DEVELOPMENT AND GOVERNMENTALITY*

Michael Watts
Institute of International Studies, University of California,
Berkeley, California, USA
Editors Note: The following is the second in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
Lecture Series. It was presented at a special session of the Association of American Geographers
Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, 22 March 2002.

The subjectivity of individuals, the socalled speakers and hearers of political

discourse, who actually, or even ideally,
populate a state, needs to be
understood in terms of enunciative
modalities the statuses, sites, and
positions of their existence as
political subjects. Enunciative
modalities refer to the ways a
discursive practice is attached to
bodies in space (Clifford, 2001:56).
Governmental thought territorializes
itself in different ways We can
analyze the ways in which the idea of a
territorially bounded, politically
governed nation state under sovereign
authority took shape One can trace
anomalous governmental histories of
smaller-scale territories and one can
also think of these [as] spaces of
enclosure that governmental thought
has imagined and penetrated how
[does it] happen that social thought
territorializes itself on the problem of
[for example] the slum in the nineteenth
century (Rose, 1999:34-36)?
An invitation to celebrate a birthday the 50th
anniversary of the Singapore Journal of
*

I have deliberately retained the spoken character of

the lecture which I delivered at the Los Angeles
Association of American Geographers Meeting.

Tropical Geography in this case is inevitably

an enticement to return to the museum, always
disorganised and incomplete, that is our
memory of the past. To reflect upon the
achievements and the complex genealogies of
a journal now a half-century old, born within
the British imperium in 1953 as The Malayan
Journal of Tropical Geography (MJTG), is to
conjure up, for me at least, the name of Paul
Wheatley, a founding editor of MJTG and a
teacher of mine at University College London
in the late 1960s. Recollecting the first
occasion on which I heard him speak a
characteristically vivid account of the historical
geography of Malaya is to relive my own
fascination with the tropics and to revisit
Wheatleys own scholarly luminosity, a lecture
laced with words I did not understand,
delivered in a wonderful west country brogue
with which I could identify (that originated not
far from my own village) and, above all, exuding
a theoretical and historical lan that registered
his own cosmopolitan intellectual biography.
In his own way, Wheatley was a central figure
in the genesis of the very idea of a tropical
geography one could of course add other
names such as Pierre Gourou, Keith Buchanan,
Benny Farmer, Dudley Stamp the genealogy
of which has hardly begun to be unravelled
(Driver & Yeoh, 2000). Wheatleys brilliant
career he died in 1999 after completing his
magisterial book on the Muslim city
embodies, more than anything else, an
enduring concern with other models: of the

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24(1), 2003, 6-34

Copyright 2003 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Watts.p65

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Development and Governmentality

city, of space, of economy and society. And it
is to this question of other models, of the
endless search for alternatives in my case
alternative models of development that I
have been asked to speak today (Victor Savage
timidly suggested in his invitation that I should
dilate on the small problem of the decentring
of geographical discourse from its AngloAmerican centre).
To pose the question of development
alternatives in the contemporary moment is,
necessarily, to confront the events of
September 11th 2001. The indelible images of
aircraft plunging into the Twin Towers, and of
their horrific, vertiginous collapse, has brought
the development realities of the West Bank,
Egypt, West Asia and the Indonesian
archipelago to the American heartland with a
terrifying bonus: namely, an anti-globalisation,
anti-imperialistic resistance movement armed
with all the knowledge and weaponry of
twenty-first century cybercultural
modernity. Political Islam or Islamism by
which I mean quite specifically a social
movement to reappropriate a collective Muslim
identity that simultaneously breaks with
religious tradition and challenges assimilative
modernism as a basis for an alternative
sociopolitical project (Gole, 2002; see also
Halliday, 2002; Ruthven, 2002) can, indeed
must, be read as a sort of alternative yet
distinctively modern vision of development.
September 11th in all of its horror cannot be
fully understood outside of the crisis of the
modern and the crisis of development.
All of this was brought home powerfully to
me in the wake of the New York attacks as I
received emails from friends in Nigeria where
I have worked for three decades who took
heart from the fact that many Muslims could
be seen driving around Kano and other centres
in the Muslim north with Osama bin Laden
posters plastered in the rear windows of their
cars. None of these engineers, doctors and
academics was planning to sign up for Florida
pilot-training schools, nor did they exalt in the
carnage and horror of September 11th . But the

Watts.p65

multiplication and reproduction of popular

Osama imagery across the Quran Belt
speaks powerfully to why September 11th is as
much a problem of development, and the
failings of secular nationalism and the
postcolonial state in particular, as it is a
national security concern.
The political field of which the likes of AlQaeda or Hib al-Tahir al-Islami are part,
represents a cultural and political movement
that contains universalistic aspirations and yet
remains resolutely particular and local
(Lapidus, 2001). Islamism is a sort of articulation
the language is from Stuart Hall (1996) who
refers to the simultaneous process of the
interpellation of an identity (i.e. Muslim) and
of a political project (i.e. the return of the
caliphate) that has produced a militant Muslim
vanguard that must be located on a larger
landscape of global Islamic revival. In a
universe marked by locality and diversity,
generalisation about Islam is always
treacherous, but there surely are important
discursive shifts and debates within what has
been called the Quran Belt and its 1.2 billion
Muslims. One aspect of this revival is
Islamism, a series of movements of modern,
educated and urbanised groups rather than the
ulema and Sufi brotherhoods, typically maledominated and seeking to reinstitutionalise
their conception of Islamic laws, institutions
and other imagined practices of the first
Muslims (Ruthven, 2002). Like other
movements, there are a variety of political and
strategic tactics employed, from armed
insurrection (jihad) to building a parallel civil
society (virtually everywhere), to the voting
booth (e.g. in Malaysia). Islamism is
concentrated among urban youth caught, as
Lubeck and Britts (2001:6) put it, in the miasmic
webs of multiple post-colonial crises. Political
Islam, then, represents a shift in popular
consciousness from a secular nationalist vision
to an Islamic one. As Olivier Roy (1994:4) says,
Islamists received their training not in religious
schools but in colleges and universities where
they rubbed shoulders with Marxist militants
whose ideas they borrowed and injected with

2/28/2003, 9:40 AM

Watts

Quranic terminology. The huge increase in

urban unemployed graduates provided a fertile
ground from which such radical and militant
anti-imperialist ideas could draw sustenance.
Islamism, of course, operates at many levels:
the global ummah, reform of the territorially
defined nation state, the moral economy of the
urban neighbourhood; this in part explains its
appeal, its reach and its robustness (Lubeck,
1999).
Islamism, one can say, has seized the
imagination of sections of urbanised youth
by throwing down the gauntlet of antiimperialist populist nationalism (Lubeck, 1999;
Halliday, 2002): it is what Immanuel Wallerstein
(1990) calls an antisystemic movement
opposing US-led globalisation. It is another
sort of anti-globalisation movement on the
same ground, but with a very different political
disposition, as the battles of Seattle, Prague
and Genova, in other words. To grasp
Islamisms appeal and dynamics requires,
however, an understanding in my account,
of four key vectors of the crisis of the secular
nationalist development project within
Islamdom, and within the Middle East and
West Asia in particular. First, the political
economy of the oil boom produced rentier
capitalism of a decrepit and undisciplined sort
as well as a profound sense of moral decay
and state delegitimation prompted by the
1970s commodity booms. Second, vast
financial resources that flowed to the Saudi
and Gulf states exposed immigrant labour to
Wahabbi and other Islamist doctrines and, in
turn, funded global networks of associations,
charities as well as, in some cases, militant
cells. Third, the intersection of the 1990s petrobust and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF)/World Bank-led austerity and neoliberal
reforms further pulverised already crippled
Middle East and West Asian states, throwing
millions into poverty and further eviscerating
state services and welfare provision (in which
Muslim civic organisations came to play an
enormous role as the state contracted and
withdrew). And fourth, geopolitics the Cold
War struggles in Afghanistan, the US support

Watts.p65

of Israel and of West Bank settlements, and

the collapse of the Soviet-socialist bloc
provided a setting in which Islamist ideas
flowered in the rich loam of US hegemony that
included financial and military support as much
as political abandonment and cultural
imperialism. The historical confluence of these
powerful forces all saturated with an
American presence in the form of oil
companies, global regulatory institutions,
foreign investment and military commitments
crippled, one might say destroyed a secular
nationalist project that was, in any case, of
shallow provenance.
Islamism, then, reflects a failure of
postcolonial development but, paradoxically,
represents a peculiar sort of challenge to what
has emerged in the last decade or so as the
alternatives to development or postdevelopment school those for whom
development is a catastrophically failed
enlightenment project (see Rahnema, 1997 for
a review). Critical and culturally informed work
on development during the 1980s and
thereafter turned, in large measure, on seeing
the development project itself as a form of
modernity (Parajuli, 1991; Escobar, 1992;
Sachs, W., 1992; Ferguson, 1999; Mills, 1999;
Rofel, 1999). Development rehearses, in a
virtually unchanged form, says Akhil Gupta
(1998:36) the chief premises of the selfrepresentation of modernity: progress,
science, reason, universal history. This selfrepresentation of modernity by the West via
the Other travels in a variety of colonial and
postcolonial modalities, and in so doing
becomes an inescapable feature of everyday
life (Gupta, 1998:37) in the Third World. An
archaeology of development demands a full
grasp of location, situating it historically (in
tracing its complex genealogy and meanings,
particularly to the eighteenth century),
geographically (in relation to sites of
productions, routes of movement and patterns
of reception), and culturally (in relation to the
Wests self-representation, of reason and the
Enlightenment). Associated with a number of
public intellectuals and activists largely but

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Development and Governmentality

not wholly from the South, it is a variegated
community that has marched under the sign
of alternatives to development.
The intellectual field which constitutes
these radical critiques of development one
thinks of the work of Arturo Escobar, Gustavo
Esteva and Wolfgang Sachs, and the Postdevelopment Reader (Rahnema, 1997) as its
compendium is replete with the language of
crisis, failure, apocalypse and renewal, and,
most especially, of subaltern insurgencies
which are purportedly the markers of new
histories, social structures and political
subjectivities (Pieterse, 1996). The Delhi
Centre for Developing Societies to invoke
one such important and visible cluster of
erstwhile anti-development Jacobins, latterly
referred to by Fred Dallmayr (1996) as a Third
World Frankfurt School includes among its
pantheon the likes of Ashis Nandy, Rajni
Kothari and Shiv Visvanathan, who in their
own way represent a veritable heteroglossia
of alternative voices from the South,
encompassing a massive swathe of intellectual
and political territory on which there is often
precious little agreement. Much but by no
means all of this critique draws sustenance
from the idea of the third leg of modernity
the dark side of modernity and the
Enlightenment which produced the new
human sciences and the disciplines more
than the Marxian leg of capitalist exploitation
and the Weberian (and Habermasian) leg of
the colonisation of the lifeworld by
monetisation, rationalisation, calculation and
bureaucratisation. This tale of disenchantment
carries the timbre of earlier critiques of
development most vividly of the 1960s, but
also of the 1890s and earlier, as Michael Cowen
and Robert Shenton (1996) have admirably
demonstrated in Doctrines of Development
readily apportioning blame to the multinational
behemoths (corporate and multilateral) of
global capitalism. Running across this body
of work is the notion of development as an
essentially western doctrine whose normalising assumptions must be rejected: it
[development] is the problem not the solution

Watts.p65

(Rist, 1997). The sacred cows for Esteva and

Prakash (1998) they are the myth of global
thinking, the myth of the universality of
human rights and the myth of the individual
self must be substituted by grassroots
postmodernism. By the late 1990s, much of
this discourse and activism morphed into, or
met up with various anti-globalisation
movements and the proliferation of
transnational activism and virtual organising,
what the Rand Corporation dubbed NetWar
(see Routledge, 1994).
Escobars (1995) book Encountering
Development is the most developed account
of thinking about the development industry
in grand poststructural terms, offering a vision
of subaltern and indigenous social movements
as vehicles for other ways of doing politics
(non-party, non-mass, cultural and selforganising), and of doing postdevelopment
(decentralised, community-based, participatory, indigenous and autonomous).
Interestingly, this postdevelopment movement
met up and cross-fertilised with a largely
western academic development community
energised by what was dubbed the impasse
in development debate of the 1980s and 1990s
(Schuurman, 1993; Booth, 1994). In effect this
was a debate within the circumference of
Marxist development theory, between its
neo and structural schools, over the
extent to which Third World socialism suffered
from many of the trappings of industrial
capitalism (and many others unique to it!), and
a theory captured by economic essentialism,
class reductionism, and teleological thinking.
One can argue whether this characterisation
of Marxist development theory is plausible, or
indeed an adequate account of marxism itself
in its panoply of guises (Watts, 1989). But the
impasse debate spawned important new
intersections between postcolonial and
postmarxist thinking, providing a fertile ground
on which development could be refigured by
a careful reading of Ranajit Guha, Gyatri Spivak
or Edward Said (see Gupta, 1998). There is
little theoretical coherence in the impasse work
actor-network approaches, a focus on

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Watts

identity politics and the cultural construction

of class, a shift to responsible politics
(Booth, 1994) but Corbridge (1998:95) is
nonetheless right to emphasise that it (like the
postdevelopment work) reinforces the need
to see the ways in which the West represents
its nonwestern others and forces us to ask
What is development? Who says that is what
it is? Who aims to direct it and for whom?.
Much of this critical work which represents
precisely an effort to decentre development and
geographic knowledge from the AngloAmerican centre (see Slater, 1993) harkens
back in its invocation of crisis to the 1960s, but
radically questions the state as a necessary and
appropriate vehicle for national aspirations; and
the universalistic (and anti-imperialistic) claims
for liberation are no longer axiomatic and taken
for granted. Locality, culture and authenticity
are the forms of identification which stand in
opposition to states, and the very fictions of
the nation state and nationalism are supplanted
by what Lehmann (1997:670) calls multinational populist subcultures in search of
cultural difference (cultural difference is at the
root of post-development as Escobar
(1995:225) says). One might say that the practical
and strategic content of this vision is rooted
firmly in the soil of civil society rather than in
the state or market. But it is civil society of a
particular sort: of grassroots movements, of
subaltern knowledges, of cultural economics,
of hybrid indigenous politics, of the defence
of the local, of cybercultural posthumanism. As
Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001:178) put it:
It recognizes that predevelopment models
of economy persist in hybrid form
through their transformative engagement
with modernity, and advocates creating
conditions conducive to local and
regional experiments that do not
necessarily conform to a single,
overarching development scheme.
It is incontestable, of course, that the growing
clamour to provincialise Europe, to see
outside and beyond the hegemony of the

Watts.p65

West, to abandon the myth of development,

and so on, were forged and perhaps reached
their apogee in the crucible of what Perry
Anderson (2000:15) calls the neo-liberal grand
slam, that is to say, the disappearance of the
entire political horizon of the 60s generation
and of massive political defeat for the Left.
But what has all of this to do with September
11th ? It seems to me that September 11th is part
of an extraordinarily powerful (transnational
and global) decentring of discourse from an
Anglo-American centre (if I may return to my
brief), much deeper and more compelling than
what passes for postdevelopment or
grassroots postmodernism. It is global yet
anti-imperialist, universal yet particular,
historically framed yet unequivocally modern.
And, relatedly, political Islam seems to meet
all of the preconditions of hybrid forms of
alternative development, and would fit quite
comfortably in Gibson-Graham and Ruccios
frame of reference. If development, as Gupta
(1998) says, is orientalism transformed into a
science for action in the contemporary world,
is not Islamism a vivid exemplar of postdevelopment, a case of religion transformed
into cultural politics? If development has its
theoreticians, its institutions and apparatuses,
Islamism has its organic intellectuals (e.g. Sayid
Qutb), its Islamic banking and charities, its legal
framework (sharia) and a model of corporatist
social and economic transformation. None of
this is to endorse political Islam (I most certainly
do not) or to tag postdevelopmentalists as no
different from Islamic fascists (to deploy
Christopher Hitchens (2002) ugly appellation)
but, rather, to acknowledge that there has been
a tectonic anti-development shift that is to
say, an alternative development involving a
decentring of certain sorts of discourse and
practice away from secular nationalism; a
global and transnational set of movements,
often hybrid, modern and cosmopolitan in
character, and anchored in the cultural,
historical and local. At the very least one needs
to view the questions of alternatives, and
developments failures, through the optic of
the catastrophe of the Twin Towers. Is not

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Development and Governmentality

Islamism a radical provocation for the way we
think about alternatives?

DEVELOPMENT AND THE

MODERN
The problem of poverty is centered
around two closely related subjects;
pauperism and political economy
they formed part of one indivisible
whole: the discovery of society
(Polanyi, 1957:103).
My brief here is not to explore the relations
between Islamism and alternative development
but to deploy Islamism as an entry into the
crises of the postcolonial state, to locate them
on a larger landscape of developmental political
economy and to explore them under the sign
of governmentality and rule. The backdrop
for this rather limited excursion into
contemporary development is a growing
acknowledgement of the limits of economism
the so-called post-Washington consensus.
Former World Bank Vice President Joseph
Stiglitzs (2002) new book, Globalization and
its Discontents, is simply one highly visible
questioning of the worst of market utopianism.
Karl Polanyi is very much back in vogue
indeed, a new edition of The Great
Transformation has a foreword penned by
Stiglitz himself (Polanyi, 2001). But the
questioning of economism and market utopias
has a number of critical iterations. One is the
resurgence of geography. A major proponent
is none other than economist Jeffrey Sachs,
formerly of Harvard and now of Columbia
University, a widely-applauded figure in the
debates over economic reform in the postsocialist bloc (as a fearless advocate of shock
therapy), a sometime critic of the World Bank
and IMF austerity programmes, and latterly a
tireless promoter of the idea that geography
causes poverty. Virtually all of the tropics
remain poor, says Sachs (2000:9), because
climate accounts for a quite significant
proportion of cross-national and crossregional disparities of world income. Global
production is highly concentrated in the

Watts.p65

11

coastal regions of the temperate zones

(Sachs, J. et al., 2001:73), the proximate
countries, to employ his lexicon. As his
former Harvard colleague (and ex-Marxist),
Ricardo Haussman (2001) puts it,
underdevelopment is a case of bad latitude.
The new geography of development
bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared
Diamond (1997) and The Wealth and Poverty
of Nations by David Landes (1999) both extol
the virtues of advantageous geography in the
long march of economic development
endorses what the then US Treasury Secretary
(and now President of Harvard University)
Lawrence Summers dubbed in the summer of
2000, the tyranny of geography (cited in
Haussman, 2001:45). Isolation, poor soil, erratic
climate, inaccessibility, low agricultural
productivity and infectious disease mutually
reinforce one another in a vicious cycle of
destitution and backwardness. Geography
need not be destiny, they say, but for much of
the world it simply is. For the geographically
challenged, the prognosis is a good dose of
globalisation (Hausmann, 2001:53). If
geography has a new cachet in economics,
political science cannot of course be far behind.
Princeton political scientist Jeffrey Herbst
(2000:156-169), for example, sees in the
weakness of African postcolonial states more
or less favorable geography. It is the size
and shape of inherited national territories,
coupled with population density space and
human fecundity once again that determine
the broadcasting of political authority and
political stability. In its national designs,
Herbst argues, Africa leaves much to be
desired.
For the geographer, the return to the role
of geography in human affairs or more
properly to nature, location and topography
as determinants of growth and welfare simply
recapitulates ideas of great genealogical
complexity and historical depth (Glacken,
1967). Not surprisingly, then, the Sachs/
Harvard/Columbia model, in its emphasis on
ecology, disease and isolation, takes us back
rather than forward, indeed it carries a pungent,

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Watts

late-Victorian imperial odour. So, one might

well ask, is this not the Dark Continent all over
again? Well, yes and no. In the Sachs account,
nature and geography take pride of place, but
unlike the discourses of a century ago, the
role of culture is for the most part invisible.
Hausmann, Sachs and friends do indeed refer
to social institutions and markets as
necessary building blocks for growth, but the
tropes of sloth, fecundity, racial inferiority and
an irredentist anti-market mentality the
hallmarks of the Victorian imperium are
largely absent. Geography is, rather, a vast
wrecking ball, its biophysical powers capable
of social havoc: It is no accident says Sachs
(2000:15), in an astonishing aperu, that
genocide took place in Rwanda! Central
African ethnic bloodletting, produced by a
lethal combination of organic nationalism and
fascist politics, is here read as the product of
geographical disadvantage. Running
through the new economic geography of
development is a bow to Ellsworth
Huntington (1972), a cavalier ratification of
economics and economic growth as the sine
qua non of development, and an
unquestioned hymnal to the Olympian powers
of modern science and technology.
A second critical reflection on economism
is the resurgence of culture. Samuel
Huntington (2000), in Culture Matters, sees
culture, understood as values, attitudes and
beliefs, as a key variable in the determination
of democratisation and economic growth. Bad
attitude (not latitude) is growth-inhibiting.
Others reject the cultural dispositions
argument of Huntington and rather see culture
in Weberian terms, as a way of addressing how
institutions are embedded (Castells, 1998).
Indeed, the focus on institutions and on pathdependency is precisely an attempt to grapple
with the lack of political economic
convergence within so-called emerging
markets. Postsocialist transitions are
heterogeneous in form, and this diversity
matters because of culture and history and
the place-specific path dependencies it
generates (Stark & Bruszt, 1998). A concern

Watts.p65

with Polanyi, embedded institutions and

multiple (and often non-optimal) capitalisms
has produced a now large body of work on
governance and development, much of it
concerned with trust, self-organising networks
and social capital (see Woolcock & Narayan,
2000). Governance here refers to the structure
or patterns of relations between various
political actors, that is, the outcome of all
these interactions and interdependencies; the
self organizing networks that arise out of the
interactions between a variety of organizations
and associations (Rose, 1999:17). In this
sociological view, governance in the modern
sense is about the intersection of the public,
private and voluntary, in which there is no clear
sovereign authority, and in which trust,
conventions, networks and non-formal
obligations and reciprocities figure centrally.
Questions of governance, and sensitivity
to multiple paths of capitalism, are powerful
antidotes to the absurdities of high
economism. But there is a danger, as Hart (2002)
has signalled recently, that one loses sight of
the interconnection across divergences,
ignores the ongoing struggles and processes
by simply reading path-dependency from
history, seeing power in institutions as
exercised only through rules and norms
(culture). It is against these lacunae that I
wish to return to governance, but from a
Foucauldian perspective, deploying some of
the recent work by Nikolas Rose (1999) and
Michael Clifford (2001). Development
practices can, in this framework, productively
be construed as forms of what Michel Foucault
called government. To understand development is to grasp how the possible field of
action of others (Foucault, 1982:221) is
structured through a variety of technics and
micropolitics of power (from the map, to the
national statistics, to forms of surveillance) to
accomplish, or attempt to accomplish, stable
rule through certain sorts of governable
subjects and governable objects (Scott, 1995;
Li, 1996). Escobar embarked precisely upon
this project of course, but his study was
empirically weak, insensitive to the multiple

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Development and Governmentality

trajectories of peripheral capitalist development, and inattentive to what Polanyi (1957)
called the double-movement, the struggles
and countermovements around forms of rule;
what Foucault (1982:220-21) calls the conduct
of conduct. In Encountering Development
(Escobar, 1995), it is the claustrophobic
closure of the development project its
singular character and its oppressiveness
that is so striking, not the singular complexities,
and frequent failures, of securing rule,
producing governable subjects and
governable spaces. I want to try and ground
such spaces within the circumference of a
specific style of imagining (Anderson, B.,
1983), and within the logic of a particular form
of capitalism associated with a very particular
resource, namely, oil.

GOVERNMENTALITY AND
GOVERNABLE SPACES
The contact point at which individuals
are driven and know is tied to the way
they conduct themselves and know
themselves. This can be called government (Foucault, 1980:7; emphasis in
original).
I am taking the idea of governmentality from
the work of Foucault (see 1984, 2000; also
Gordon, 1980; Barry et al., 1996), for whom it
implies an expansive way of thinking about
governing and rule in relation to the exercise
of modern power. Government for Foucault
referred famously to the conduct of conduct,
a more or less calculated and rational set of
ways of shaping conduct and of securing rule
through a multiplicity of authorities and
agencies in and outside of the state and at a
variety of spatial levels. In contrast to forms
of pastoral power of the Middle Ages from
which a sense of sovereignty was derived,
Foucault (2000:211) charted an important
historical shift, beginning in the sixteenth
century, toward government as a right manner
of disposing things so as to not lead to the
common good but to an end that is
convenient for each of the things governed.

Watts.p65

13

At the centre of government lay a complex

notion of the governance of things. As he put
it:
On the contrary, in [the modern exercise
of power], you will notice that the
definition of government in no way
refers to territory: one governs things.
But what does this mean? I think this is
not a matter of opposing things to men,
but rather of showing that what
government has to do with is not
territory but, rather, a sort of complex
composed on men and things. The
things, in this sense, with which
government is to be concerned are in
fact men, but men in their relations,
their links, their imbrication with
those things that are wealth,
resources, means of subsistence, the
territory with its specific qualities,
climate, irrigation, fertility, and so on;
men in their relation to those other
things that are customs, habits, ways
of acting and thinking and so on; and
finally men in relation to those still
other things that might be accidents
and misfortunes such as famines,
epidemics, death and so on What
counts is essentially this complex of
men and things; property and territory
are merely one of its variables
(Foucault, 2000:201-22; emphasis
added).
The new practices of the state, as Mitchell
Dean (1999:16) says, shape human conduct by
working through our desires, aspirations,
interests and beliefs for definite but shifting
ends. Unlike the new governance literature of
Putnam (2000) and others, for whom governance
is the self-organising networks that arise out of
the interactions between a variety of
organisations and agencies, governmentality
for Foucault refers not to sociologies of rule
but, to quote Rose (1999:21), to the:
studies of stratums of knowing and
acting. Of the emergence of particular

2/28/2003, 9:40 AM

14

Watts
regimes of truth concerning the
conduct of conduct, ways of speaking
truth, persons authorised to speak
truth. of the invention and
assemblage of particular apparatuses
for exercising power they are
concerned with the conditions of
possibility and intelligibility for ways
of seeking to act upon the conduct of
others.

It was the task of Foucault to reveal the

genealogy of government, the origins of
modern power and the fabrication of a modern
identity. The conduct of conduct
governmentality could be expressed as
pastoral (classically feudal in character), as
disciplinary (the institutions of subjection from
the prison to the school) or as biopower (the
administration of forms of life). Modern
governmentality was rendered distinctive by
the specific forms in which the population and
the economy were administered, specifically
by a deepening of the governmentalisation
of the state (see Foucault 2000) that is to
say, how sovereignty comes to be articulated
through the populations and the processes
that constitute them. What was key for
Foucault was not the displacement of one form
of power by another, nor the historical
substitution of feudal by modern governmentality, but the complex triangulation
involved in sustaining many forms of power
put to the purpose of security and regulation:
Accordingly, we need to see things not
in terms of the replacement of a society
of sovereignty by a disciplinary society
and the subsequent replacement of a
disciplinary society by a society of
government; in reality one has a
triangle, sovereignty-disciplinegovernment, which has as its primary
target the population, and as its
essential mechanism the apparatuses
of security I want to demonstrate the
deep historical link between movement
that overturns the constants of
sovereignty on consequence of the

Watts.p65

10

problem of choices of government; the

movement that brings about the
emergence of population as a datum,
a field of intervention the process
that isolates the economy as a specific
sector of reality; and political
economy as the science and the
technique of intervention of the
government in that reality. Three
movements government, population,
political economy that constitute from
the eighteenth century onward a solid
series, one that even today has
assuredly not been dissolved
(Foucault, 2000:219, emphasis added).
Governing, that is to say, what authorities want
to happen, in relation to what problems and
objectives, and through what tactics, can be
assessed as the analytics of government
(Rose 1999:21). Dean (1999: 20-27) has referred
to such analytics as the processes by which
we govern and are governed within different
regimes, and the conditions under which they
emerge, operate and are transformed. Dean
notes that there are four dimensions to
government so construed. The first he calls
forms of visibility (the picturing and
constituting of objects). The second is the
techne of government (through what means,
mechanism, tactics, and technologies is
authority constituted and rule accomplished).
The third, the episteme of government (what
forms of thought, knowledge, expertise,
calculation are employed in governing and how
is form given to what is governable). And the
fourth, forms of identification (the forming of
subjects, selves, agents and actors, in short,
the production of governable subjects).
Some of these Foucauldian ideas have
already been productively deployed in the
understanding of nature and resource
management what one might call green
governmentality and the relations between
nature and nationalism (see Braun, 2000;
Drayton, 2000). I want to explore the relations
between two aspects of governmentality. One
is what Foucault (2000) explicitly refers to as

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Development and Governmentality

relations between people and resources (in my
case people and oil in the Niger Delta). The
other, taken from Roses excellent exegesis on
Foucault, is his notion of governable spaces
as they emerge from the four analytics of
government detailed above (see Li 2001, 2002;
Moore 2000). For Rose (1999:32), governable
spaces, and the spatialisation of government,
are modalities in which a real and material
governable world is composed, terraformed,
and populated. The scales at which
government is territorialised territory is
derived from terra, land, but also terrere, to
frighten are myriad: the factory, the
neighbourhood, the commune, the region, the
nation. Each of these governable spaces has
its own topology and is modelled, as Rose
(1999: 37) puts it (through systems of cognition
and remodelled through government practice),
in such a way that demands how such topoi
have emerged: the social thought and practice
that has territorialised itself upon the nation,
the city, the village or the factory. The map
has been central to this process as a mode of
objectification, marking and inscribing, but
also as a little machine for producing
conviction in others (Rose, 1999:37). But, in
general, it was geography that formed the art
whose science was political economy (Rhein,
cited in Rabinow, 1984:142). Modern space
and modern governable spaces were produced
by the biological (the laws of population which
determine the qualities of the inhabitants) and
the economic (the systems of the production
of wealth). Governable spaces necessitate the
territorialising of governmental thought and
practice but are simultaneously produced as
differing scales by the cold laws of political
economy (Rose, 1999:39).
I want to think about the genesis of
differing sorts of governable spaces in Nigeria
as part of a larger landscape of what Dean
(1999) calls authoritarian governmentality,
that is to say, an articulation of generalised
uses of the instruments of repression with
biopolitics it regards its subjects capacity
for action as subordinate to the expectation of
obedience (Dean, 1999, p. 209), as he says. I

Watts.p65

11

15

want to root these spaces and forms of power

in the logic of petro-capitalist development,
that is to say a particular sort of extractive
development which is generative of differing
sorts of scale, or the politics of scale as Neil
Smith (1992) calls it. Extractive politics has
been the subject of some recent theoretical
work within the field of development theory,
most notably by Paul Collier (2000) and his
World Bank project, and political scientists
Michael Ross (2001) and Michael Klare (2001).
The latter see oil as a dwindling resource
and a key strategic one that will necessarily
be generative of interstate conflict. For Ross,
oil is a resource curse due to its rentier effect
(low taxes plus patronage) and its repression
effect via military power. Collier sees oil as
central to the economics of civil war. It
permits, indeed encourages, extortion and
looting through resource predation (at least
up to the point where 26 per cent of GDP is
dependent on resource extraction!). The
commodity in these analyses possesses epic
powers. My analysis conversely sees and
charts the relations between oil and violence,
but does so through examining how forms of
governable (or non-governable) spaces are
generated by the evil twins of authoritarian
governmentality and petro-capitalism.

ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE
The normal exercise of hegemony is
characterized by the combination of
force and consent, in variable
equilibrium, without force predominating too much over consent
[But] between force and consent
stands corruption-fraud, that is the
enervation and paralysing of the
antagonist or antagonists (Antonio
Gramsci, cited in Anderson 2002:8).
One of the great deltaic regions in the world,
the Niger Delta is a vast sedimentary basin
constructed over time through successive
thick layers of sediments dating back 40-50
million years to the Eocene epoch. An immense
coastal plain covering almost 70,000 km2, its

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Watts

geographical perimeter extends from the Benin

River in the west to the Imo River in the east,
and from the southernmost tip at Palm Point
near Akassa to Aboh in the north, where the
Niger River bifurcates into its two main
tributaries. A classic arcuate delta, the Niger
Delta is also endowed with very substantial
hydrocarbon deposits. Crude oil production
currently runs at almost two million barrels per
day, roughly 90 per cent by value of Nigerian
export revenues. Nigeria is not only the largest
producer of petroleum in Africa and among the
worlds top ten oil producers but, in the wake
of September 11th and the current Middle East
crisis, is also being pursued by the Bush
administration as a major supplier for the US
market.
The contemporary geostrategic significance of the Niger Delta has emerged from
an astonishing ethnic and linguistic
complexity and, paradoxically, from a history
of recent economic and political irrelevance.
There are five major linguistic categories (Ijoid,
Yoruboid, Edoid, Igboid and Delta Cross), but
each embraces a profusion of ethnolinguistic
heterogeneity. The history of the Delta is in
some respects captured in this cultural
complexity since precolonial trade patterns
across the region reflected a rich and complex
social division of labour rooted in occupation,
ethnicity and micro-ecology. These
commercial and exchange relations were
radically compromised, however, by the
Portuguese in the fifteenth century, and
subsequently by the French, Dutch and British
slavers. The rise of the so-called legitimate
trade under British auspices in the nineteenth
century the genesis of rubber and cocoa
which displaced slavery after abolition gave
rise to an Oil Rivers Protectorate in which a
vital commercial life flourished. The
establishment of the Nigerian colony and the
imposition of indirect rule in the early 1900s
marked an end to the brief period of
commercial vitality. For most of the first half
of the twentieth century the Delta was an
economic and political backwater. In the
gradual transition to independence in the

Watts.p65

12

1950s, the so-called ethnic minorities voiced

their concerns to the departing British
administrators that their interests in a Nigerian
federation dominated by three ethnic
majorities (the Hausa, the Yoruba and the Ibo)
were to all and intents and purposes invisible.
What was true at the moment of imperial
departure only became more so during the
long march of the postcolonial period.
The onset of commercial petroleum
production in 1956 in the heart of the Delta
discovered in Oloibiri in current Baylesa State
seemed to hold out the promise of rapid
development for the ethnic minorities. But the
presence of transnational oil companies in
joint ventures with the Nigerian state (the
Nigerian National Petroleum Company
(NNPC)), instead, produced enormous
environmental despoilation and a crisis of
forms of traditional livelihood. By the 1970s
and 1980s, a number of ethnic communities
had begun to mobilise against the so-called
slick alliance of oil companies and the
Nigerian military. The Movement for the
Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) led by
Ken Saro-Wiwa (1995) challenged Shell for its
environmental despoilation and human rights
violations and the Nigerian state for its unjust
control of their oil. Saro-Wiwa and the
MOSOP leadership were hung by the Nigerian
military in 1995, but since that time the Niger
Delta has become a zone of intense conflict as
more oil-producing minorities (e.g. the Adoni,
Itsekiri and Ijaw) clamour for compensation
and for the recognition of their claims for
resource control. More recently, substantial
coverage in the world press has been devoted
to a group of Delta women who have occupied
Chevron oil refineries, demanding company
investments and jobs for indigenes (New York
Times, 13 August 2002).
Currently, the Niger Delta stands at the
ground zero of contemporary Nigerian politics.
Marginalised and excluded from the benefits
of oil, it is located nonetheless at the
crossroads of the four most pressing political
issues in the federation. First, the efforts led

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Development and Governmentality

by a number of Delta states for resource
control, which in effect means expanded local
access to oil and oil revenues. Second, the
struggle for self-determination of minority
people and the clamour for a sovereign national
conference to rewrite the constitutional basis
of the federation. Third, a crisis of
governability in the region as a number of state
and local governments are rendered helpless
by militant youth movements, growing
insecurity and state violence. And, finally, the
emergence of what is called a South-South
Alliance linking the hitherto excluded oilproducing states in a bulwark against the
ethnic majorities.
Let me say a brief word about oil and its
relationship to Nigerian political economy (see
Khan, 1994; Forrest, 1995; Watts, 2000; Obi,
2001). Nigeria is a multi-ethnic state and was a
British colony until 1960. Colonial indirect rule
assumed the form of a decentralized
despotism (Mamdani, 1996) orchestrated
through regional rule by the three ethnic
majorities. The backbone of each region was
an export commodity and a government
Market Board. At independence, the Muslim
northerners held a fragile hegemony over the
regions, and it was into this weak federal
system that commercial oil was inserted. The
break-up of the federation in 1967 following a
sorry trail of military coups was precipitated
by the secession by Biafra (the former Eastern
Region), a conflagration in no small measure
the product of the new politics of oil. A federal
victory assured the integrity of Nigeria and
the continued pre-eminence of oil. Indeed,
within a few years of the end of the war, oil
was firmly in the national drivers seat. In the
wake of the oil boom of 1973, Nigeria was
awash in petro-dollars and embarking upon a
ferocious programme of modernisation and
ambitious state-led development. Nigeria, in
short, assumed the mantle of an oil nation.
But what began as a boom and untempered
ambition in the 1970s ended with the bust in
1985 with military-led austerity and World
Bank structural adjustment programmes. In
1999, after a terrifying period of military

Watts.p65

13

17

authoritarianism under Sani Abacha, Olesegun

Obasanjo became the first democratically
elected President in 20 years. Over three
turbulent decades, as civilian and military
governments came and went, oil trickled
further into the veins of the Nigerian body
politic.
I want to make two important points about
oil. The first is that it matters profoundly to
the character and dynamics of Nigerian
development. Oil is of course a biophysical
entity (a subterranean fluid capable of being
pumped and transmitted); it is also a commodity
that enters the market with a price tag and, as
such, is the bearer of particular relations of
production. Not least, oil also harbours
fetishistic qualities; it is the bearer of meanings,
of hopes, of expectations of unimaginable
powers: unprecedented wealth, avarice and
power. Not unexpectedly, oil crops up
constantly in the popular Nigerian imagination
(see Watts, 1994), resplendent with all manner
of brilliant and unctuous qualities. In virtue
of the multifaceted thing called oil, we can come
to appreciate Coronils (1997:49) claim that oil
illustrates the importance and the mystification
of natural resources in the modern world. The
second point about oil is that Nigerian petrocapitalism contained a sort of doublemovement, a contradictory unity of capitalism
and modernity captured in the fact that oil
production in Nigeria has always been a joint
venture, currently with 14 transnational
companies, in which joint operating
agreements determine the distribution of
royalties and rents. On the one hand, oil was
a centralising force that rendered the state more
visible and globalised, underwriting a process
of secular nationalism and state building. On
the other, a corrupt and undisciplined oil-led
development, driven by an unremitting political
logic of ethnic claims-making, was to fragment,
pulverise, and discredit the state and all of its
forms of governance. It produced a set of
conditions which compromised and, I would
argue, radically undermined the very tenets of
the modern nation state. Coronil (1997: 390391) refers to this conundrum as the Faustian

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Watts

trade of money for modernity, which in

Venezuela brought the illusion of development. In Nigeria, too, the double-movement
brought illusion but, more importantly,
produced forms of governable spaces that
questioned the very idea of Nigeria, spaces
that generated forms of rule, conduct and
imagining at cross purposes with one another,
antithetical to the very idea of a coherent
modern nation state that oil, in the mythos of
the West at least, represented.
On this petroleum-inspired canvas, let me
now turn briefly to governable spaces, and to
three in particular that I shall refer to as the
space of chieftainship, the space of
indigeneity and the space of the nation state.

Force and domination: The space of

chieftanship
Nembe community in Bayelsa State stands at
the originary point of Nigerian oil production.
In the 1950s, the Tennessee Oil Company (an
American company) began oil explorations
there but oil was not found until much later,
when Shell DArcy unearthed the Oloibiri oil
field in Ogbia. Subsequent explorations led to
the opening of the large and rich Nembe oil
fields near the coast in Okpoama and TwonBrass axis. Currently, the four Nembe oil fields
produce approximately 150,000 barrels of high
quality petroleum through joint operating
agreements between the NNPC and Agip and
Shell. If Nembe is the ground zero of oil
production, it is also a theatre of extraordinary
violence and intra-community conflict, the
result of intense competition over political turf
and the control of benefits from the oil
industry. The violence can be traced back to
the late 1980s when the Nembe council of
chiefs acquired power from then king, Justice
Alagoa Mingi IX, to negotiate royalties and
other benefits with the oil companies. The
combination of youth-driven violence and
intense political competition has transformed
Nembes customary system of governance and
set the stage for further challenges to the
traditional authority of chieftainship (see
Kemedi, 2002; HRW, 2002). 1

Watts.p65

14

Oil became commercially viable in 1970s,

but to grasp its transformative effects on
Nembe politics and community that is, to its
genesis as a distinctive governable space
requires an understanding of customary rule
and chieftainship in the Delta. Indirect rule in
the colonial period certainly left much of the
Niger Delta marginalised and isolated, but it
also, in the name of tradition, built upon and
frequently invented chiefly powers of local rule
which in the Nembe case was grafted onto a
deep and complex structure of kingship and
gerontocratic rule. To understand the
dynamics of Nembe as a governable space,
recall that land lay in hands of customary
authorities (notwithstanding the fact that the
1969 Petroleum Law granted the state the
power to nationalise all oil resources). Land
rights, and therefore claims on oil royalties,
were from the outset rooted in the amayanabo
(king) and, derivatively, the subordinate
powers, namely the council of chiefs and the
executive council. Historically the Nembe
community possessed a rigid political
hierarchy consisting of the amayanabo
presiding over, in descending order, the chiefs
(or heads of the war canoe houses)2 elected
by the entire war canoe houses constituted
by their prominent sons. Although the chiefs
were subservient to the amayanabo, they
acted as his closest advisers, supported the
amayanabo in the event of military threat, and
in turn were responsible for electing the
amayanabo from the Mingi group of houses,
that is to say, from the royal line. The current
Nembe council of chiefs is the assemblage of
the recognised chiefs of Nembe chalked by
the king.
By the late 1980s, a widespread sense of
malaise coloured Mingi rule. Accordingly, the
Nembe monarchs ineffectiveness in dealing
with the oil companies led to a radical
decentralisation of his powers in 1991 to the
council of chiefs headed by Chief Egi Adukpo
Ikata. Insofar as the council now dealt directly
with Shell and handled large quantities of
money paid by the oil companies, competition
for election to the council was intensified as

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Development and Governmentality

various political factions struggled for office.
By 2000, the council had expanded from 26 to
90 persons. Coeval with the evisceration of
kingly powers, the deepening of the council
mandate and the expansion of council
members was a subtle process of youth
mobilisation. In an age-graded society like
the Nembe Ijaw, youth refers to persons
typically between their teens and early forties
who, despite whatever achievements they may
have obtained (university degrees, fatherhood,
and so on), remain subservient to their elders.
Central to any understanding of the emergence
of a militant youth in Nembe town was the
catalytic role played by a former company
engineer with Elf Oil Company, Mr. Nimi B.P.
Barigha-Amage. He deployed his knowledge
of the oil industry to organise the youths of
the Nembe community into a force capable of
extracting concessions from the oil companies,
in essence by converting cultural organisation
into protection services. Chief Ikata was quick
to exploit the awareness and restiveness of
the youths to pressure Shell into granting
community entitlements. A pact between Chief
Ikata and the young engineer was in effect
instituted: the engineer supplied the youths
with information regarding community
entitlements, and the chief deployed his
knowledge of military logistics to organise the
shutting down of flow stations, the seizure of
equipment and sabotage (Alagoa, 2001; HRW,
2002).
Armed with insider knowledge of the
companies and an understanding of a loosely
defined set of rules regarding company
compensation for infringements on community
property, Barigha-Amage pushed for the
creation of youth cultural groups who
gradually, with the support of some members
of the council of chiefs, intermediated with oil
companies and their liaison officers, and
manipulated the system of compensation in
the context of considerable juridical and legal
ambiguity. Liaison officers, colluding with
community representatives, were able to
invent ritual or cultural sites that had
ostensibly been compromised or damaged by

Watts.p65

15

19

oil operations, for which monies exchanged

hands. As the opportunities for appropriating
company resources in the name of
compensation became visible through the
success of the cultural groups, other sections
of the youth community began to organise in
turn around clan and familial affiliations. In
1994, for example, a group called House of
Lords (Isongoforo) was created by a former
university lecturer, Lionel Jonathan; a year later,
in 1995, Mrs. Ituro-Garuba, wife of a well-placed
military officer, established Little Fishes
(Agbara-foro). Inevitably, with much at stake
financially, and control of the space between
community and company in the balance,
conflicts within and among youth groups
proliferated and deepened. In turn, growing
community militancy spilled over into often
violent altercations with the much-detested
mobile police (Mopos) and local government
authorities. The regional state and governor
attempted to intervene as conditions
deteriorated but a government report, on
which such action was predicated, was never
released for political reasons. A subsequent
banning of youth groups had, as a result, no
practical effect (HRW, 2002).
Slowly, the subversion of royal authority,
the strategic alliances between youth and
chiefs, and the growing (and armed) conflict
between youth groups for access to Shell
resulted in the ascendancy of a highly militant
Isongoforo. In an environment of rampant
insecurity and lawlessness, of occupations and
closures of flow stations, and of tensions
between the companies, service companies
and local security forces, Isongoforo were
provided stand by payments by the
companies, that is to say hired for protection
purposes, and at the same time colluded with
the community liaison officers to invent
compensation cases. Isongoforo occupied the
centre of a new governable space which they
ruled through force rather than any sense of
consent or customary authority. This quasimafiosi was funded by the large quantities of
monies that they commanded from the
companies, and by the arms which they

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Watts

controlled. This volatile state of affairs

collapsed dramatically as local resentments
and struggles proliferated. In February 2000,
a Peoples Revolution overthrew
Isongoforo, ostensibly precipitated by the
humiliation of the council of chiefs at the
hands of Shell (backed by the intimidating
Isongoforo forces). The chiefs now
orchestrated the occupation of flow stations
and undermined the powers of Isongoforo
by recruiting and supporting other youth
groups. By May 2000, Isongoforo had been
sent into exile, but they were promptly
replaced in the wake of the return of BarighaAmage as high chief of Nembe by his own
cultural group, Isenasawo/Teme. Teme
instituted a rule of terror and chaos far worse
than their predecessors. It, too, proved
unstable in the context of excessive youth
mobilisation, and split into two factions
producing, in short order, coups, counter
coups and much bloodshed. A government
Peace Commission was established in
January 2001 in a desperate effort to bring
peace to one of the jewels in the oil-producing
crown (Alagoa, 2001).
Much of this later violence (after 1996) was
largely unregulated by the state authorities
because of its concurrence with the 1999
elections in which some of the key youth
leaders were expected to deliver votes for the
incumbent gubernatorial race. In the creation
of what in effect was a sort of vigilante rule,
there were complex complicities between
chiefs, youth groups, local security forces and
the companies. The occupation of oil flow
stations (for purposes of extortion) were often
known in advance and involved collaboration
with local company engineers; youths were
de facto company employees providing
protection services, and local compensation
and community officers of Shell and Agip
produced fraudulent compensation cases and
entitlements. Nembe, a town with its own long
and illustrious history and politics, had
become a sort of company town in which
authority had shifted from the king to warring
factions of youth who were, in varying ways,

Watts.p65

16

in the pay of and working in conjunction with

the companies. The council of chiefs stood in
a contradictory position, seeking to maintain
control over revenues from the companies and
yet intimidated and undermined by the militant
youth groups on whom they depended. In
the context of a weak and corrupt state, the
genesis of this power nexus bears striking
resemblances to the genesis of the Mafia of
nineteenth-century Sicily (Blok, 1974).
In Foucauldian terms, what I have described
is the displacement of a specific form of
pastoral power (chieftainship) by a governable
space of civic vigilanteism, a sort of thickening
of civil society that the likes of Robert Putnam
(see 2000) would presumably not endorse.
Civic powers have expanded by overthrowing
a territorial system and a gerontocratic royal
order. Youth mobilisations whose political
affiliations and ambitions were in any case
complex because they reflected an unstable
amalgam of clan, family and local electoral
loyalties had thrown up an identity and
subject that was indisputably revolutionary,
representing an unholy alliance between civic
organisations (presenting themselves as
cultural organisations) and private companies.
Rule in Nembe is a realm of privatised violence;
an unstable hegemony held in place by
domination and force. The analytics of
government here turn on what Foucault (2000)
calls men in their imbrication with wealth and
resources institutionalised through forms
of calculability, techne, visibility, and so on
that emerge from the legal and company
dispositions to regulate local populations,
backed up by the forces of repression. The
governable subject is de facto a sort of
employee, and rule is a Gramscian War of
Position (Gramsci, 1971). Culture serves as the
form by which company rule is experienced
(violent youth groups) but in a way that
renders the space increasing ungovernable.

Persuasion and consent: The space

of indigeneity
The Niger Delta is a region of considerable,
perhaps one should say bewildering, ethno-

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linguistic complexity. The Eastern Region, of
which the Delta is part, is dominated
statistically by the Ibo majority, but there is a
long history of excluded ethnic minorities in
the Delta, dating back at least to the 1950s
when the Willinck Commission took note of
the inter-ethnic complexity of the region.
Throughout the colonial period prior to the
arrival of commercial oil production, there had
been efforts by various minorities, who saw
themselves as dominated by the Ibo, to
establish Native Authorities of their own. In
the 1960s, prior to the outbreak of civil war
two charismatic local figures, both Ijaw
Nottingham Dick and Isaac Boro declared a
Delta Republic, a desperate cry for some sort
of political inclusion that lasted a mere 12 days.
The ill-fated Delta Peoples Republic in 1966
was the forerunner of what is today a prairie
fire of ethnic mobilisation by the historically
excluded minorities now tagged as
indigenous in order to capture the political
and legal legitimacy conferred in 1995 by the
International Labor Organization of the United
Nations (ILO Convention 169) (Nelson, 1999;
see also Kinsbury, 1999; Brysk, 2000). The
paradigmatic case in the Delta is the struggle
by Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni/MOSOP. I
shall concentrate here on their case simply as
a way of revealing a rather different sort of
governable space, one marked by ethnic
subjects and indigenous territory.
The Ogoni are typically seen as a distinct
ethnic group consisting of three subgroups
and six clans dotted over 1,050 km2 of creeks,
waterways and tropical forest in the northeast
fringes of the Niger Delta. Located
administratively in Rivers State, a Louisianalike territory of some 50,000 km2, Ogoniland is
of one the most heavily populated zones in all
of Africa. Indeed, the most densely settled
areas of Ogoniland over 1,500 persons per
km2 are the sites of the largest wells. Its
customary productive base was provided by
fishing and agricultural pursuits until the
discovery of petroleum, including the huge
Bomu field, immediately prior to independence.
Part of an enormously complex regional ethnic

Watts.p65

17

21

mosaic, the Ogoni were drawn into internecine

conflicts within the Delta region, largely as a
consequence of the slave trade and its
aftermath, in the period prior to arrival of
colonial forces at Kano in 1901. The Ogoni
resisted the British until 1908 (Naanen, 1995)
but, thereafter, were left to stagnate as part of
the Opopo Division within Calabar Province.
As Ogoniland was gradually incorporated
during the 1930s, the clamour for a separate
political division grew at the hands of the first
pan-Ogoni organisation, the Ogoni Central
Union, which bore fruit with the establishment
of the Ogoni Native Authority in 1947. In 1951,
however, the authority was forcibly integrated
into the Eastern Region. Experiencing
tremendous neglect and discrimination,
integration raised longstanding fears among
the Ogoni of Ibo domination.3 Politically
marginalised and economically neglected, the
Delta minorities feared the growing
secessionist rhetoric of the Ibo and,
consequently, led an ill-fated secession of their
own in February 1966. Ogoni antipathy to what
they saw as a sort of internal colonialism at
the hands of the Ibo continued in their support
of the federal forces during the civil war. While
a Rivers State was established in 1967 which
compensated in some measure for enormous
Ogoni losses during the war the new state
recapitulated in microcosm the larger national
question. The new Rivers State was multiethnic but presided over by the locally
dominant Ijaw, for whom the minorities felt little
but contempt.4
During the first oil boom of the 1970s,
Ogonilands 56 wells accounted for almost 15
per cent of Nigerian oil production,5 and in the
past three decades an estimated US$30 billion
in petroleum revenues have flowed from this
Lilliputian territory. It was, as local opinion had
it, Nigerias Kuwait. Yet according to a
government commission, Oloibiri, where the
first oil was pumped in 1958, has no single
kilometre of all-season road and remains one
of the most backward areas in the country
(Furro, 1992:282; see also Douglas & Okonta,
2001). Rivers State saw its federal allocation

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22

Watts

fall dramatically in absolute and relative terms.

At the height of the oil boom, 60 per cent of oil
production came from Rivers State but it
received only five per cent of the statutory
allocation (roughly half of that received by
Kano, Northeastern State, and the Ibo
heartland, East Central State). Between 1970
and 1980 it received in revenues one-fiftieth
of the value of the oil it produced. Few Ogoni
households have electricity, there is one doctor
per 100,000 people, child mortality rates are
the highest in the nation, unemployment is 85
per cent, 80 per cent of the population is
illiterate and close to half of Ogoni youth have
left the region in search of work. Life
expectancy is barely 50 years, substantially
below the national average. If Ogoniland failed
to see the material benefits from oil, what it
did experience was an ecological disaster
what the European Parliament has called an
environmental nightmare. The heart of the
ecological harms stem from oil spills either
from the pipelines which criss-cross Ogoniland
(often passing directly through villages) or
from blow outs at the wellheads and gas
flaring. As regards the latter, a staggering 76
per cent of natural gas in the oil-producing
areas is flared (compared to 0.6 per cent in the
US). As a visiting environmentalist noted in
1993, in the Delta, some children have never
known a dark night even though they have no
electricity (Village Voice, 21 November
1995:21). Burning 24 hours a day at
temperatures of 13-14,000o C, Nigerian natural
gas produces 31.75 million tonnes of carbon
dioxide and 10.89 million tonnes of methane,
more than the rest of the world (and rendering
Nigeria probably the biggest single cause of
global warming) (Hammer 1996). The oil
spillage record is even worse. There are
roughly 300 spills per year in the Delta, and in
the 1970s alone the spillage was four times the
much publicised Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.
In one year alone, almost 700,000 barrels were
soiled according to a government commission.
Ogoniland itself suffered 111 spills between
1985 and 1994 (Hammer, 1996:61). Figures
provided by the NNPC document 2,676 spills
between 1976 and 1990, 59 per cent of which

Watts.p65

18

occurred in Rivers State (Ikein, 1990:171), of

which 38 per cent were due to equipment
malfunction.6 Between 1982 and 1992, Shell
alone accounted for 1.6 million gallons of
spilled oil, 37 per cent of the companys spills
worldwide. The consequences of flaring,
spillage and waste for Ogoni fisheries and
farming have been devastating. Two
independent studies completed in 1997 reveal
total petroleum hydrocarbons in Ogoni streams
at 360 and 680 times the European Community
permissible levels (RAN, 1997; HRW, 1999).
The hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the
Ogoni nine in November 1995 accused of
murdering four prominent Ogoni leaders and
the subsequent arrest of 19 others on treason
charges represented the summit of a process
of mass mobilisation and radical militancy
which had commenced in 1989. The civil war
had, as I previously suggested, hardened the
sense of external dominance among Ogonis.
A supreme cultural organisation called
Kagote, which consisted largely of traditional
rulers and high ranking functionaries, was
established at the wars end and, in turn, gave
birth in 1990 to MOSOP. A new strategic phase
began in 1989 with a programme of mass action
and passive resistance on the one hand, and
on the other, a renewed effort to focus on the
environmental consequences of oil (and
Shells role in particular) and on group rights
within the federal structure. Animating the
entire struggle was, in Letons words (cited in
Naanen, 1995:46), genocide being committed
in the dying years of the twentieth century by
multinational companies under the
supervision of the Government. A watershed
moment in MOSOPs history was the drafting
in 1990 of an Ogoni Bill of Rights (Saro-Wiwa,
1992, 1995). Documenting a history of neglect
and local misery, the Ogoni Bill took head-on
the question of Nigerian federalism and
minority rights. Calling for participation in the
affairs of the republic as a distinct and
separate entity, the Bill outlined a plan for
autonomy and self determination in which
there would be guaranteed political control
of Ogoni affairs by Ogoni people... the right to

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Development and Governmentality

control and use a fair proportion of Ogoni
economic resources... [and] adequate
representation as of right in all Nigerian
national institutions (Saro-Wiwa, 1990:11). In
short, the Bill of Rights addressed the question
of the unit to which revenues should be
allocated and, derivatively, the rights of
minorities (HRW, 1999; Okonta, 2002).
In spite of the remarkable history of MOSOP
between 1990 and 1996, its ability to represent
itself as a unified pan-Ogoni organisation
remained an open question. There is no panOgoni myth of origin (characteristic of some
Delta minorities), and a number of the Ogoni
subgroups engender stronger local loyalties
than any affiliation to Ogoni nationalism. The
Eleme subgroup has even argued on occasion
that they are not Ogoni. Furthermore, the
MOSOP leaders were actively opposed by
elements of the traditional clan leadership, by
prominent leaders and civil servants in state
government, by some critics who felt SaroWiwa was out to gain cheap popularity
(Osaghae, 1995:334) and, not least, the youth
wing of MOSOP, which Saro-Wiwa had made
use of, and which the leadership were often
incapable of controlling. What Saro-Wiwa did
was to build upon over 50 years of Ogoni
organising and upon three decades of
resentment against the oil companies to
provide a mass base and a youth-driven
radicalism and, it must be said, an
international visibility capable of challenging
state power. Yet, at its core, the indigenous
subject and the indigenous space was
contentious and problematic. Ike Okonta
(2002) has brilliantly showed how, in the Ogoni
case, it proved unravelled into fragments of
class, clan, generation and gender.
What sort of articulation of indigenous
identity and political subjectivity did SaroWiwa pose? What sort of governable space
did this represent? It was clearly one in which
territory and oil were the building blocks upon
which ethnic difference and indigenous rights
were constructed. And yet it was an unstable
and contradictory sort of articulation. First,

Watts.p65

19

23

there was no simple sense of Ogoni-ness, no

unproblematic unity, and no singular form of
political subject (despite Saro-Wiwas (1995),
ridiculous claim that 98 per cent of Ogonis
supported him). MOSOP itself had at least
five somewhat independent internal strands
embracing youth, women, traditional rulers,
teachers and Churches. It represented
fractious and increasingly divided we, as
the open splits and conflicts between SaroWiwa and other elite Ogoni confirms (Ministry
of Information, 1996).7 Second, he constantly
invoked Ogoni culture and tradition, yet he
also argued that war and internecine conflict
had virtually destroyed the fabric of Ogoni
society by 1900 (Saro-Wiwa, 1992:14). His own
utopia, then, rested on the recreation of Ogoni
culture and suffered like all ur-histories from
a quasi-mythic invocation of the past. Third,
ethnicity was the central problem of
postcolonial Nigeria the corruption of ethnic
majorities and, for Saro-Wiwa, its panacea
(the multiplication of ethnic minority power).
To invoke the history of exclusion and the need
not simply for ethnic minority inclusion as the
basis for federalism led Saro-Wiwa to ignore
the histories and geographies of conflict and
struggle among and between ethnic minorities.
And, the narrative of Ogoni exclusion and
internal colonialism proved also to be partial,
not least with respect to other ethnic minorities
in the Delta. Compared to many Delta
minorities the Ogoni have fared well (with 12
per cent of Rivers State population, the Ogoni
accounted for one third of the states
commissioners). The Ogoni produce none of
Rivers State oil currently; while two other small
minorities with no political representation
account for 68 per cent (Okonta 2002).
Paradoxically, MOSOP surfaced as a
foundational indigenous movement even
though the significance of its oil-producing
region was diminishing. By the late 1990s
moreover, as a movement it had fallen apart
and intergroup struggles deprived it of much
of its previous momentum and visibility. But
it gave birth to what one might call many
Ogonis, as indigenous movements among oil

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24

Watts

producing communities have proliferated. The

same forces have spawned a raft of indigenous
self-determination movements among the Egi,
Ijaw, Ikwerre, Isoko, Itsekiri, Ogbia and Urhobo,
among others (Obi, 2001).8 MOSOP itself fell
apart precisely as these other movements
gained power. Since the return to civilian rule
in 1999, there has been a rash of such minority
movements across the Delta calling for
resource control, autonomy and a national
sovereign conference to rewrite the Nigerian
constitution. At the same time, the Delta has
become ever more engulfed in civil strife:
militant occupations of oil flow stations,
pipeline sabotage, intra-urban ethnic violence
and, of course, the near anarchy of state
security operating in tandem with company
security forces.9 The shock troops of many
of these indigenous movements are youth, and
the multiplication of ethnic youth movements
is one of the most important political
developments in contemporary Nigeria. And
it is here that the politics of oil-producing
communities meet up with the politics of oilproducing indigenous groups.
What does the Ogoni case reveal, then, as
a governable space? My point is that
particular populations have been
constructed as indigenous; this construction,
as I explain below, emerged from the nationalist
struggle as customary rights were added to a
discourse of citizenship. But the process
received enormous energy as indigeneity as a
political category garnered international
support in the last part of the twentieth century,
a resource that Saro-Wiwa deployed brilliantly
(Bob, 2002). The emergence in Nigeria of a
national debate over resource control in the
late 1990s is precisely a product of indigenous
claims-making on the state, a process by which
ethnic identifications must be discursively and
politically produced. The Ogoni case shows
that there is no pre-given ethnic identity but,
rather, complex and unstable genealogical
histories of identification that have emerged
in the last century. The indigene has to be
made interpollated around a strong sense
of territory and in the context of cultural,

Watts.p65

20

economic and political heterogeneity. In

Foucauldian terms, this was achieved through
an imbrication of things and people, oil and
ethnicity, and it has been generative of a
profusion of indigenous movements.
Indigeneity has, in this sense, unleased the
huge political energies of ethnic minorities who
recapitulate in some respects the postcolonial
history of spoils politics in Nigeria. The effect
of this multi-ethnic mobilisation was the
production of political and civic organisations
and new forms of governable space, a
veritable jigsaw of militant particularisms. The
Kaiama Declaration in December 1998 indicates
that there is the making of a pan-ethnic
solidarity movement in the works, but its
contours are at present limited (see ERA, 2000;
Douglas & Okonta, 2001). As the Ogoni case
shows, much of this visibility and identification
turned on the invention and reinvention of
tradition and local knowledge, with an eye to
the Nigerian constitution and international
politics (Nelson, 1999). This is a classic case
of the articulation of differing forms of power
that Foucault describes. What I have
documented here, however, is the multiplication of governable spaces which stand in
some tension or even contradiction with each
other only in this way can one understand
the explosion of inter-ethnic tensions in the
Delta and with the national space of Nigeria,
to which I now turn.

Corruption and fraud: The space of

nationalism
One of the striking aspects of the governable
spaces of indigeneity as they emerged in the
Delta is that they became vehicles for political
claims, typically articulated as the need for a
local government, or in some cases a state.
Indigeneity necessarily raises the question of
a third governable space, that of the nation
state, an entity that pre-existed oil and came
to fruition in 1960 at independence. Oil, in this
sense, became part of the nation-building
process the creation of an oil nation.
Nature and nationalism become inextricably
linked. But how did petro-capitalism,
understood as a state-led and thoroughly

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Development and Governmentality

globalised development strategy, stand in
relation to the creation of the governable space
called modern Nigeria?
Here I want to start with the work of
Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 2001) and his
observations on postcolonial African politics.
Colonial rule and decentralised despotism were
synonymous, says Mamdani (1996). The
Native Authorities consolidated local class
power in the name of tradition (ethnicity) and
sustained a racialised view of civic rights. The
nationalist movement had two wings, a radical
and a mainstream. Both wished to deracialise
civic rights, but the latter won out and
reproduced the dual legacy of colonialism.
They provided civic rights for all Nigerians,
but a bonus customary rights for indigenous
people. The country had to decide which
ethnic groups were indigenous and which
were not a basis for political representation, a
process that became constitutionally
mandated in Nigeria. Federal institutions are
quota-driven for each state, but only those
indigenous to the state may apply for a quota.
As Mamdani (1998:7) puts it:
The effective elements of the
federation are neither territorial units
called states nor ethnic groups but
ethnic groups with their own states
Given this federal character every
ethnic group compelled to seek its own
home, its NA [Native Administration],
its own state. With each new political
entity the non-indigenes continues to
grow.
Once law enshrines cultural identity as the basis
for political identity, it necessarily converts
ethnicity into a political force. As a
consequence, in Nigeria, clashes in the
postcolonial period came to be not racial but
ethnic, and such ethnic clashes, which
dominated the political landscape in the last
three decades, are always at root about
customary rights to land, and derivatively to a
local government or to a state that can empower
those on the ground as ethnically indigenous.

Watts.p65

21

25

Into this mix so brilliantly outlined by

Mamdani enters oil, that is to say, a valuable,
centralised (state-owned) resource, a source
of unearned income that detaches the states
from the financial task of securing revenue
from its ciitzens . It is a national resource on
which citizenship claims can be constructed.
As much as the state uses oil to build a nation
and to develop, so communities use oil wealth
to activate community claims on what is seen
popularly as unimaginable wealth black gold.
The governable space of Nigeria is, as a
consequence, reterritorialised through ethnic
claims-making. The result is that access to oil
revenues amplifies what I call subnational
political institution-making; politics becomes,
then, a massive state-making machine. Only
in this way can one understand how, between
1966 and the present, the number of local
governments have grown from 50 to almost
1000, and the number of states from three to
36! Nigeria as a modern nation state has
become a machine for the production of ever
more local political institutions, and this
process is endless. The logic is ineluctable
and, of course, terrifying.
What sort of national governable space
emerges from such multiplication, in which,
incidentally, the political entities called states
or LGAs (local government areas) become
vehicles for massive corruption and fraud
that is to say, the disposal of oil revenues
(Ikporukpo, 1996)? The answer is that it works
against precisely the creation of an imagined
community of the sort that Ben Anderson
(1998) saw as synonymous with nationalism.
Nation building, whatever its imaginary
properties, whatever its style of imaging, rests
in its modern form on a sort of calculation,
integration and a state and bureaucratic
rationality which the logic of rent-seeking,
petro-corruption, ethnic spoils politics and
state multiplication works to systematically
undermine. Lauren Berlant (1991:61) has said
in her study of Nathaniel Hawthorne that every
nation and hence every governable national
space requires a National Symbolic, a
national fantasy which designates how

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Watts

national culture becomes local through images,

narratives and movements which circulate in
the personal and collective unconsciousness. My point is that the Nigerian
national symbolic grew weaker and more
attenuated as a result of the political economy
of oil. There was no sense of the national
fantasy at the local level; it was simply a big
lie (or a big pocket of oil monies to be raided in
the name of indigeneity). At independence,
Obafemi Awolowo, the great western Nigerian
politician, said that Nigeria was not a nation
but a mere geographical expression; 40 years
later this remained true but more so. Any
construction of a robust, meaningful, national
identity requires, as Clifford (2001:114) says, a
rigorous survey of the social body to
determine its makeup and nature. A petro-state
of the Nigerian sort, wracked by corruptionfraud in the Gramscian sense referred to earlier,
is the very antithesis of surveillance, or indeed
of rigour. It is as Nigerian novelist Chinua
Achebe (1988) called it, at best, a big crummy
family.
What we have, in other words, is not nation
building understood in the sense of
governmentality as a form of governable space
but perhaps its reverse; the unimagining
or deconstruction of a particular sense of
national community. Nicos Poulantzas (1978)
said the national or modern unity requires a
historicity of a territory and a territorialisation
of a history. Oil capitalism and its attendant
governmentality in Nigeria have achieved
neither of these requirements. The governable
space called Nigeria was always something of
a public secret. Forty years of postcolonial
rule has made this secret more public as ethnic
segregation has continued unabated and
undermined the very idea of the production of
governable subjects. The double-movement
of petro-capitalism within the frame of a
modern nation state has eviscerated the
governable space of the nation, it has
compromised it and worked against a sense of
a governable subject. The same, incidentally,
might be said of the impact of oil on the Muslim
communities of Nigeria (Watts, 1998, 2000). Oil

Watts.p65

22

and identity people and things have

produced an unimagined community on which
the question of Nigerias future hangs.
A striking aspect of contemporary
development in Nigeria is the simultaneous
production of differing forms of rule and
governable space different politics of scale
(Smith, 1992) each products of similar forces,
and yet, which work against, and often stand
in direct contradiction to one another. The
idioms are youth, indigene and oil nation, but
their forms of identification and the robustness
of their spaces are often incompatible. I have
tried to root these contradictions in the doublemovement of petro-capitalism which is
generative of an authoritarian governmentality
constituted by the three forms of governable
space that I have described. There is of course
an irony here, in that the Foucauldian project
from which governmentality is derived is often
chided for its panoptical sense of closure and
overwhelming aura of domination, but my
account of Nigeria reveals ragged, unstable,
perhaps ungovernable, spaces and analytics
of government that hardly correspond to the
well-oiled machine of disciplinary and
biopower. Such is, in my book, the heart of
the so-called crisis of the postcolonial state in
Africa. It is in this sense that I invoke the idea
of economies of violence to characterise
governmentality in contemporary Nigeria.

HYBRIDS, COSMOPOLITANS
AND ALTERNATIVE
MODERNITIES
A cultural theory directs one to examine
how the pull of sameness and the
forces of making difference interact in
specific ways under the exigencies of
history and politics to produce
alternative modernities at different
national and cultural sites Thus in
the face of modernity one does not turn
inward, one does not retreat; one
moves sideways, one moves forward.
All this is creative adaptation. Non-

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Development and Governmentality

Western people, the latecomers to
modernity, have been engaged in these
maneuvers for nearly a century
(Gaonkar, 2001:17, 22).

inappropriate postcolonials they enter

a disturbing presence that continuously interrupts the redemptive
narratives of the West.

I want to conclude with some reflections on

whether these governable spaces that I have
briefly outlined some of which are highly
unstable and violent can be read, as some
would have it, as illustrations of alternative
modernities, hybrid cosmopolitans emerging
within the interstices of global development.
If development is a resolutely dialectical
process a self-representation of modernity
that refers to the nondeveloped other, and in
turn travels to, and is indigenised by, the local
other, in a way that may come to shape, indeed
destabilise, that very self-representation it
is no surprise that many of a poststructural
inclination have come to see development on
the ground as a sort of mixing, syncretism and
cross-fertilisation rather than a crude mimicry
or replication. Hybridity is the nom de rigeur
(Babbha, 1989; Gilroy, 1993; Canclini, 1996;
Ferguson, 1999; Taylor 2001). The hybrid
annexes a particular intellectual territory which
sees postcolonial settings as borderlands and
spaces of marginality, replete with instabilities
for the West that emerge, in Saids (2000) view,
from the exile and displacements of a global
cultural and political economy. Guptas (1998)
account of agronomic knowledges blending
humoral and scientific practices a lived unity
of the incommensurable becomes
constitutive, in fact of what it means to be
postcolonial. As he (Gupta, 1998:232) says:

The ceaseless traffic in translation and

mimicry (Bhabha, 1989) not only unsettles
spatialised notions of culture, nation, and so
on, but posits the existence of what one might
call non-Kantian forms of cosmpolitanism.
Cosmopolitanism, with its obvious reference
to the European experience, is now deployed
to identify both precolonial or premodern
cosmopolitanism outside of the West (for
example, the Asia-wide circulation of Sanskrit
poetry in the first millennium) and
contemporary nonwestern cosmopolitan
capitalism (for example, Dioufs (2000) account
of the global religio-economic network of the
rural Mourides). Cosmopolitanism here refers
to both the sense of an enthusiasm for
customary difference (against a unified
polychromatic culture) and to some sense of
global citizenship (Brennan, 2001). This is the
cosmopolitanism not of universality,
rationality and progress but of the victims of
modernity, what Pollock et al. (2000:582) call
minoritarian modernity. With good reason
one might think that this is a terrifying case of
turning adversity into advantage. The role of
the nation state in these articulations is often
ambiguous, but they obviously speak
simultaneously both to globalised forms of
governance outside of what Brennan calls
manageable nations and to a recognition of
local development that is, as Diouf notes,
inexplicable outside of globalisation.

[P]ostcolonial settings provide the

rationale for the idea of alternative
modernities where incommensurable
conception and ways of life implode
into one another, scattering rather than
fusing, into strangely contradictory yet
eminently sensible hybridities It is
this unobtrusive intermingling and
coexistence of incommensurable beliefs
that makes it impossible to position
peasants as occupying a space of pure
difference As hybridized, syncretic,

Watts.p65

27

23

Does all of this work add up to, or confirm,

the notion of alternative or plural modernities?
And what might it imply for development?
Doubtless there is a sort of ineluctable logic
that has led from the posing of development
as a form of modernity to the recognition that,
in a world of globalisation and a global
development industry, what is at stake is the
making of alternative modernities. But to make
such a claim is, on its face, far removed from
some of the postdevelopment work. To think

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Watts

of alternative modernities is to admit it is

inescapable and, as Gaonkar (2001:1) says, to
desist from speculations of its end. In the
same way, when Diouf (2000) says that the
cosmopolitanism of the rural Senegalese
Mourides traders who now operate
sophisticated global economic networks in
Turin, Paris and New York is not simply
informed by the western trajectory of
modernity alone, he has done nothing but
affirm the powers of non-western capitalist
accumulation (indeed his article reads like
African nationalism meeting the Chamber of
Commerce!). All of which is to say the powers
of capitalist modernity are undiminished.
Could not Diouf be read as a variant of
Webers protestant ethic (the Muslim ethic and
the rise of capitalism)?
Chakrabarty (2000), at the end of his
postcolonial Provincializing Europe, says
his task has been to create conjoined and
disjunctive genealogies for European
categories of political modernity, to keep in
tension the necessary dialogue between the
universal history of capital (History I) and
the diverse ways of being human (History
II). But what exactly has this distinction
yielded as regards the prospects for the onthe-ground hegemony of development
practice? Not much I fear. In the same way
Gibson-Graham and Ruccio (2001), in a critical
poststructural rereading of my own work,
desperately search for some spheres in which
non-capitalism resides untouched by the
overwhelming powers of capitalism (as they
interpret my analysis). Whether their reading
is right or wrong and, I would say for the
record that certain threads of Marxism have
always been attentive to diversity and to the
spaces opened within capitalism for noncapitalist production and, quite specifically,
that their interpretation of my Marxism is
totally wrong-headed matters less than the
fact that they do not to seek to abandon
progress and development, but rather to
understand the possibilities for nonexploitative and just forms of produced
wealth, which sounds like most of left-of-

Watts.p65

24

centre conventional development theory. It

is also striking that the cultural creativity and
the creative adaptation (Gaonkar, 2001:22)
that is emphasised in this work bears the
hallmark of great familiarity. In Gibson-Graham
and Ruccios reading of my Gambia work
(Watts 1992), the womens work gangs, and
the struggles over the conjugal contract are
(cultural specificity notwithstanding) very
familiar stories. After reading Chakrabartys
(2001) account of Calcutta, it is not the sense
of hybridity or the difference that remains,
but the extraordinary resonances with
Marshall Bermans (1982) account of
(western) modernity. One wonders whether
the renarrativising and the hybridities and
the cosmopolitan capitalisms can really
substantiate the astonishing claim that the
not-quite-modern disrupts the complacent
march of progress (Gupta, 1998:233) or
unsettles the representational efficacy of
the relations of global inequality (Gupta,
1998:231).
In some postcolonial and poststructural
quarters, then, there is a reluctant admission
of the universality of capitalist modernity
and a much less explicit acknowledgement
of the neoliberal grand slam, as Perry
Anderson (2000) puts it. There is, it must
be said, an obvious tension between those
who stand at a critical angle to western
enlightenment and who trumpet grassroots
postmodernism, and those who, in
acknowledging the inescapability of the
modern, invoke a multiplicity of other
modernities. In the former, there is a danger
of the worst of populist myopia; in the latter,
the vain hope that in the renarrativisation of
western hegemony (the discovery of
alternative modernities) resides a success
story. Both tend to occlude the terrible
realities of unprecedented global economic
inequality and the crude violence of twentyfirst century empire. I have tried to steer
between these poles, by endeavouring to link
governmentality and governable spaces to the
hard edges of global capitalism of a very
particular sort (the trajectory of Nigeria petro-

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Development and Governmentality

capitalism). Perhaps, as Gaonkar suggests,
there is a creative adaptation in all of this
but one must surely resist the incursions of
biology in its deployment. Perhaps one can
see in Nembe, or in Ogoni, alternative
modernities. But this, it seems to me, leaves
the hard questions untouched. What is the
environment, and its causal powers, within
which adaptation occurs? What are the
contradictions and tensions within this
process that produce a modernity that is partial
and incomplete? And what are the multiple
ways in the name of adaptation that governable
and ungovernable spaces and subjects are
thrown up by the rough and tumble of the
grand slam of liberal capitalism (Anderson, P.,
2000). Whether the phenomena I describe are
hybrid or cosmopolitan concerns me less than
the forms of power and the forms of economy
the contours of hegemony that they
express. And this takes us I think, beyond the
culturalism of much of the alternate
modernities work to recognise, certainly, local
history and local culture, but also what is
familiar and general, that is to say, the great
clanking gears of capital. And I would like to
think that this is a project for which Paul
Wheatley, for whom material circumstances
and the culture of power were always central
to his model of the pre-industrial city, would
have had some measure of intellectual
sympathy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Victor Savage and Henry
Yeung for the invitation and the kindnesses
they offered me, and to two anonymous
referees for criticisms of the manuscript. I
have learned much from Don Moores related
project on governmentality, hegemony and
territory in Zimbabwe.

The war canoe houses were the units of the

kingdoms defense forces. Each house consisted of
the head and a formidable number of able-bodied men
responsible for defending the house and the king.

As constitutional preparations were made for the

transition to home rule, non-Ibo minorities
throughout the Eastern Region appealed to the
colonial government for a separate Rivers State.
Ogoni representatives lobbied the Willink
Commission in 1958 to avert the threat of exclusion
within an Ibo-dominated regional government which
had assumed self-governing status in 1957, but
minority claims were ignored (Okpu, 1977; Okilo,
1980).
3

In 1974, the Ogoni and other minorities petitioned

for the creation of a new Port Harcourt State within
the Rivers State boundary (Naanen, 1995:53; see
also Whech 1995).
4

According to the Nigerian government (Ministry

of Information, 1996), Ogoniland currently produces
about two per cent of Nigerian oil output and is the
fifth largest oil-producing community in Rivers State.
Shell maintains that total Ogoni oil output is valued
at US$5.2 billion before costs!

The oil companies claim that sabotage accounts for

a large proportion (60 per cent) of the spills, since
communities gain from corporate compensation. Shell
claims that 77 of 111 spills in Ogoniland between
1985 and 1994 were due to sabotage (Hammer, 1996).
According to a government commission (Ministry of
Information, 1996), however, sabotage accounts for
30 per cent of the incidents but only three per cent of
the quantity spilled. Furthermore, all oil-producing
communities claim that compensation from the
companies for spills has been almost nonexistent.

Saro-Wiwa was often chastised by the Gokana (he

himself was Bane) since most of the Ogoni oil was in
fact located below Gokana soil. In other words, on
occasion, the key territorial unit became the clan rather
than the pan-Ogoni territory (see Okonta, 2002).

Egi National Congress (ENC); Ijaw National

Congress (INC), Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), Southern
Minorities Movement (SMM); Council for Ikwerre
Nationality (CIN); Isoko Development Union (IDU);
Itsekiri National Patriots (INP); Movement for the
Payments of Repatriation to Ogbia (MORETO) and
the Urhobo Progressive Union (UPU).

The US State Department, for example, refers to

the minority and anti-oil movements as terrorist
and to the youth movements as undemocratic; a
recent CIA report sees the problems as a result of
environmental stresses. Even those who champion
the role of civic associations have seen the events of
the last decade in the Delta as negative and
perverse (Ikelegbe, 2001). Such assessments
9

ENDNOTES
1
The data for the case study was collected during a
visit to the Niger Delta in January and February 2001.
I also rely heavily on the assistance and work of Von
Kemedi (2002) and the Nembe Peace Commission
(Alagoa, 2001).

Watts.p65

25

29

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30

Watts

misconstrue the history and dynamics of the

relations between extraction, the environment and
identity politics. But such judgements certainly do
grasp the gravity of the crisis in the Delta.

Booth, D. (ed.) (1994) Rethinking Social

Development: Theory Research and
Practice, London: Methuen.

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