Jannik Schritt

What happens when practices are transferred from one place to another? This question lurks in the background of competing concepts of social order, modernization and globalization: Does it expand a homogeneous space where the functionality of original practices is reproduced? Or does it mix up any settled orders and create a dynamic space of heterogeneous assemblages? We here draw on a mobile ethnography following the travel of ‘mini-publics’, a pratice of organizing public participation, across different situations. We find three different modes by which mobilized elements of this practice (people, texts and artefacts) link up with local configurations: Firstly, colonization is when the original practice is sought to be replicated at the site of destination, reflecting a modern ambition to territorially expand the order that guarantees the original function. Secondly, appropriation is when mobilized elements of practice are left to freely change their meanings and effects as they are absorbed into various local configurations, reflecting a postmodern ambition to dissolve boundaries and hybridize settled orders. Thirdly, commensuration is when elements embedded in different sites are linked with each other through a broader abstract model within which they are positioned as functionally equivalent, reflecting a reflexive-modern ambition to build network infrastructures for integrating diversity. We find that the three modes coexist and thus propose them as components of a broader conceptual repertoire for empirically analysing how transfer happens, how translocal spaces are constituted, and how globalization takes shape, rather than a priori assuming either one, or the other mode as the generally dominant pattern.

In many Muslim countries in West Africa and beyond, "protests against Charlie Hebdo" occurred when citizens went out on the streets following Friday prayers on 16 January 2015. However, only in Niger did these protests turn extremely violent. This report analyses the social, political and religious workings behind the protests in Niger. In doing so, it shows that the so-called "protests against Charlie Hebdo" are only superficially linked to the Muhammad cartoons by the French satirical magazine. Similarly violent protests have occurred in Niger-often in the town of Zinder-for quite different reasons and on different occasions in recent years. The report therefore argues against simplistic notions of religious fundamentalism and shows that the protests can be explained more appropriately in terms of politics and socioeconomic exclusion. " Manuscript

ABSTRACT At the beginning of production, the presence of oil in Niger was characterised by talking oil politics. In this talk, political actors invoked the ‘resource curse’ thesis to question the legitimacy of their opponents through the speech acts of naming, blaming and claiming. Analysing two radio debates from late 2011 about the future fuel price and the prospects of Niger’s oil refinery, I situate the actors’ oil talk according to their positions in the political arena, thereby revealing their personal projects. In doing so, I show that oil talk is enacted in a double sense. Firstly, political actors’ agendas shape their talk and secondly, privileged access to radio is essential in becoming a potent political actor in the talk around oil. Using these findings, I discuss the importance of radio in Nigerien politics and try to decode the ‘how’ of Nigerien politics itself.

We study efforts at promoting deliberative mini-publics as a model of democracy. Our focus is on practices supporting the circulation of know-how for doing mini-publics. In this paper we center on the building of infrastructures for knowledge exchange in and around a network known as Democracy R&D. This is a network of mini-publics practitioners from around the world with the declared goal of adding momentum to democratic innovation by enhancing translocal connections, community building, and knowledge. We look at how the network is organized, how online communication platforms are installed, and how observatory devices draw dispersed practices together into a shared frame of mutual learning and collective action. How do such practices configure the ways in which knowledge can flow across sites? How do they constitute an instrument space, a translocal assemblage of knowing and doing democracy by means of deliberative mini-publics? Using concepts like scopic media and centers of calc...

This article discusses the workings of civil society and its leaders in Niger. Tracing the country's historically sedimented socio-political order, it argues that Niger's civil society is characterized by a twofold embeddedness. Since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, the political game in Niger has been exemplified by co-optation, bribery and corruption. These spoils are a central focus for civil society leaders who have become experienced in the political game. Indeed, actors’ social embeddedness in networks of solidarity demands that they capture and redistribute the spoils they receive. At the same time, however, their social and political legitimacy as civil society leaders rests on their ability to avoid becoming entangled in the game, and to avoid accusations of ‘playing politics’. In other words, civil society activists are embedded in the same social and political structures as state bureaucrats and politicians. In this context, civil society activist...

This article focuses on ‘generic moments of becoming’, historical sedimentation and patterns of recurrent protests to explain the structural drivers that sparked the dramatic increase in urban protests and riots in Niger between 2013 and 2018. It identifies several factors in the country's socio-political configuration as particularly important for understanding the protests: new media and politics by proxy, political machines, the social and political embeddedness of civil society, ethnicity and regional political strongholds, the legacy of Françafrique, religious reform movements, and male youth violence. In examining these drivers, the article aims to provide an informative overview of contemporary politics and society in Niger and to counter culturalist, ahistoric and Eurocentric notions of ‘African disorder’.

Abstract This article explores the emergence of public controversies around the development of a new technological zone and its associated energy infrastructure. It focuses on the moment when Niger became a new oil producer in 2011, and traces its historical genesis, to show how new oil-related infrastructures were contested in a series of socio-technical disputes. These controversies centered on connecting, counting and knowing oil and were produced, at least in part, by the standardizing effects of the oil industry and its role in the formation of a technological zone. The way the disputes unfolded opens up an epistemic window onto larger questions related to the oil industry in Niger. Going beyond the resource curse and rentier state models’ focus on rentseeking and greed, I argue that disputes over the oil infrastructure in Niger reveal what is at the heart of everyday politics and society at the moment of entering the oil-age, namely local content and participation. I identify three common strategies adopted by host countries to gain a foothold in the oil industry and to achieve national development: resource control, sector links, and indigenization. Analyzing these strategies allows us to gain a nuanced understanding of resource politics and standardization in Africa.

The opening of the first oil refinery in Niger at the end of November 2011 spurred protests and violent clashes between youths and police. These protests turned into urban riots in the days following. In this extended case study, I analyse the processual, performative and affective dimensions of the protests and discuss urban protest and contentious politics in Niger against the backdrop of political machines, a hybrid civil society, the dynamics of intersectionality, and the role of ordering technologies. I argue that influential theories of social movements tend to overlook the heterogeneity, contingency and relational processuality of protest movements, and that taken together, these elements are rather best understood using the holistic notion of ‘contentious assemblages’. Keywords: Collective action, social movements, contentious politics, protest, assemblage, affect, oil, Niger

:The article focuses on disputes and protests around the inauguration of Niger’s first oil refinery in late 2011. Drawing on theory of the resource curse and the literature on African politics and the state, it analyzes the transformative potential of oil in Nigerien politics and society, showing how oil was received in an already well-structured political arena, sparking political conflicts rather than conflicts about oil. With the start of oil production adding fuel to these conflicts, it argues that in oil’s immediate presence, historically sedimented politics were played out through the idiom of oil, through which not only is oil-age Niger made a social and political reality, but political difference is also reconstructed, and patterns of domination are reinforced.

Die erweiterte Fallmethode, die von der Manchester Schule in der Ethnologie bereits in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren entwickelt wurde, um gesellschaftliche Konflikte anhand von (Groß-) Ereignissen exemplarisch zu untersuchen, findet in der Protestforschung bislang kaum explizite Anwendung. Der vorliegende Artikel veranschaulicht am Beispiel von Protesten um die Eröffnung der ersten Erdölraffinerie in Niger 2011 methodisches Vorgehen, theoretische Prämissen und Stärken der erweiterten Fallmethode. Der Artikel verfolgt dabei auch das Ziel, die Methodologie der erweiterten Fallmethode im Lichte gegenwärtiger Sozialtheorie neu zu formulieren.

ABSTRACT The article focuses on spatializing struggles in relation to Niger's new oil infrastructure and shows how it turned public and political. Two different but interconnected perspectives are employed: first, a historical perspective illuminates how economic theories of growth, visions of industrialization, desires for energy autonomy, political projects for constitutional change and infrastructural developments in neighbouring countries were, from the very beginning, entangled in Niger's oil assemblage. These entanglements made the petro-infrastructure political even before it had materialized. Second, by focusing ethnographically on the spatial dispersion of the petro-infrastructure over different administrative regions in Niger, the article examines territorializing processes in which temporally and spatially separated histories of marginalization were stitched together to reconfigure collective identities. These dynamics go beyond existing explanations of resource curse theories, showing how oil acts as a catalyst that accelerates pre-existing dynamics, slowly transforming the socio-political configuration in which it operates in the process.

Abstract This paper shows how the development of oil in Niger and Uganda was coupled with standardization and dis/entanglement practices. In Niger, actors contested the lack of standards in the Chinese oil industry but capitalized on the opportunities that linkages to the industry had produced. In Uganda, by contrast, local entrepreneurs objected to the insistence of Western multinational oil companies on international standards, characterizing it as a barrier to the creation of linkages to the oil industry. To conceptualize these radically different outcomes of capitalist expansion, we identify specific socio-political, legal and corporate configurations that shape the way the oil industry operates in particular contexts. Understanding capitalism as assemblages, we acknowledge its heterogeneity, inconsistency and indeterminacy without losing sight of its ‘bigness’.

Im internationalen Wettrennen um Afrikas Ressourcen ist auch Niger ein Erdölstaat geworden. Was bedeutet dies für die Gesellschaft und die Politik in dem westafrikanischen Staat? Aus einer ethnologischen Perspektive wird die materielle und ideologische Bedeutung des Erdöls in den politischen Auseinandersetzungen auf nationaler und regionaler Ebene diskutiert.

In this article, we analyse the political and social process through which Niger has emerged as a new oil state since 2008. Instead of viewing the situation as a clear-cut resource-curse scenario, we see oil as an important, but by no means determining factor in the country's current political workings. Analysing the main features and narratives of the Nigerien political game in this time of incipient oil production, we first of all observe how various political actors, including the government, political parties, civil society, and wealthy businesspeople, transform oil into a political resource by developing particular notions, images, and meanings of it, including scenarios of a resource curse or resource blessing. We thus argue that in the formative moment of Niger becoming a new oil state, oil appears as an idiom within which Niger's current political and social processes are framed.

Jannik Schritt skizziert in seinem Beitrag das Konzept der »contentious assemblages«. Aufbauend auf einer erweiterten Fallstudie über urbane Aufstände um die Eröffnung einer Erdölraffinerie in Niger, wird gezeigt, dass Proteste heterogene sozio-technische Gefüge sind, die sich durch eine Verkettung von Ereignissen im Prozess bilden und wieder zerfallen. Der Beitrag bespricht dabei analytische Werkzeuge aus Assemblage- und Affekttheorie, einen Fokus auf politische Situationen und die erweiterte Fallmethode, um die Heterogenität, sozio-materielle Relationalität, Prozesshaftigkeit und Kontingenz von Protest aufzuzeigen, die mit den etablierten Theorien sozialer Bewegungen oft unterbelichtet bleiben.

:The article examines the spatial, economic, political and socio-cultural transformations induced in the process of Niger becoming a new oil producer in 2011. It does so by analyzing entanglements of Western and Chinese ‘oil zones’ in Niger, which are understood as trans-territorial spaces of assemblage. I argue that the specific properties of these two oil zones have triggered the emergence of a particular ‘petro-political configuration’ in Niger. The argument proceeds through four stages. Firstly, looking at economic entanglements, I argue that the Chinese oil zone enabled the Nigerien economy to develop so-called upstream and downstream oil industries, something the Western oil zone had not allowed. Secondly, analyzing political and socio-cultural entanglements, I argue that, by being co-opted into former Nigerien president Mamadou Tandja’s political project for constitutional amendment, China’s oil diplomacy has become a kind of ‘soft power’ in Niger, something Western political rhetoric has failed to achieve. Thirdly, focusing on geopolitical and military entanglements, I argue that the militarization of global space should ensure capitalist accumulation, especially in situations in which the translation of transnational governmentality has failed. Finally, I use these entanglements to identify the heterogeneous elements of Western and Chinese ‘oil zones’, and the specific capitalist properties these assemblages generate.

This chapter examines new forms of transnational governmentality after 9/11, focusing on Niger and the “global war on terror” in the Sahel. Launching the Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI) and later AFRICOM as new political strategies combining counterterrorism initiatives with energy security issues, the United States argued for a military base in Niger in order to enhance regional peace and security. Based on the Foucauldian concept of “dispositif,” this paper focuses on how transnational political rationalities and governance technologies are subjectified in Niger by politicians, media, civil society, and ordinary people, and thus shape reality. By showing the creative adaptation of political rationalities by Nigerien actors, the (partial) failing of and resistance against governance technologies through subjectification in a transnational context becomes apparent. This failure of “soft” governance technologies simultaneously legitimizes governance technologies of coercion and force. As ...

In many Muslim countries in West Africa and beyond, “protests against Charlie Hebdo” occurred when citizens went out on the streets following Friday prayers on 16 January 2015. However, only in Niger did these protests turn extremely violent. This report analyses the social, political and religious workings behind the protests in Niger. In doing so, it shows that the so-called “protests against Charlie Hebdo” are only superficially linked to the Muhammad cartoons by the French satirical magazine. Similarly violent protests have occurred in Niger – often in the town of Zinder – for quite different reasons and on different occasions in recent years. The report therefore argues against simplistic notions of religious fundamentalism and shows that the protests can be explained more appropriately in terms of politics and socio-economic exclusion.

This article analyses political speeches and practices of three Nigerien presidents between 2008 and 2011. It argues that politics in Niger are characterised by a logic of code-switching between an extroverted rhetoric to gain access to international aid, and an introverted rhetoric that critiques this very international system. This analysis makes a case for studies of African states that do not completely adhere to a perspective of either neocolonial dependency or neopatrimonialism. Rather, as leaders of a Janus-faced state, Nigerien presidents walk a tightrope to manoeuvre between external and internal demands in order to acquire resources and legitimacy in both spheres.

Wie lassen sich Energiewende, Demokratie und Ökonomie zusammendenken, um den Herausforderungen des Anthropozäns zu begegnen? Der Blogbeitrag skizziert aus einer räumlichen Perspektive, wie Energieinfrastrukturen nicht nur bestimmte Produktionsverhältnisse, sondern auch spezifische Herrschaftsmuster begünstigen. Während Kohle und insbesondere Erdöl kapitalistischen Oligopolismus und Autoritarismus befördern, bieten erneuerbare Energien durchaus postkapitalistische und demokratische Potenziale, wenn Energieautonomie mit lokalen Entscheidungsstrukturen und solidarischen Wirtschaftsformen ineinander ginge.

https://sfb1265.de/en/blog/energie-infrastruktur-und-herrschaft/

At the beginning of production, the presence of oil in Niger was
characterised by talking oil politics. In this talk, political actors
invoked the ‘resource curse’ thesis to question the legitimacy of
their opponents through the speech acts of naming, blaming and
claiming. Analysing two radio debates from late 2011 about the
future fuel price and the prospects of Niger’s oil refinery, I situate
the actors’ oil talk according to their positions in the political
arena, thereby revealing their personal projects. In doing so, I
show that oil talk is enacted in a double sense. Firstly, political
actors’ agendas shape their talk and secondly, privileged access to
radio is essential in becoming a potent political actor in the talk
around oil. Using these findings, I discuss the importance of radio
in Nigerien politics and try to decode the ‘how’ of Nigerien
politics itself.

In a context of global inequality, the ontological status of the SARS-CoV-2 virus changes according to the socio-technical network into which it is integrated. Jannik Schritt discusses how the virus travels and translates around the globe in context-specific ways producing different effects and exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. In light of the context-specific transformations of the virus, the question is whether a global standardized approach of isolation and lockdown that builds on a decontextualized equivalence construction is apt to manage the pandemic.

This article discusses the workings of civil society and its leaders in Niger. Tracing the country's historically sedimented socio-political order, it argues that Niger's civil society is characterized by a twofold embeddedness. Since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, the political game in Niger has been exemplified by co-optation, bribery and corruption. These spoils are a central focus for civil society leaders who have become experienced in the political game. Indeed, actors’ social embeddedness in networks of solidarity demands that they capture and redistribute the spoils they receive. At the same time, however, their social and political legitimacy as civil society leaders rests on their ability to avoid becoming entangled in the game, and to avoid accusations of ‘playing politics’. In other words, civil society activists are embedded in the same social and political structures as state bureaucrats and politicians. In this context, civil society activists cannot maintain the moral high ground they often claim to occupy.

This article focuses on ‘generic moments of becoming’, historical sedimentation and patterns of recurrent protests to explain the structural drivers that sparked the dramatic increase in urban protests and riots in Niger between 2013 and 2018. It identifies several factors in the country's socio-political configuration as particularly important for understanding the protests: new media and politics by proxy, political machines, the social and political embeddedness of civil society, ethnicity and regional political strongholds, the legacy of Françafrique, religious reform movements, and male youth violence. In examining these drivers, the article aims to provide an informative overview of contemporary politics and society in Niger and to counter culturalist, ahistoric and Eurocentric notions of ‘African disorder’.

In this article, I discuss the methodological framework of the extended case method in light of both the findings of my case study and contemporary social theory. Taking the inauguration event of the first oil refinery in Niger in 2011 as a starting point from which to analyse the country’s socio-political order, I then extend the situation into time, space and theory to account for oil-induced transformations. To do so, I make use of Burawoy’s four moments of the extended case method but critique and consequently reformulate each moment in order to push them through theories of practice, process, globality and serendipity.

Jannik  Schritt verbindet in »Contentious Assemblages: Gefüge, Affekt, politische Situationen und die erweiterte Fallmethode als Analysewerkzeuge zum Verständnis urbaner Aufstände« die poststrukturalistische Affekt- und Assemblagetheorie von Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari mit dem Konzept der »contentious politics« der Bewegungsforschung. Anhand der Analyse urbaner Aufstände gegen die Eröffnung der ersten Erdölraffinerie in Niger 2011 zeigt er, dass in urbanen Protesten keine gemeinsamen Interessen, gemeinsame Identität oder Solidarität vorhanden sein müssen. Um der Heterogenität, Relationalität, Prozesshaftigkeit und Kontingenz von Protest gerecht zu werden, müsse der gesamte Protestzyklus und die am Protest beteiligten menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Elemente untersucht werden, so sein Argument.

The opening of the first oil refinery in Niger at the end of November 2011 spurred protests and violent clashes between youths and police. These protests turned into urban riots in the days following. In this extended case study, I analyse the processual, performative and affective dimensions of the protests and discuss urban protest and contentious politics in Niger against the backdrop of political machines, a hybrid civil society, the dynamics of intersectionality, and the role of ordering technologies. I argue that influential theories of social movements tend to overlook the heterogeneity, contingency and relational processuality of protest movements, and that taken together, these elements are rather best understood using the holistic notion of ‘contentious assemblages’.

Abstract

Die erweiterte Fallmethode, die von der Manchester Schule in der Ethnologie bereits in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren entwickelt wurde, um gesellschaftliche Konflikte anhand von (Groß-) Ereignissen exemplarisch zu untersuchen, findet in der Protestforschung bislang kaum explizite Anwendung. Der vorliegende Artikel veranschaulicht am Beispiel von Protesten um die Eröffnung der ersten Erdölraffinerie in Niger 2011 methodisches Vorgehen, theoretische Prämissen und Stärken der erweiterten Fallmethode. Der Artikel verfolgt dabei auch das Ziel, die Methodologie der erweiterten Fallmethode im Lichte gegenwärtiger Sozialtheorie neu zu formulieren.
Abstract

The extended case method, developed by the Manchester School of Anthropology in the 1950s and 60s to analyze social and political conflicts on the basis of (major) events, has hitherto received little attention in the context of protest research. Using the example of the protests surrounding the opening of the first oil refinery in Niger in 2011, this article illustrates the methodology, theoretical premises, and strengths of the extended case method. The article thereby also aims at reformulating the methodology of the extended case method in the light of contemporary social theory.

In this article, we analyse the political and social process through
which  Niger  has  emerged  as  a  new  oil  state  since  2008.  Instead  of  viewing  the  situation  as  a  clear-cut  resource-curse  scenario,  we  see  oil  as  an  important, but by no means determining facto
r in the country’s current political  workings.  Analysing  the  main  features  and  narratives  of  the  Nigerien political game in this time of incipient oil production, we first of all observe how various political actors, including the government, political parties, civil society, and wealthy businesspeople, transform oil into a political resource by
developing particular notions, images, and meanings of it, including scenarios of a resource curse or resource blessing. We thus argue that in the formative moment  of  Niger  becoming  a  new  oil  state,  oil  appears  as  an  idiom  within  which Niger’s current political and social processes are framed.

Abstract: The article focuses on disputes and protests around the inauguration of Niger’s first oil refinery in late 2011. Drawing on theory of the resource curse and the literature on African politics and the state, it analyzes the transformative potential of oil in Nigerien politics and society, showing how oil was received in an already well-structured political arena, sparking political conflicts rather than conflicts about oil. With the start of oil production adding fuel to these conflicts, it argues
that in oil’s immediate presence, historically sedimented politics were played out through the idiom of oil, through which not only is oil-age Niger made a social and political reality, but political difference is also reconstructed, and patterns of domination are reinforced.

Résumé: Cet article se penche sur les conflits et les protestations à propos de l’inauguration de la première raffinerie de pétrole du Niger à la fin de 2011. Il s’inspire de la théorie de la malédiction des ressources et de la littérature sur la politique et l’état en Afrique et analyse ainsi le potentiel de transformation généré par le pétrole dans la politique et la société nigérienne, montrant comment le pétrole a été accueilli sur une scène politique déjà bien structurée et engendrant avant tout des conflits politiques plutôt que des conflits à propos du pétrole. Avec le début de la production pétrolière qui a ajouté du carburant à ces conflits, nous faisons valoir qu’avec la proximité directe du pétrole, des politiques historiquement sédimentées se sont réglées à travers l’idiome du pétrole. Non seulement le Niger de l’ère du pétrole devient une réalité sociale et politique définie à travers cet idiome, mais la différence politique est également reconstruite, et les schémas de domination sont renforcés.

Keywords: Oil ; African state ; politics ; resource curse ; Niger

In 2008, Niger signed an oil contract with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) over the Agadem oil block located in the far eastern region of Diffa; and in 2011, they inaugurated the country’s first and only oil refinery near Zinder, the second biggest city, situated in the country’s south-east. While the inauguration had been planned as a major celebration to mark the coming of oil, it soon became a highly contested political event. That day, with new President Mahamadou Issoufou coming from the capital Niamey (located in the west of the country) to Zinder to mark the occasion, youths set alight tire street barricades and clashed with police. The protests turned into violent riots some days later with youth clashing with security forces in the streets, burning down a police station and looting a bank. Two people were killed and several were injured.
Using in-depth ethnographic material collected over 13 months of fieldwork from 2011 to 2014 within the methodological framework of the extended case method, the book takes the event of the oil refinery’s inauguration as point of departure. Based on the tradition of the Manchester School, but reformulated in light of contemporary social theory, the extended case method is used to extend out from the ethnographic description of the inauguration to the historical processes and structural conditions that made the celebration and contestation possible in the first place: first, to the colonial and postcolonial entanglements in the quest for Niger’s natural resources, and then to political conflicts that were played out on the public
political stage after the signing of the oil contract in 2008. The main section of the book then focuses on the political arena that formed in Zinder around the inauguration. It shows the political work that turned the opening ceremony into a highly contested event and thereby contributed to making oil into a social and political reality, reconstructing social and political difference and reinforcing patterns of domination. In the next step, abstracting from the ethnographic material, the historically sedimented patterns of domination in Nigerien politics and society are analyzed and placed in relation to the politics of the oil infrastructure. Doing so enables an understanding of how the spatial dispersion of the petro-infrastructure in Niger over different administrative regions produced and connected different publics. Furthermore, it makes visible how local historical narratives of repression and marginalization were stitched together to reconfigure collective identities. Finally, the transformation of Niger into an oil state is analyzed, mainly focusing on the period from the beginning of oil production in 2011 until the time of writing in 2018, to understand how entanglements of Western and Chinese economic, political and military forces shape such a development. The empirical findings are then used to theorize on the significatory, temporal, material, and spatial dimensions of an oil state in the making, arguing that oil acts as a catalyst that transforms meshwork-like structures or dynamic systems from one state to another. In the case of Niger,
a formerly authoritarian uranium-based state was transformed into a petro-democracy.

Im Jahr 2008 unterzeichneten die nigrische Regierung und die China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) einen Vertrag zur Erdölförderung im Agademblock, der in der fernöstlichen Region Diffa liegt, und eröffneten 2011 die erste und einzige Ölraffinerie des Landes in der Nähe von Zinder, der zweitgrößten Stadt im Südosten des Landes. Während die Einweihung als eine große Feier geplant war, um das Erdölzeitalter in Niger einzuläuten, wurde die Einweihung bald zu einem stark umkämpften politischen Ereignis. Zur zeremoniellen Eröffnung der Feierlichkeiten
reiste der neue Präsident des Niger, Mahamadou Issoufou, aus der Hauptstadt Niamey im Westen des Landes nach Zinder. Zeitgleich setzten Jugendliche in Zinder gegen seine Ankunft Barrikaden in Brand und es kam zu gewaltsamen Auseinandersetzungen mit lokalen Polizeikräften. In den darauffolgenden Tagen eskalierten die Proteste weiter und entwickelten sich zu urbanen Aufständen. Männliche Jugendliche lieferten sich Straßenschlachten mit der Polizei, brannten eine
Polizeiwache nieder und plünderten eine Bank. Es gab zwei Tote und mehrere Verletzte.
Die Dissertation greift auf dichtes ethnographisches Material zurück, das im Verlauf von 13 Monaten Feldforschung zwischen 2011 und 2014 mit der erweiterten Fallmethode gesammelt wurde. Basierend auf der Tradition der Manchester Schule, aber im Lichte zeitgenössischer Sozialtheorie neu formuliert, wird die erweiterte Fallmethode verwendet, um ausgehend von der ethnographischen Beschreibung der Einweihung der neuen Raffinerie zu den historischen Prozessen und strukturellen Bedingungen zu gelangen, die dieses umkämpfte Ereignis erst ermöglichten. Zunächst werden die kolonialen und postkolonialen Verflechtungen auf der Suche nach Nigers natürlichen Ressourcen untersucht. Danach werden die politischen Konflikte
betrachtet, die nach der Unterzeichnung des Erdölvertrages 2008 auf der politischen Bühne im Idiom des Erdöls ausgetragen wurden. Der Hauptteil des Buches konzentriert sich vorrangig auf Zinders politische Arena, die sich um die Einweihung herum formierte. Es zeigt die Politiken verschiedener Akteure, die die Eröffnungszeremonie zu einem höchst umstrittenen Ereignis machten und so dazu beitrugen, Öl in eine soziale und politische Realität zu verwandeln, soziale
und politische Unterschiede zu rekonstruieren und bestehende Herrschaftsmuster zu verstärken. In einem nächsten Schritt werden, abstrahiert vom ethnographischen Material, die historisch sedimentierten Herrschaftsmuster der nigrischen Politik und Gesellschaft analysiert und nachfolgend in Beziehung zur Politik der Erdölinfrastruktur gesetzt. Dies ermöglicht ein Verständnis darüber, wie die räumliche Strukturierung der Erdölinfrastruktur in Niger über verschiedene Verwaltungsregionen hinweg unterschiedliche Öffentlichkeiten hervorgebracht und miteinander verbunden hat. Durch diese Verflechtungen wurden ortsspezifische historische Narrative der Repression und Marginalisierung zusammengefügt und kollektive Identitäten in
diesem Prozess rekonfiguriert. Abschließend wird die Transformation Nigers in einen Erdölstaat analysiert, die sich hauptsächlich auf den Zeitraum vom Beginn der Ölproduktion 2011 bis zum Zeitpunkt des Schreibens im Jahr 2018 konzentriert. So wird nachgezeichnet, wie Verflechtungen von westlichen und chinesischen wirtschaftlichen, politischen und militärischen Kräften diese Transformation formen. Schließlich werden die empirischen Untersuchungen dazu verwendet, um die bedeutungsgebenden, zeitlichen, materiellen und räumlichen Dimensionen eines Erdölstaates im Werden zu theoretisieren. Die Dissertation argumentiert, dass Erdöl als Katalysator wirkt, der netzwerkartige Gefüge oder dynamische Systeme von einem bestehenden Zustand in einen anderen neuen Zustand transformiert. Im Fall von Niger wird dargelegt, wie sich aus einem ehemaligen autoritären Uranstaat eine Petro-Demokratie entwickelt.

In 2011, Niger became a new oil producer. Based on an extended case study of the country’s entry into the oil-age, the book offers a nuanced examination of the local, regional, national and international dynamics that have shaped Niger’s contemporary socio-political configuration. The analysis of the political order in the oil era helps to situate recent developments, such as the military coup of 16 July 2023, within the broader historical continuities and political logics that characterise the country. While the coup has fuelled speculation about possible alliances and motivations linked to the country’s anticipated oil boom, it must be situated within a complex web of political, economic and social dynamics that this book carefully dissects. “Crude Moves” provides a much-needed political anthropology of contemporary Nigerien politics and society, avoiding analyses that overemphasise either oil (the ‘resource curse’ literature) or ‘African’ traditional culture (the ‘neo-patrimonialism’ literature) as the determining factors in the political game. Instead, it analyses how a socio-political configuration has historically emerged over time through introverted and extroverted dynamics.