Stella is a lawyer with an over fifteen-year career trajectory that has spanned legal practice and international development. The latter has involved policy advisory support, research, and advocacy around public policy reforms in West Africa.  Her research is structured around a court case that was brought before a London High Court, involving an oil spill in one of Nigeria’s oil producing communities.

The global architecture around international development is currently nudging corporations towards playing more significant roles, than before, in delivering national and regional development targets. Against this backdrop, this research asks, ‘what does the social contract mean within a context of petro-capitalism’? For communities that are rich in natural resources but challenged by ethnic, linguistic, and other heterogeneities, this reveals new routes for challenging and holding powerful actors to account, while also indicating potentially problematic challenges to the nation-state.

Stella’s research is being supervised by Professor Jeremy Allouche and Dr Philip Mader. Her working PhD title is “The Politics of Natural Resource Governance in the Niger Delta: Then and Now’.