers

Criminal Resistance? offers an ethnographic perspective on the politics of subversion by different actors in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Temitope Oriola opens with two incisive quotes from important protagonists of the Niger Delta struggle, Ken Saro Wiwa—the leader of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MSOOP), convicted and murdered by the Nigerian state in 1993 because of his environmental activism—and Asari Dokubo—leader of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF), an insurgency group that operates in the Niger Delta. The first quote highlights Ken Saro Wiwa’s prediction about an elusive peace in the Delta, while the quote by Dokubo shows how insurgents decided to shelve the peaceful protest of Wiwa for an armed uprising. The quote is quickly followed by an account of how four foreign oil workers were kidnapped in an attack on a Shell offshore oil facility in 2006 by Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta People (MEND). The book focuses on ‘‘kidnappings that are putatively connected to the struggle for emancipating the Niger Delta’’ (p. 5), intending to ascertain whether kidnapping should be seen as a form of protest against the state and oil corporations or as a criminal enterprise. Insurgents tie their oppression to a lack of benefits from the exploitation of oil, their natural resource. Using this knowledge, Oriola suggests that kidnapping offered MEND a form of political expression that frames the Niger Delta struggle as a struggle for the emancipation of the entire region. Oriola categorized actors involved in the Niger Delta insurgency into ‘‘firstand second-order casts’’ (p. 25). The firstorder cast is constituted by the Niger Delta communities, interventionist groups such as NGOs, oil workers, transnational oil corporations, the Nigerian state and its security agencies, and insurgents. The second-order cast is made up of Nigerian society, insurance companies/brokers such as Lloyd’s of London, researchers, academics, global security information companies, the media, and private military corporations. It is the intertwining interactions among these orders that make the phenomenon of kidnapping oil workers in the Niger Delta a very complex enterprise. To better understand this complexity, Oriola suggests that we incorporate insurgents such as MEND, who link themselves to wider social movements in the Delta region and these movements’ demands, into our understanding of the functionality of social movements. Kidnapping is seen as ‘‘a spectacular array of performances within an ambience of contentious politics manufactured by the intricacies of the political economy of the Nigerian rentier petro-state’’ (p. 24). Thus, in the performance of the act of kidnappings, oil workers are seen by the insurgents as a ‘‘foreign other’’ whose interests align with the old colonial order during the colonization (or rather, exploitation) of Nigeria. When oil workers are kidnapped, insurgents and other actors see the process as a form of ‘‘reverse exploitation’’ (p. 77), where the exploiters are being made to pay for their ‘‘sin.’’ One major characteristic of the insurgency in the Delta, Oriola argues, is the fluidity in their membership. This fluidity ‘‘is not necessarily a quality of MEND’’ (p. 94), but a feature that reverberates among insurgents in the entire region. Since membership is fluid, many insurgents oftentimes cooperate and collaborate in the prosecution of kidnappings as a strategy for the emancipation of the Delta. Many see their participation in the established groups as a form of apprenticeship from which, after a period, they graduate to forming their own group while retaining the capacity to continue to collaborate and cooperate with their old group. This capacity, Reviews 391