Natural Resources and Conflict Dynamics in Federal Countries

“This book’s historical and institutional comparison of the entrenched politicization of Nigerian revenue sharing and the relative predictability and flexibility of Canadian fiscal federalism is bold, nuanced, rigorous, and persuasive. This is an important new book, and the definitive study of Nigerian federalism from a comparative perspective.” —Rotimi Suberu, Bennington College, USA, and Editor of Regional and Federal Studies "This book featuring an original comparison of Canada and Nigeria expands our knowledge on non-violent territorial conflict around oil in federations. A very rich study featuring extensive and methodical research." —André Lecours, University of Ottawa, Canada "This book gives us an expansive—and valuable—notion of conflict, encompassing not just violence but jurisdictional struggles over both resources and their revenues, as well as fiscal transfers. This proves immensely useful for understanding the dynamics of intergovernmental federal conflict over oil. It should be essential reading for scholars of federalism or the politics of resource extraction." — Lori Thorlakson, University of Alberta, Canada This book examines the dynamics of oil conflicts within the context of federalism in Canada, an older federation with broadly a decentralized institutional design governing oil, and Nigeria, a newer federation with a largely centralized design. It traces resource ownership, control or regulation, and revenue sharing conflict over time, and provides a focused comparison of conflict over the role of oil in intergovernmental fiscal transfers in both countries.The book provides a much-needed corrective to conventional, static notions of oil conflict as either violent or nonviolent outcomes by carefully analyzing the evolution and ebbs and flows of conflicts hidden within conflict patterns that appear to be self-reinforcing and entrenched. It demonstrates the centrality of endogenous processes of federal institutional development, especially federal institutional (structural and ideational) rules about oil itself, to conflict dynamics. It also highlights how these conflict patterns are shaped and reshaped by the renegotiation and reinterpretation of institutional rules over time in response to historical temporalities and shocks, political agency, and changing socioeconomic realities. Eyene Okpanachi is Research Project Lead in the Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Canada, and Research Fellow at the University of South Wales, UK.