Globalization and Environmental Conflict in Africa

This paper examines the relationship between the processes of globalisation, mineral/resource extraction in Africa, and the deepening of environmental conflict on the continent since the late 1970s, and especially with the onset of structural adjustment which imposed the hegemony of the free market on the African ecology. It is based on a case study of the interface between global oil capital and the intensification of environmental conflict in Nigeria's oil-produci ng communi ties mainly located in the Niger Delta. Specifically, it examines the ways the social contradictions and scarcities of resources spawned by global conglomerates operating in the Nigerian oil industry, provoke conflict. The subordination of the rights of the populations of the oil producing areas in Nigeria by oil multinationals and their partner the state, in the quest for profit is thus a critical, explosive element in the linkage between politics and the ecology. Environmental conflict in the Nigerian oil industry, particularly in the oil-rich region of the Niger Delta, is "globalised" in the sense of the presence of global actors in the local communities; the integration of the communities via oil production into the global economic system and the connections being forged by local social movements to the global human rights agenda; and international human and environmental rights groups in the fight against the state-global oil alliance. At another level, it reflects how globalisation defined as "a process of global integration in which diverse peoples, economies, cultures, and political processes are increasingly subjected to international influences, and people are made aware of the role of these influences in their everyday lives" (Midgeley, 1997), finds expression in the identities, constituents, and modalities of the various social forces immersed in the environmental conflicts in the Niger Delta. For