Zones of Exclusion: Offshore Extraction, the Contestation of Space and Physical Displacement in the Nigerian Delta and the Mexican Gulf

Abstract

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.

Contested claims over space and identity between fishers and the oil industry in Mexico

“…In their research on hydrocarbon governance in the Gulf of Mexico, Breglia (2013) and Zalik (2009) demonstrate how -apart from legal actions and state-policing in the privatizing offshore -the Mexican government's welfare interventions are encouraging fishers to become entrepreneurial aquaculturists. Correspondingly, Sawyer (2004), Breglia (2013) and Himley (2013) show how corporations are seeking to transfer local claims to resource access from formal political arenas to voluntary programmes of corporate social responsibility and community development.…”

“…For this reason, the oil industry seeks to organize its production into spatially isolated operations, separated from the social observation and political pressure of civic movements (Zalik, 2009). By appearing to remove itself from local social conflicts, the oil industry obscures the links between global projects of resource appropriation and local experiences of resource exclusion (Appel, 2012;Ferguson, 2005).…”

“…Inspired by Collier's (2009) Foucauldian approach, we examine how modes of resource governance based on conventional forms of authoritarian control (Watts, 2004b;Zalik, 2009) become combined with techniques of disentanglement and indirect governance (Appel, 2012;Himley, 2013). We argue that empirical analyses of neoliberal governance would benefit from more attention being paid to the complex articulations of different forms of governance.…”

“…His comments also provide a point of departure for understanding a range of shifting forms of resource governance and contestation characteristic of large-scale extractive operations in the global South (Bebbington, 2012;Watts, 2011;Zalik, 2009).…”

Implementation challenges of climate change adaptation initiatives in coastal lagoon communities in the Gulf of Mexico

“…Fishers, regardless of their status as members of cooperatives, freelance or private, face many other important challenges, such as the establishment of new fishing regulations that prohibit fishing activities close to offshore oil fields, which function as artificial reefs, so that fishers can no longer access the abundant species around them (Zalik 2009). These new conditions increase fishers' production costs and time, because they need to go farther from the coast; they also increase their risks.…”