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How Business Makes Bandits: Business, Power and Accountability in the Niger Delta

  • Dates: 22 November 2011
  • Time: 13.00 - 14.30
  • Location: IDS Convening Space

About the presentation
 
Kate Meagher, IDS Alumni and lecturer in Development Studies at LSE, presented the seminar 'how business makes bandits: Informal enterprise, unemployment and instability in Nigeria'.
 
This seminar compared two areas of south-eastern Nigeria in which business expansion has led to conflict and lawlessness rather than enhancing stability.  Departing from Olsen's concept of 'stationary bandits', Meagher drew on events in the Niger Delta and in the Igbo manufacturing clusters in the nearby town of Aba to show that business can also serve to create banditry.  The Delta case explored the role of multinational oil companies in exacerbating banditry in the area through community securitisation strategies, while the Aba case will trace how efforts of dynamic small producers to protect property rights was transformed into a reign of violent vigilantism and kidnapping that has largely destroyed the local business environment.  These cases were used to argue that there is nothing inherently stabilising about markets, and that much depends on how business actors are embedded in local economic and power relations.
 
Listen to the speakers
 
Listen to Kate Meagher (speaker), Stephen Spratt (moderator) and Cassandra Biggs (attendee) discuss what they think the biggest challenge is for business operating in areas of conflict; the global implications and what they took from the seminar. Hear the interviews on Mixcloud above.
 
Key points from the seminar
  • Involvement of business in governance nothing new – ‘distressingly familiar’
  • Globalisation drives wedge between regulatory influence and societal commitment
  • Shell: power to reshape regulatory dynamics, but lacks embeddedness in community
  • Bakassi Boys:  embeddedness without power to reshape regulatory dynamics
  • Instead of civilising role in conflict zones, often end up with predatory governance and 21st century concession economies.

Listen to Kate Meagher's seminar on how business makes bandits: business, power and accountability in the Niger Delta.

About the speaker

Kate Meagher has a DPhil in Sociology from Oxford, and lectured in Rural Sociology at the Institute for Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria from 1991-1997.  She has published widely on the changing character of the informal economy in contemporary Africa, and the implications of economic informalisation for development, governance and globalisation.

Her work is based on extensive empirical research in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, focusing on a range of informal economy issues including informal institutions and non-state governance, cross-border trading systems and regional integration, the urban informal sector, rural non-farm activities, small-enterprise clusters, and informal enterprise associations.  Her current research interests include comparative approaches to African informal economies; informalisation, political voice and citizenship; hybridity, taxation and governance, and the impact of China on African informal economies.  She is the author of Identity Economics:  Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria (James Currey, 2010).

For more information on this seminar, or any others in the series, please contact Vivienne Benson. This event is part of the 'Conflicting Interests' Business and Development seminar series, hosted by IDS' Globalisation team.