When Michael Watts talks about the human, societal, and resource costs of extracting oil in Africa, it’s impossible to ignore the connection between the fuel in one’s tank and violence in the Niger Delta.
Watts, author of Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, is professor and Class of 1963 chair of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He has spent more time researching and writing about that region than any other scholar in the world.
At 51Թ, he met with students and faculty over lunch and dinner, and gave a public talk in Love Auditorium. He also recorded a “Conversation on World Affairs with President Jeff Herbst” in the university’s television studio.
“Oil is a big state-producing machine,” Watts told a full house in Love Auditorium. Students and faculty represented peace and conflict studies, geography, global engagements, environmental studies, Africana and Latin American studies, and other programs and departments with related interests across the disciplines.
Watts argued that resource wealth from the Niger Delta generates a state apparatus that is more effective at capturing oil revenues than it is at creating functional social and political institutions. Therefore, rather than benefiting from the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil pumped every year from its lands and shores, the region has become worse off the more oil is extracted.
Nonetheless, he urged his audience to understand that while oil extraction always transforms societies and politics, each case needs to be grasped in its historical complexity.
Nancy Ries, associate professor of anthropology and director of peace and conflict studies, was inspired to organize the lecture after her students read Watts’ work last year.
“They found his scholarship both eye-opening and lucidly clear, and his lecture did not disappoint,” she said. “He told an enormously complex story in ways that made sense but yet disrupted our received notions of what oil is ‘about.'”
The full conversation between President Herbst and Watts can be found on .