Containing political violence to what end? : the political economy of amnesty in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta

In 2009, the Nigerian government introduced a new amnesty programme to help manage the Niger-Delta oil conflict. The latter has largely been between the Niger Delta militants versus multinational oil companies and the government. Unlike an earlier small-scale amnesty programme that was introduced in Bayelsa State between 2004 and 2005, which clearly failed to reduce widespread violence, the 2009 large-scale amnesty programme led to a period of relative peace in the Niger Delta. The programme initially appeared to have defied a common argument; namely, that an improvement in low human development or people’s living conditions is an important step in managing resource-related conflicts, especially where resource revenues have failed to impact positively on the local population. This dissertation argues that, instead of successfully managing the Niger Delta conflict and engaging with all the key actors in peace-building, the 2009 amnesty temporarily contained violence without institutional reforms and led to an “amnesty trap”. In so doing, the analysis disentangles the ideas of conflict management and containment, which are often used interchangeably, and offers a critique of a common understanding of a “conflict cycle” – of conflict management, containment, and resolution. More specifically, the dissertation uses the limited access order (LAO) explanatory framework of North et al. (2009) to show the extent to which institutions have helped to shape Nigerian political elites’ behaviours and decisionmaking that affect the socio-economic realities of actors in the country and undermine peacebuilding in the Niger Delta. In this vein, the study explains why political elites’ rush to tackle violence by settling ex-militants and their commanders through an unconditional amnesty has failed to change the dynamics of Nigeria’s oil conflict. Through the amnesty, ex-militant commanders (who used to be enemies of the state) came to accumulate huge wealth and to also occupy influential political roles. This containment proved short lived, however, as violence resumed through new militant groups in 2016. In turn, the dissertation investigates how measures applied by the Nigerian government to manage the Niger-Delta conflict have actually prepared the grounds that might further fuel the conflict trap. By drawing on a triangulation of primary and secondary sources, the analysis demonstrates why amnesties will always be insufficient to manage violence when they are implemented without significant institutional reforms notably, improving the rule of law for elites, developing perpetually lived forms of elite organisations, and consolidating political control of the military