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261 CHAPTER ELEVEN Protest-as-Violence in Oil Fields The Contested Representation of Profiteering in Two Extractive Sites Anna Zalik At a 2008 conference on violence in the Nigerian oilfields a colleague referenced the final passage of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart to highlight the problematic use of the term pacification as a strategy for “resolving” the Niger Deltan crisis. In that passage a colonial official reflects on the suicide of the novel’s hero, Okonkwo. The colonial officer felt he had learned a number of things from his experiences: “One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. . . . The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. . . . The official had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .” The term, this colleague pointed out, recalled the notion of the “peace of the graveyard,” suggestive of both violent dispossession and the distinction between peace and substantive justice. “Pacification” is central to achieving the monopoly over the means of violence that is supposed to characterize the modern state, including the state’s role as arbiter of official justice—a form of authority that Charles Tilly famously referred to as the institutionalization of organized crime (Tilly 1985). Pacification was explicitly required for a successful colonial project, which employed both consent-based strategies and physical violence to achieve it (Idahosa and Shenton 2004). In boom extractive sites industrial activity is surrounded by social and ecological violence, involving blatant physical dispossession, whole- 262 • Anna Zalik sale destruction and lifting of territory, and societal upheaval. Where claims for resource sovereignty express themselves in physical protest, the state and its security forces as well as its presumed check—the judiciary, are key agents in shaping notions of “legality” and “violence.” In this chapter social consent to, or rejection of, legal norms shaping resource claims on oil fields in the Niger Delta and Canadian Tar Sands express varying degrees of internalization of particular mechanisms of authority. In the oil fields of these two regions the notion of the “peace of the graveyard ,” suggestive of violent repression, may be counterposed to the internalization of legal norms. To use another historically inflected use of the term, “social peace,” citing Sorel’s critique of bourgeois accommodation, refers to a political context in which significant demands against capitalist relations become muted, in part through reformism (Finlay 2006; Beetham 1969). At a meeting between Canadian First Nation and oil industry representatives in 2008, where industry sought community consent for a project, a local resident considered this problem, stating: “we know what has happened to indigenous people’s due to the oil industry worldwide. I won’t stand for that, I won’t allow that to happen to me, to my kids, to my grand-kids. I have two hands: One hand can sign a Memorandum of Understanding on a piece of paper, the second can motion to another 1000 people behind me saying: We won’t allow that to happen here. We’re not going to give you that land.” Indeed, the Southern Nigerian and Northwestern Canada context suggest how formalized state and industrial-corporate approaches to “pacification,” whether via the means of force/state violence or its official legal counterpart, inform and shape protest in the spatial setting of the oil field. In the Nigerian context, where the United States and the United Kingdom have actively established and supported deepening foreign militarization in the Delta region, an armed insurgency challenges the state and the oil industry’s monopoly on extracted resources. In parallel, the marking of insurgent participation in the contraband oil trade as “illegal,” promoted through the industry endorsed Web site legaloil .com, discredits the insurgent call for “resource control” that claims sovereignty over the region’s resources. In Canada, the mandating of consultation with aboriginal communities via the fiduciary “duty to consult” discursively implies a recognition of aboriginal territorial rights, even as Canadian laws deem blockades of access roads on their lands “illegal.” As expressed in the Niger Deltan insurgency and facility occupations, then, alongside a burgeoning set of challenges to provincial and federal jurisdiction in Canada (from indigenous and eco-justice groups), dispossessed residents contest both the categories of “legal/ licit” protest and “formally permitted” claims on strategic, heavily policed, pe...

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