Enclosed Futures: Oil Extraction in the Republic of Congo

Abstract

This article analyzes how the discovery of a giant oil field in its territorial waters in 1969 transformed the historical trajectory of the Republic of Congo, nine years after it acquired its independence. It focuses on how the materiality of oil—and the materiality of the massive offshore industrial complex that needed to be assembled to extract it—catalyzed a deep spatiotemporal reconfiguration of existing power relations. The Congolese anticolonial elites thought they could turn this reconfiguration to their advantage and make petroleum the means to economic prosperity for the masses. But they soon stumbled over enormous countervailing forces, as oil multinationals imposed the legal infrastructure that insulated future hydrocarbon flows and revenue streams from ambitions of self-governance after decolonization. Since then the day-to-day reproduction of Congo’s extractive business as usual has relinquished the emancipatory futures that anticolonial elites had in mind and precipitated the triumph of undemocratic politics.