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1 Environment and conflict
Introduction
What drives conflict between local communities, the State and multinational corporations over the environment? Two competing approaches to the problem begin from first principles, delineating how we should understand the environment. Based on such definition, surrogates explain why conflict emerges over the environment without bothering whether their definition is commonly shared by both communities and capitalists. Largely, the definition of the environment on offer is rooted in a modernist scientific worldview, which dispenses with other worldviews. Yet, the delegitimated worldviews remain valid or coherent to local communities. This book focuses on the incommensurability between âenvironmentâ as seen by capital and communities and its role in the emergence of political conflicts in resource-rich domains.
It is not clear in many accounts what environment means. Conventional understanding of environment, foregrounded in a âtechnological logicâ, designates the latter as a resource for human use and background against which social actions are enacted.1 Champions of this view often include the State, multinational corporations in the extractive sector, and some scholars and journalists. The other vision comprehends environment, beyond its resource value, as a meaningful place, the physical extension of community, and the abode of ghosts, spirits and deities. The worldview rests on a âmoral orderâ in which environment is not separate from social actors; it is the meeting place of deities, ancestors, human beings and other living and non-living things.2
The two logics are inherently conflictual, assuming overt and deadly dimension, wherever industrial capital meets with land-dependent grassroots communities. Everywhere, the story is the same; from the Bergama Movement (Turkey), Naxalite Movement, and Narmada Bachao Andolan Movement (India), the Zapatistas (Mexico), and the Mapuche (Chile), to various grassroots movements in the Niger Delta. The confrontation between the two logics has generated wicked problems for local livelihoods, untold human misery and expropriation. Yet, many scholars continue to use the concepts of âenvironmentâ and âconflictâ without staking out in clear terms what they mean.
The conventional approach shapes scholarship dedicated to the nexus between environment and conflict. Surrogates argue that competition between groups over scarce environmental resources within the context of depleting resources automatically generates violent conflict. Examples such as the Darfur in Sudan and Lake Chad in Northeast Nigeria have been cited to exemplify how scarcity of environmental resources shapes the onset and protraction of violent conflicts in many domains worldwide. A variant of the resource-scarcity school is the resource abundance approach, which suggests that resource abundance does also precipitate violent conflict. The rebel movement, Revolutionary United Front (RUF), is cited as an example of an armed actor that emerged in the context of diamond-abundant Sierra Leone. Greed compelled the RUFâs efforts to seize and loot the diamond resource base.
The political economy literature, which focuses more on explaining the socioeconomic causes of environment-related conflicts, has equally been shaped by the conventional understanding of environments. For instance, some argue that the conflicts in the Niger Delta are simply results of the arm-twisting strategy of conflict entrepreneurs who seek cooptation into the Stateâs distributive or patronage network (Reno 2002, 2005; Collier 2001, 2002; Omeje 2006). Others suggest otherwise, arguing that collective mobilisations against oil development and the State reflect a legitimate demand by ethnic minorities for a wholesome environment and secured livelihoods (Obi 2006).
There is, therefore, a marked polarisation within the literature on how best to understand the conflicts vis-Ă -vis the environment. Like the resource-scarcity and resource-abundant paradigms, the twin political economy approaches to the Niger Delta conflicts limit their discourse of environment to the latterâs material and economic value. Inevitably, they simplify the conflicts as strategic attempts by conflict entrepreneurs to capture the material and economic values of environmental resources. Both approaches disable any capacity to understand the environment as more than physical resource. Draped in the garb of the rational actor model, these explanations leave little room for moral motivation as an explanatory factor in conflict.
A view of the environment as synonymous with the material and economic alone represents a Western imaginary. Whitt and Slack emphasise that an âenvironment particularises or contextualises a community, situating it within and bonding it to both the natural world and the larger âcontainingâ societyâ As a result, communities are bounded by and interpenetrated by given environments. Communities transform and partially construct the environment through social practices and discourses. Simultaneously, communities are in turn transformed and partially constructed by the environment. In that sense, environment is âthe embodiment, or material extension of communitiesâ. Communities and their âconstitutive environments are inseparable; they are the unit of development and change. All development is, for better or worse, co-development of communities and environmentsâ (1994: 21â2).
The implication of the argument, which has largely been neglected in the social sciences, is the question of how environmental transformations have shaped societal transformation. The question is placed in proper perspective in the environmental humanities where the quest is to understand how human society shapes the environment, and how the latter, in turn, shapes the human environment, and with what consequences. If environment and society are understood as inseparable, how does environmental transformation imposed by translocal capital or external actors affect the nature and behaviour of the local community? The human dimension of environmental change has focused mainly on the poverty and health impacts. Less attention has been given to how environmental change is implicated in the sudden transformation of a quiescent community into a politically conscious and disruptive one. This book is interested in exploring the environmental history of conflict and collective action in Ogoniland.
What is conflict?
Essentialist conceptualisation of conflict over the environment is a symptom of a deeper malaise, the tendency to reduce the State merely to a political, economic and physical organisation. As a result, instances of the Stateâs projection of symbolic power are obscured. Symbolic power largely facilitates the exercise of political, economic and physical power. The State is a cultural or symbolic organisation (Taylor 1994; Loveman 2005). Failure to grasp the symbolic dimension of the State invariably leads to failure to perceive the symbolic in the challenge that is posed to the State. In consequence, many writers engage in reductionism when they limit oppositional challenge against the State to the level of the economic, political and physical. They define both the State and its challenge aculturally. Contrary to the trend in the larger part of the literature on the Niger Delta conflicts, the author is of the view that a stipulation of what is meant by âconflictâ is appropriate. There is the risk of essentialising reality in the failure to define conflict. Often, there is a tendency to view conflict in the region either as the outcome of durable structural contradictions or structural crisis, or provincial or self-oriented desire of poor marginalised minorities. From the former view, the conflict is seen as an effect of the environmental and socioeconomic crisis, while in the latter the conflict is an expression of shared interests within a common structural condition. In effect, conflict is portrayed as a feature of the social system, or a result of individual beliefs or reaction to external conditions. Structural, or unwelcome conditions, however, do not invariably breed conflict.
For our purpose, therefore, a conflict exists where there is a clear delineation of the identity of the actor, and a definition of the opponent, who are organised and oriented according to their own set of goals and values, and the stakes over which they fight (Touraine 1985). It is a relationship between two or more opposed actors âfighting for the same resources, to which both give valueâ (Melucci 1985: 794). Actors in conflict reveal the stakes in conflict. They do not simply fight for material provincial goals. Their goal is not merely to be included in the status quo. They desire to change peopleâs lives in the belief that the individualâs life can be changed in the present while pursuing more general changes in the society. Thus, actors in conflict fight for symbolic or cultural stakes; âfor a different meaning and orientation of social actionâ (Melucci 1985: 797).
There are different types of social conflict, including collective efforts to advance group interest in a competitive situation, change the rules of the game for group benefit, and control of the main cultural patterns, that is who defines the truth, what constitutes morality and how people relate with the environment. Moreover, society is composed of different sub-systems to which the collective actor is oriented. A collective actor functions simultaneously within several organisational systems. In consequence, her/his activities connect with a whole range of objectives, problems and actors (Touraine 1981). Failure to grasp the complexity of the collective actor and the arena in which it operates has led some to deny, unwittingly, dimensions of a conflict that involve control of the âmain cultural patternâ, and to reduce all conflicts to the presence of grievances, mundane aspirations, and political claims.
When does conflict emerge in the form of collective mobilisation? Is it during a time of crisis or structural dislocation? A view of collective action in the Niger Delta as reaction against structural disintegration or crisis hides the conflict dimension of the collective actor. Actors are deprived the meanings of their action (see Melucci 1985). Similarly, the suggestion that conflict is the expression of shared interests or beliefs does not clarify how interests and beliefs are produced in the context of constraints. By limiting collective action to the political level, we hide their cultural dimension. Social conflicts are not simply political; they are cultural as well given that they shape the systemâs cultural production. Collective action is not simply about inclusion, it âchallenges the logic governing production and appropriation of social resourcesâ (Melucci 1985: 798).
Largely, the literature on the conflict has underlined the causative role of environmental crisis, economic crisis, and political instability. What has been neglected is the role of culture in the emergence of the conflict. Culture has been treated as insignificant background to the conflict. Thus, the conflict is seen as emergent and disconnected from its institutional contexts. The argument is taken to extreme by Bob (2005) who strenuously argue that Ogoni frames were shaped by global factors. This book argues that there is continuity between the Ogoni mobilisation and its institutional contexts. The challenge Ogoni mobilisation generated and the frames it deployed emerged from within its cultural universe, even if it borrowed from the global space.
Constructing the environment
In the cosmology of Niger Delta communities, the environment is more than resources and far from an inanimate stage for human practices. To the contrary, the environment represents the encounter between the human, otherworldly, and other animate and inanimate beings, including the veneration that accompanies that interaction. Desecration of that linkage elicits moral sentiments of revulsion and unease. Chakrabathy (2000:16) underscores the interconnection between humans and environment, arguing that the ontological assumption embedded in the social sciences that âthe human is ontologically singular, that gods and spirits are in the end âsocial facts,â that the social somehow exists prior to themâ is misleading. There is no known society in which humans have existed without gods and spirits associating with them. To him, gods and spirits are âexistentially coeval with the humanâ, and âthe question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spiritsâ (Chakrabathy, 2006:16). Such companionship takes various forms in, on and within the environment.
Communities are, however, just one set of actors who construct, and are constructed by, the environment. Through policies and laws, the State ensures the spatial ordering of a region into reserved areas, crude oil pipelines, and housing settlements. Moreover, the State employs its symbolic power in an attempt to naturalise its contingent processes of spatialisation. Thus, the materialistic tools of laws and policies have cultural dimensions (Loveman 2005). Similarly, oil corporations extend spatial ordering by means of land enclosure, land and river pollution, the siting of oil facilities, and the discursive redefinition of local places in line with extra-local logics.
The State is more than an administrative, policing and military organisation; it is also a symbolic organisation (Loveman 2005). Symbolic power is the âability to make appear as natural, inevitable, and thus apolitical, that which is a product of historical struggle and human inventionâ (Loveman 2005: 1655). Through classification, codification and regulation, the State is able to constitute particular kinds of people, places and things. Through spatial practices and policies the State actively constitutes the people and places in whose name or interest it claims to exist or act. Social life is ordered through generalised perception that a Stateâs activities are natural, inevitable or manifestly useful.
The spatial orderings disrupt the pre-existing and on-going spatial logics and practices of local communities. Therefore, when local communities mobilise against the State and oil corporations, environmental construction or place-making become the object of contentious politics. Such mobilisation reflects utter spatial transgression, disrupting the âofficialâ orderings of the State and oil corporations in an attempt to reclaim pre-colonial rights to territorialisation. The conflict challenges the Stateâs symbolic power, or the naturalisation of Stateâs constitution of the environment, and the notion that its practices are inevitable and for the general good.
Grassroots approach to environment
The modernist perspective recognises only what can be derived from empirical experience. Knowledge that is not empirically tested, such as indigenous knowledge, is seen as illegitimate and disqualified as inadequate and unscientific (Fairhead and Leach 1997: 54). By recognising scientifically verified knowledge, modernist epistemology marginalises critical lines of inquiry (Preston 2002). Instead of empirical evidence being the source of all knowledge, the mind is active in the construction of knowledge; human beings do not discover knowledge but they construct it (Schwandt 2002). This book adopts the decolonised approach to environment. The author believes that rather than being objective, knowledge is âengaged, value bound and context determinedâ (Scoones and Thompson 1993: 9). Also, arguments that research is an independent process of discovering the truth do not reflect reality (Finlay 2002). The exercise of power shapes and validates some types of knowledge claims over others (Radford 1992). Despite their weaknesses, qualitative method and use of unstructured interviews, follow-up interviews, in-depth group discussions and anecdotal evidences provide access to local community subjective reality that would otherwise remain hidden under a positivist approach.
Place-sensitive social movement approach
The central part of the book examines the potential of place-sensitive social movement theories for understanding the Ogoni conflict, and why and how the Ogoni mobilised against the State and Shell Oil Company. The idea is to analyse how place, that is, environment understood from the perspective of local communities, mediated why and how the community mobilised. Existing literature on the conflict provides robust account of factors implicated in the conflict. Yet, by ignoring place-sensitive social movement imagination, the literature is clearly unable to explain who joined the movement, or did not, and why. It is more than a question of why the movement emerged; but more of why specific people decided to join the movement in particular places and times. Place-sensitive social movement imagination enables engagement with such spatially precise, actor-oriented question by directing attention to a deeper understanding of how the movement came into being (Wolford 2003).
Place-sensitive movement approach enables us overcome the duality between society and nature or the human and non-human inherent in many accounts. The conventional understanding of environment is related to the basic sociological premise that âsocial factsâ are to be explained by âsocial factsâ (Lockie 2004). Thus, environment-related movements and the aspirations of activist members have been conceived in terms of social psychological causes and processes. In effect, the environment is reduced to asocial and passive entity, whose significance is limited to economic value. Reconceptualisation of the environment as constructed, and therefore a meaningful place, helps overcome such ontological distinction between the human and non-human. Place-sensitive movement theories provide the tools to navigate the interrelationship and interdependence between the human and non-human.
Place-sensitive social movement theories enable better understanding of the complex realities of conflicts. The conflict is often defined in terms of crude oil, or the precipitating issue. Similarly, the goals and intentions of the protagonists are derived ab initio from the economic importance of crude oil and what value it entails for the conflicting parties. In effect, conflict that emerges over crude oil is invariably about protagonists desire to appropriate the benefit or market value of oil. Environmental protection discourse of the people is merely a metaphor for an attempt to extract greater value from crude oil revenue. Invariably, the issue at stake defines what conflict is â competition between the contenders to improve their lot vis-Ă -vis the issue. Such understanding of conflict reduces conflict to a single thing usually geared at material appropriation. It disables analytical focus on the multi-dimensionality of conflict, the various societal subsystems conflict is directed at, and the complex forms of challenge posed by conflict. It is unable to account adequately for why and how collective actors mobilise.
The lack of deserved attention to the role of place in the onset and dynamics of conflicts in the region has promoted the proliferation of continental resolution measures even though no two conflicts are exactly the same. The author believes that continental perspectives to understanding the conflicts in the region must be abandoned for a place-sensitive approach. Too many studies of the conflict deploy continental perspectives that explain one conflict and not another. Continental perspectives hide the diversities in causes and courses of conflicts (Shaw 2003). Thus, many works on the conflict are based ab initio on unfounded and irrelevant arguments. Too many of the books on the conflict are aspatial in intent and/or execution. They fail miserably to understand the environment from a decolonised perspective, that is, as place. That is why place-sensitive social movement theories provide a turning point for this book.
This book is the outcome of about ten yearsâ experience of researching the Ogoni conflicts. The author has had in-depth conversations with many past and present Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) leaders, activists, ordinary Ogoni men and women around the issue of why and how they mobilised. The author has published widely on the Ogoni conflict and believes that ...
