Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria

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.

Omolade Adunbi is an associate professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), Program in the Environment (PitE), and the Honors Program, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2015), winner of the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.