A state of conflict has existed in the Niger Delta for fifty years. The nature of the conflict, whether it is terrorism or civil insurrection, has not been resolved by the respective legislative entities. This qualitative case study was designed to explore the nature of the Niger Delta conflict from the perspective of several members of the Nigerian National Assembly and determine whether terrorism in Nigeria is related to the general conflict. Social conflict theory provided the basis for the exploration. An ancillary question explored whether antiterrorism legislation in 2006 alleviated the Niger Delta conflict. Interview data were collected from 1 senator and 5 representatives of the Nigerian National Assembly. These data were inductively coded and manually analyzed for major themes, and then triangulated with a review of internal and public documents pertaining to the relevant legislation. The study established that the root causes of the Niger Delta conflict were economic inequities. Three conclusions were drawn from the case study and data regarding legislative attempts to address the conflict: (1) the antiterrorism legislation of 2006 did not criminalize the Niger Delta conflict, (2) the legislation did not have an impact on fiscal resource allocations to the region, and (3) no link between the conflict and current terrorism activities in Nigeria was evident. Recommendations are given for the Nigerian state to engage in fiscal federalism as a means of equitable allocations of resources to the region, thereby contributing to positive social change.

As the global demand for oil increases, human health implications related to its discovery and transport remain a serious concern. The Niger Delta has been the site of severe environmental degradation since the oil boom of the 1970s. While some researchers have examined the environmental effects of oil procurement, few have explored human health implications in this region. This phenomenological study investigated the human physical and mental health consequences of oil-related environmental degradation through the perceptions and lived experiences of villagers in Koluama, Nigeria. The conceptual framework for the study was based on research conducted by Morello-Frosch, Zuk, Jerrett, Shamasunder and Kyle (2011) on the public health consequences of environmental pollution to which marginalized populations are vulnerable. Participants included a random sample of 33 residents of Koluama. Data were collected via individual semistructured interviews and 3 focus groups and analyzed using: interpretative phenomenological analysis. Themes that emerged from analysis included children's health issues, including asthma and other breathing problems; and death rates among the elderly in the area. The villagers, aware of the increase in mortality and illness in the area, also suffered from anxiety and depression. The research findings demonstrated the perception of the participants that the oil companies appeared not to be concerned about the lack of health care in the area; although illness increased in the area of the oil fields. This study might be beneficial in eliciting positive social change at the individual and organizational levels by illuminating oil-related health problems and may lead to better health care access for the population.

The Niger Delta militancy ravaged the Nigerian upstream petroleum sector between 2004-2009, bringing it to a standstill. In response, the Nigerian state adopted an amnesty policy―a globally recognized tool for conflict resolution and peacebuilding―to protect the sector and the economy from collapse. Little is known, however, about the unintended consequences of the amnesty implementation for the Nigerian upstream petroleum sector. Thus, the purpose of this study was to fill this gap in the research literature on the Niger Delta amnesty program. Polarity management was the conceptual framework applied; relative deprivation and polarities of democracy constituted the theoretical foundation for this qualitative case study. Face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with 29 purposefully selected participants from the senior ranks of the petroleum industry, sector trade unions, relevant government agencies, and a regional university. Data were inductively coded as part of content analysis, the data analysis strategy. Participants viewed the amnesty policy as being poorly conceived and implemented due to the many unintended negative consequences arising from the policy implementation. The key finding from the study indicates that both the sector and the Niger Delta region are worse off post the amnesty policy implementation. The study concludes that by adopting and implementing the study recommendations, stakeholders may be able to mitigate the identified unintended consequences, position the Nigerian upstream petroleum sector for sustainable growth, address the root causes of the militancy, and deliver a positive social change for the residents of Niger Delta.

ABSTRACT Niger Delta of Nigeria is a region characterized with conflict commonly conceptualized as ‘‘petro-violence’’. This violence  between Shell and its host communities has lasted over four decades. While the activities of Shell and other oil companies destroy the ecology of the region , the oil producing communities demand improved explorative and exploitative activities of the companies, improved welfare for the people and compensation for the harm done to the ecology of the region. This work examines whether Shell can really be blamed for contributing to the conflict in the region and whether it is morally permissible for Business Corporation like Shell to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility.

Oil extraction in Nigeria has caused extensive environmental degradation and health problems in many Nigerian communities, particularly in the ecologically sensitive Niger Delta where nearly all of the oil extraction takes place. The reasons for this are complex and have roots in Nigeria’s colonial past. The Nigerian economy is largely reliant on its petroleum resources which, in conjunction with governmental corruption and high international demand for Nigerian oil, has created a system where environmental externalities are largely ignored. Multinational oil companies with little stake in the development and environment of Nigeria are responsible for most of the extraction projects and subsequent environmental damage. However, the Nigerian federal government has failed to effectively regulate these projects. Communities in the Niger Delta bear nearly all of the environmental burden of oil extraction, but see very little of the economic benefits. The main environmental impacts of oil extraction are oil spills, land use change, and gas flaring. Oil spills are very common in the Niger Delta. Cleanup efforts are often inadequate, resulting in loss of delicate ecosystems as well as fisheries and farmland. Large tracts of rainforest and mangrove ecosystems have been cleared or degraded by the oil extraction process. Nigeria flares more gas per barrel of oil extracted than any other country in the world, contributing to global warming and creating serious health hazards for communities located near gas flares. Diversification of the Nigerian economy would help to alleviate many of the factors that lead to environmental degradation, including the dependence of the government on oil revenues, high unemployment, and rampant oil theft. Curbing government corruption is also vital to effective regulation of oil extraction. International consumers can help Nigeria head towards a less petroleum-driven future through an increased awareness of the origins of their oil and pressure on the Nigerian federal government and the multinational oil companies to extract oil more conscientiously or even to discontinue oil extraction. But most importantly, the solution to Nigeria’s economic concerns must ultimately come from Nigerians as international influence has been a major contributor to the environmental degradation in the first place.

This mixed-method analysis of three Nigerian states explores the ways in which a major policy shift has produced short-term peace outcomes in a vastly contested terrain entailing conflicting interests. The central argument of "Paths to Peacebuilding," is that disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration can create peace in resource-conflicted societies when there is governmental will and community and citizen involvement in both the design and implementation of the program. The overriding concern was whether the DDR process was capable of contributing to tangible improvements in real and perceived safety on the ground as well as destroying the structures that both contributed to and sustained insurgency for over two decades. The disarmament process yielded over 3,000 semi- and fully automatic weapons and other military style hardware. It also resulted in the demobilization of over 26,000 former fighters. The DDR program generated important but geographically differentiated reductions in militant violence across the three states studied. The study analyzes survey and interview data from a random sample of 346 combatants and ex-combatants and other knowledgeable informants in three Niger Delta states - Rivers, Delta, and Bayelsa. The dissertation compared DDR success rates between individuals who entered the DDR program and those who did not. An examination of the programming determinants, controlling for non-programmatic factors including community exposure to pollution reveals some evidence of macro success and micro failure. While the program has created a new sense of peace that allows oil corporations to continue oil production unhindered leading to increased oil earnings for the Nigerian state, there is lack of local level support for the program or its participants. For example, findings of significant association between participation in the program and the successful disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of ex-combatants are moderated by participation effects. While evidence of some level of macro success is clearly indicated in addition to some level of impact on the lives of program participants, the failure to adequately link DDR to broad economic and social development programs may obviate the tentative gains made and plunge the region into potentially more devastating rounds of violent insurgency and counter-insurgency.

<p><strong> ABSTRACT</strong></p><p><strong> </strong>Niger Delta of Nigeria is a region characterized with conflict commonly conceptualized as ‘‘petro-violence’’. This violence  between Shell and its host communities has lasted over four decades. While the activities of Shell and other oil companies destroy the ecology of the region , the oil producing communities demand improved explorative and exploitative activities of the companies, improved welfare for the people and compensation for the harm done to the ecology of the region. This work examines whether Shell can really be blamed for contributing to the conflict in the region and whether it is morally permissible for Business Corporation like Shell to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility.</p><p> </p>

Einen großräumigen Überblick über ein Gebiet von Interesse können Satellitenbilddaten ermöglichen. Dabei werden räumliche Beziehungen erkennbar und lassen sich untersuchen. Die Bestimmung der räumlichen Verteilung und des zeitlichen Ausmaßes eines großräumigen Ereignisses, wie einer Überflutung, ist oftmals nur mit Unterstützung von fernerkundlichen Daten möglich. Es besteht der Bedarf an kontinuierlichen Informationen über den Zustand eines Systems über einen längeren Zeitraum, wenn Zusammenhänge zwischen den natürlichen Schwankungen und unterschiedlichen anthropogenen sowie natürlichen Einflüssen untersucht werden sollen. Das Nigerbinnendelta in der Republik Mali nimmt in der semi-ariden Region eine besondere Stellung ein, da es sich um einen Gunststandort handelt, der wesentlich zur wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der Region beiträgt. Die im Rahmen dieser Arbeit zu erstellende Datenbasis beruht auf SAR-Daten, deren größter Vorteil in der Wetter- und Tageszeitunabhängigkeit liegt. Eine Herausforderung bei der Nutzung von Radaraufnahmen sind die spezielle Bildgeometrie, der auftretende Speckle-Effekt sowie das komplexe Rückstreuverhalten der Strahlung. Die Datenbasis bilden ERS- und Envisat-Aufnahmen, deren Auswertung zunächst die Datenaufbereitung bzw. die Vorverarbeitung, u. a. in Form einer radiometrischen Kalibrierung und einer Speckle-Filterung, vorangestellt ist. Die Anwendung von pixelbasierten Auswertemethoden ist aufgrund der radiometrischen Eigenschaften der Daten weniger geeignet, weshalb die in der Fernerkundung neuere objektorientierte und wissensbasierte Klassifikation zur Anwendung kam. Das Fehlen von zeitnah erhobenen Geländebeobachtungen sowie das komplexe Rückstreuverhalten der Mikrowellen erfordern eine ausführliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem Untersuchungsgebiet sowie mit dem Verhalten der C-Band SAR-Daten in Feuchtgebieten. Innerhalb der SAR-Daten treten vermehrt Überschneidungen in der Rückstreuung unterschiedlicher Landbedeckungen auf. Deren Trennung erfordert Vorkenntnisse über die Ausbreitung der Landbedeckungen zu unterschiedlichen hydrologischen Stadien. Die zum Aufbau der wissensbasierten Auswertung erfolgte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Untersuchungsgebiet beinhaltete neben der geographischen Aufbereitung die Erstellung einer Vergleichsbasis, basierend auf multispektralen Aufnahmen. Auf Grundlage je einer Aufnahme während sowie nach der Überschwemmung wurden für die objektorientierte Klassifikation zwei Regelwerke, in die neben der auszuwertenden SAR-Aufnahme zusätzliche Informationen wie z. B. der Texturparameter Entropie eingingen, erstellt. Das Ergebnis ist eine Datenbasis der Überschwemmungsflächen zu verschiedenen Aufnahmezeitpunkten. Die Evaluierung von zwei Klassifikationsergebnissen ergab eine sehr gute Trennung der überschwemmten und nicht überschwemmten Bereiche. Die aufbereiteten SAR-Daten geben einen Überblick über die Ressource Wasser für bereits vergangene Zeitschnitte. Zusammen mit aktuellen Informationen können diese einen Beitrag für ein nachhaltiges Management dieser Lebensgrundlage im Nigerbinnendelta leisten.

Every year, for the past 50 years, Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta has suffered the same magnitude of oil spill in its rivers and swamps than was spilled in the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill. The damage has devastated the way of life of the Ogoni people who live in the area. They have consistently suffered environmental injustice as a result of Shell’s oil exploration, and the Nigerian government has ignored their cries for help and restitution. In fact, movements to garner support for environmental justice and fare share of oil profits and ownership from Shell and the state have been brutally shut down by the Nigerian government. Could it be that the reason that the state is willing to allow such a grave level of environmental degradation to persist is not only because it is corrupt, but also because the Nigerian government functions as a gatekeeper state guarding its precious oil resources? Following independence, many oil-producing countries turned to spigot economies that allowed whoever controlled access to the tap to collect rent on it. Thus, as a gatekeeper state, it is not in the best interest of the Nigerian government to give up its rent-seeking behaviors with Shell to appease its citizens because it may disrupt its relationship with the outside corporations. As a result, many of the cries for environmental justice by the Ogoni people have been met with resistance from the state since their function has evolved to collect taxes on exports and imports—not to maintain the trust of its citizens.

This study provides an alternative explanation for the nature of politics in the Niger Delta by focussing on the forms and contents of relationships within youth networks. While not repudiating previous narratives around historical and contemporary grievances, the study argues that a lot can be learnt from interrogating how social codes like respectability and self organizational tactics like provisionality, shape, not just the nature of youth politics, but also the ways in which youth imagine themselves and their place in fluid and extractive contexts like the Niger Delta. The implication of focussing on issues such as these, the study argues, is that it becomes possible to tease out the critical, yet often ignored, micro-politics of social categories which ultimately frame the way actors articulate their macro level grievances and aspirations. This study is driven by three main research questions. First, what pathways facilitate youth engagement with politics in the Niger Delta? Second, how do Niger Delta youth imagine and organize themselves as actors navigating its dynamic oil political economy? And finally, how has the Amnesty which was declared in 2009 for youth insurgents changed the nature of relationships within youth networks and how has it impacted on their roles as actors in the Niger Delta? As a way of engaging with these questions, the study used the 2009 Amnesty as a historical marker to periodize state interventions in the region and also to illustrate the impact and limits that formal interventions have when seeking to shape the politics of social shifters like youth. The study's main contributions include a rethinking of the notion of youth which asks for a conscious analytical disaggregation of politically active youth from the general pool of the young. This implies that the idea of youth is dependent on acts of doing rather than of being. The study also challenged the idea that youth is marginal and argues that even the fact of marginality can be a useful resource for navigating uncertain social contexts like the Niger Delta. Through its engagement with the changing notion of respectability as well as the innovative deployment of provisionality as an organizing strategy by youth, the study provides new ways of analyzing the Niger Delta that can move it away from a fixation on rational choice narratives of scarcity, greed or grievance. Finally, the study provides the first comprehensive mapping of youth networks in the Niger Delta and does so across three pathways, showing how these complex relationships shape and are also shaped by the broader political economy of oil. The study concludes by arguing for new questions to be asked about how the shifting forms and geographies of the Niger Delta's youth networks flow out to other areas of national and transnational life in ways that recognize the regions fluidity, uncertainty and permanence.