Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
In the Niger Delta, ex-militants use violence to become capitalists, via a reward system that gives them access to surveillance contracts and political positions. Hence, they are reshaping community and state power structures within a patronage system, sidelining the struggle for ecological justice.
Paper long abstract
While the focus has been on critiquing extractive elites in natural resources-endowed localities in the Niger Delta, existing studies have tended to overlook how conflict actors, particularly the warlords, have used violence as a commodity to evolve into a militia capitalist class. This paper bridges this gap in knowledge by showing how ex-militants, using their previous statuses as militia leaders, leverage the economy of conflict to attract corporate rewards such as surveillance contracts for oil and gas infrastructures as well as mouthwatering political appointments. This reward system eventually propels ex-militia leaders into becoming conflict bourgeoisie, giving them access to resources that now aid their ability to reshape community and state power structures. The paper employs the political economy approach as both a theoretical and analytical framework. It relies on secondary sources of data such as government reports, media archives, and security contract exposures, to expose this transformation. The paper submits that ex-militants now turned militia capitalists have been able to entrench a patronage-driven development that rests on the reward of violence through economic and political incentives, while sidelining the genuine struggle for ecological justice. Thus, with this massive wealth and formal political appointments, militia capitalists now wield significant resources that they deploy in reshaping the power structure of their respective communities and states in the region. Among others, the paper recommends a re-evaluation or reimagining of Niger Delta development beyond elite pacts that hand huge oil and gas infrastructure surveillance contracts to ex-militants.
Agency from the margins: Non-state actors as architects of futures