Sexual violence is more than just a “tool” of war, it is the condition on which global oil politics are made possible. Contemporary narratives of petro-threat in the Niger Delta, constructed through these deeper engagements among state violence, gender, and the colonial imperial logic of protection, continue to inform security operations there. Security forces, private, public, and corporate, all inflict numerous forms of violence on Delta communities as a means to protect the industry and keep Nigeria’s oil flowing through the global political economy. 43 Consequently, the Delta is perpetually embroiled in relationships of War/non-war. Sokari Ekine regards petro-violence as a constant state of war, in which systemic segregations of thought and practice enable contemporary representations of the Delta to be both sensational moments of violence requiring U.S. interventions and the everyday practices of violence perpetuated by U.S. interventions.44 According to Ekine, petro-communities have to “live with the U.S.” on a daily basis because of its involvement in securitizing oil in the Delta and supporting military occupation by the Nigerian state.45 In other words, today, as in the past, the security forces of the state and interstate system protect the oil industry through the regulation of petro-communities.46 Regulation relies on a constant fear of injury and danger, which are substantiated as real through material acts of ethnoracial, gender, sexual, environmental, economic, and political violence. The militarization of the Delta, under the rubric of petro-security, exacerbates violence and extends it into the multifaceted spaces of Delta life, as the interstate system rapes, kidnaps, beats, burns, and kills in petro-communities in order to secure global petroleum interests. 47 These are some of the systemic practices of (post)colonial state-building that create and maintain explicit links among the U.S., Delta communities, and petro-sexual violence. This brief history of oil and state building offers one moment of contradiction to the New York Times representation of gender violence and petroleum. Violence-against-women is not a new phenomena to oil politics, nor is gender violence a result of petro-violence. Gender violence and petro-violence are intimately linked through histories of nation building. If we can disentangle (or disabuse) the perception that sexual-gender violence and petroleum violence are separate and distinct entities, we can also destabilize claims that petro-violence is the result of ethnic-terrorist-gang activity endemic to the Delta and that women are perpetual victims of such violence and who are in need of U.S. imperial saving. In the next section, I further destabilize current representations of petro-violence that rely upon the configuration of threatening ethnic male youths and perpetual women-as-victim who is separate from petro-politics. Reconfiguring Geographies of Violence The framework of petro-sexual politics can help us to demystify arguments which frame present gender violence and petroleum violence as separate, teleological, or spectacular moments. Such desegregation is not the convention where oil production is considered. Petropolitics is generally represented, studied, and defined as what Terisa Turner and M.O. Oshare call “a male preserve,”48 in which men are the only legible actors, a convention even extended to illegitimate positions of criminality. In such discourses and representations as that in the NY Times article this chapter begins with, women are located outside the conditions of petroleum, unless they have been actively mobilized as bearers of violence. The violence against women is only presented through the frameworks of domestic violence that refuse systemic connections to global oil politics. As I discussed thus far, the colonial restructuring of gender roles in conjunction with the naturalizations of sexual violence through militarized state ideology fosters the increase of violence-against-women on all social scales in times of “war” and in “every day practice” (Mama 1997b; Agozino 2005). Domestic violence as an “every day practice” of violence-against-women is a process of petro-politics.49
Sexual violence is more than just a “tool” of war, it is the condition on which global oil politics are made possible. Contemporary narratives of petro-threat in the Niger Delta, constructed through state violence, gender, and the colonial imperial logic of protection continue to inform security operations there Security forces inflict numerous forms of violence on Delta communities as a means to protect the industry and keep Nigeria’s oil flowing through the global political economy. the Delta is perpetually embroiled in relationships of War/non-war Ekine regards petro-violence as a constant state of petro-communities have to “live with the U.S.” on a daily basis because of its involvement in securitizing oil in the Delta and supporting military occupation by the Nigerian state the security forces of the state and interstate system protect the oil industry through the regulation of petro-communities The militarization of the Delta, under the rubric of petro-security, exacerbates violence and extends it into the multifaceted spaces of Delta life, as the interstate system rapes, kidnaps, beats, burns, and kills in petro-communities in order to secure global petroleum interests