This thesis explores the political dimensions of development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) in the context of oil extraction in Sudan. It provides a detailed perspective on the experience of displacement of the local people in the oil-rich areas of Southern Sudan. It also offers an important insight into the local politics of this much-publicized dimension of Sudan’s political crises. The analytical frameworks common to the field of DIDR, mostly developed through studies of the impact of dams, mainly deal with economic and social aspects of displacement. These frameworks are inadequate for explaining oil-induced displacement, because they largely ignore the political contexts of DIDR: the focus of this thesis. Sudan’s oil project is carried out in the name of the “national interest.” But in reality, it serves the interests of the main beneficiaries: Sudan’s Northern “Arab” and Muslim elites and their supporters. Many Southern Sudanese have had to resort to arms, partly to protect their interests in oil development, and in order to contest the purported “national interest” championed by the government. This thesis problematizes the idea of a “national interest” in Sudan in order to question who benefits from development projects that cause human displacement. It argues that conflicts of interests between central government elites and local peoples best explain why displacement connected to natural resource development occurs in weak states, such as Sudan. As a result, ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional and other identities are often exploited by elites in such states in an “instrumentalist” way so as to gain, or retain, power and access to resources. This is, at the expense of local people adversely affected by development projects.

With oil reserves dwindling, efforts to create a diversified, post-oil economy in Oman have focused on building the human capital of citizens and promoting a new entrepreneurial ‘work culture’ among Omani employees and entrepreneurs. In a context in which state-provided jobs represent both an exchange of labor for a salary and a means of securing a citizen’s rightful share of the nation’s oil revenues, issues of productivity and workforce development are most often framed in terms of the ‘mindset’ of individual citizens. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork with experts and professionals in Oman’s thriving citizen labor industry—the industry of human resource specialists, consultants, career coaches, entrepreneurship trainers, and the organizations which support and sponsor them—this dissertation explores how utopian investments in Omani human capital have shaped the distributive governance of the Omani state, the production of persons, and the making of ‘an economy.’ In an environment in which economic ‘growth’ is driven by state-guided subsidy rather than market mechanisms, this dissertation describes how economic and managerial expertise is employed to create 'an economy’ in ways that are largely unaccompanied by the production of markets. By doing so, this dissertation highlights how seemingly neoliberal interventions aimed at ‘rolling back’ the state and cultivating entrepreneurial ‘mindsets’ have counterintuitively produced subjects who understand their personal and social ‘development’ as pieces of a larger system of distributive rights and obligations that is as much social and political as it is economic. Ultimately, by demonstrating how subsidy-driven investments in Oman’s citizen workforce reproduce distributive arrangements, this dissertation complicates the assumption that ‘development’ is an antidote to Oman’s natural resource dependence.