This article examines two aid interventions that manifest the merging of community development/relief and industrial security policy in the petroleum offshore of the Nigerian Niger Delta and the Mexican Gulf. In the Nigerian case, the article considers the crisis in the Warri region of Delta State in 2003, the subsequent evacuation of local residents, and the surrounding context of oil‐related violence. Simmering since the 1990s, the 2003 Warri conflict displaced thousands due to competing community claims to territory that “hosts” oil installations, Shell and Chevron primarily. In Mexico, the analysis centers on the implementation of 2003 Mexican security legislation, prompted by International Maritime Organization post 9/11 security policy, that amplifies the “Zone of Exclusion” around offshore installations. To offset the loss of livelihoods resulting from the “exclusion zone”, Mexican state agencies offered financing to support the conversion of the displaced small‐scale fishers to fish farming. The varying forms of displacement prompted by these two “liberating” interventions reflect the socio‐historical specificity of territorial relations in the Nigerian and Mexican extractive regimes. These relations constitute divergent extractive settings which have come to play contrasting roles in the global political economy of oil, one highly volatile, the other relatively stable.

This article examines the globalisation of corporate strategic philanthropy as played out in the Niger Delta of Nigeria — a region that has been marked by a history of state and petroleum industry collusion both in social repression and environmental destruction. Social control of the Delta has rested largely on what Watts (2001) conceptualises as ‘petro violence’, the joint security imposed by the Nigerian military and oil companies to police their installations and the environment of social unrest that surrounds petroleum extraction. In examining the extractive industry's response to social dislocation, this study focuses on the adoption of a model of partnership and participatory development by Shell Nigeria. The implementation of the social stabilisation project promoted by Shell's partnership model and facilitated by international donors and state institutions (understood in corporate strategy as a ‘leveraged buy in’), exemplifies the reciprocal formation of the corporate social governance projects and development assistance in the Nigerian context. Yet this new model's attempt to achieve social consent is partially contradicted by the corporate requirement of profit maximisation served by rising prices associated with perceived and real threats to oil supplies. The oil companies’ pursuit of a social ‘licence to operate’ thus rests uneasily with an industry whose underlying logic profits from the upward movement of oil prices, dependent on instability and violence. Her dissertation project, concerning social welfare interventions associated with the oil industry in the Mexican Gulf and the Niger Delta, is based on 16 months of field research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Latin American Studies Program at Cornell University

The dynamic and unfolding relationship between the oceans and humans underwrites a general narrative of oceans in ‘crisis’ and the need for new governance and regulatory frameworks to attend to it. As concerns surrounding marine space have proliferated, sovereignty, territory and property in the oceans remain imprecise and subject to controversy, presenting challenges (and opportunities) for oceans governance. This special issue employs the concept of ocean frontiers as a pivot into these concerns because of the eroding, but still frequent, portrayal of the oceans as a planetary space separate from humans and because the concept offers entry points for navigating the unfolding dimensions of ocean conservation and exploitation. Deducing from the eight contributions from the special issue, we develop four inter‐related arguments. First, while ocean frontiers pre‐exist the epistemological, jurisdictional and commodification categories that we conceptualize in this editorial introduction, we find that these categories, which may be understood as intersecting in ocean regimes, play central roles in closing the spatial and socially‐constituted ocean frontier, bringing it closer to human purview. Second, the materiality of oceans – their mobile and volumetric elements ‐ influences all of these emerging and intersecting oceanic processes. Third, contributing authors have developed innovative methodological approaches to the study of the oceans, revealing oceans not as ‘siteless’, but multi‐sited, and demonstrating that the social sciences are well suited methodologically to bring unfolding ocean processes into view. Last but not least, drawing from the insights set out by the contributors, we argue for ongoing interdisciplinary social (and natural) science research on the oceans as they and human‐ocean relations unfold in a period of dramatic change.

Abstract. Pivoting on the process of reserve replacement undertaken by key oil transnationals in Canada as a spatial fix for capital, the article considers how individual firms employ formal review processes to project their strategic interests. The proponent firm shapes, through its own participation, the regulatory terrain on which competitors will subsequently operate. In Alberta's tar sands, the oil industry's reserve replacement process serves as a spatial–temporal fix for capital, and the review process and tribunal acts as a complementary socio-ecological fix – restricting social/affective claims, including First Nations resistance, to an official tribunal setting. In seeking formal approval to replace declining oil and gas reserves with unconventionals, proponent firms claim investor security, while social movement opponents emphasize risk and insecurity arising from carbon-intensive, frontier extraction. In the case of the contested Shell Jackpine Mine Expansion Joint Review Panel, as in other environmental assessment processes in Alberta, the proponent firm and state representatives employ the oxymoronic term ‘resource sterilization’ to describe ecological protection. ‘Resource sterilization’ offers a discursive representation of how capital's spatio-temporal fix in unconventionals is facilitated through the terms of the formal review process, in which social claims are muted.

Over the past 15 years the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the United Nations agency charged with regulating extraction from the ocean floor and seabed in areas beyond national jurisdiction (a zone referred to as the “Area”), has assigned exploration contracts for deep sea mineral exploration for specific zones under its purview. Pressures have mounted in recent years for a rapid roll out of an ISA mineral exploitation regime. Under international law, the deep seabed pertains to the entire global community under the principle of the common heritage of (hu)mankind. Parastatal and private firms granted rights by the UN and/or their home states for exploration prior to the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), are among the actors in these contracts. They include US firms, notably Lockheed Martin, which participated in deep‐sea mining consortia in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper argues that the neo‐mercantilist dynamics surrounding ISA negotiations show how the geopolitics of proprietary data and political economy of finance constitute the deep seabed. The power certain states and firms hold in shaping the ISA exploitation regime arises in part from the contested legal position of ocean frontiers beyond state jurisdiction.