How do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices.

In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from them economically, they have yielded dramatically the same environmental outcome for communities around them that included pollution with precarious effects on the health of the populations in the regions, and displacement of population from their livelihood practices.

About the Author

Omolade Adunbi is Associate Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), and the Honors Program, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A political and environmental anthropologist, Adunbi is also Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Graham Sustainability Institute and Faculty Associate at the Program in the Environment (PitE), Energy Institute, Donia Human Rights Center, and the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria, winner of the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

Reviews

"An exceptional comparative ethnography! Enclaves of Exception is a fresh and fascinating analytic trajectory; a robust and valuable, if also troubling, insight into contemporary extractive economies struggling with the contradictions of special economic zones. This book is an inspiring contribution to economic anthropology."-Wale Adebanwi, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

"Enclaves of Exception is a triumph of scholarship that seamlessly fuses an unparalleled ethnography of the Niger Delta with an analytical vision that encompasses African, European, and East Asian energy regimes-and even the moonshining of the prohibition-era United States. Adunbi demonstrates the enormous potential of attending insistently and expansively to the proliferating enclaves of today's global energy complex."-Douglas Rogers, Yale University

Book Information
ISBN 9780253059574
Author Omolade Adunbi
Format Paperback
Page Count 252
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press