Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria offers a refreshing look at the complex social universe of violence and patronage in Nigeria's oil rich Delta. By exploring the critical insights offered by anthropological and sociological methods, it plugs into a new and growing body of work that is finally breaking Niger Delta scholarship out of what has become an iterative loop that is often unable to account for the ambiguous boundaries between issues, the shifting motivations and positionality of actors or sometimes even the constantly changing landscapes of violence. While the title looks deceptively like more of the old, this is indeed something new and it pushes the borders of what we know of the region into interesting new places.

The first chapter reiterates the familiar yet enduring historical narrative of ownership, dispossession and resistance in Nigeria's oil political economy. The next two chapters hold up against one another as alternative (competing?) versions of modernity within the long historical periods established by Chapter 1. While Chapter 2 addresses the evolution of modern environmental and human rights NGOs into major forces in the reshaping of the resistance landscape in the region, the third chapter highlights the modernity of ancient notions of belonging and ownership and shows how belief in an ‘ancestral promise’ is key to the making of the modern ‘rebel’ youth. Chapter 4 analyses how oil multinationals insert themselves into historical land ownership tussles as a way of incorporating communities into a modern oil complex. This, like the preceding chapters, again shows the tensions between different visions of modernity. The next two chapters engage with the role of oil in the generation of conflict and draw attention to the contrasts between the oil-bearing Delta and the revenue-receiving Abuja. The final substantive chapter deals with the peacebuilding efforts of the Nigerian state and explores how the DDR process of the Amnesty is itself a coercive space that reproduces many of the old patterns of patronage.

Perhaps the main strength of this book is the way it shows, sometimes quite vividly, the intermeshing of the various spaces and scales of social engagement in the region. For instance, Adunbi deals delicately with the connections between the ‘doing good’ world of modern environmental NGOs, official neoliberal policymaking and the so-called ‘ancestral promise’ around which young people sometimes mobilise opposition. Placing youth (sometimes the same individuals) in all of these spaces, it is easier to see the complexity of what, until 2009, seemed like an intractable canvas of conflicts and highlights the value of non-binary conceptualisations of its dynamics. The use of social contrasts to illustrate the contradictions of oil extraction in the region is very helpful.

It is precisely in the delivery of this key benefit however that one may locate the central weakness of the work. In the attempt to construct a grand narrative for the region capable of demonstrating the many ambiguities of its social boundaries, Adunbi misses an opportunity to tease out the analytical value of the everyday, as a space of value in and of itself. He tends to locate politics in every action, failing to see how a group of youth playing football may simply be doing just that rather than mobilising politically. Of course social gatherings may have political undertones but they need not be explicitly so in order to play a role in the construction of politicised youth identities. A good example is the anecdote on pages 216–19 about a football match which ends with political sloganeering and singing from which he draws a curious generalisation that ‘at the end of every game in the Delta, youths will gather to discuss the conflict in the region’ (p. 216). This may well happen in a few, but it certainly does not happen at the end of all games in the region.

The stated central goal of the book is to show that ‘land and oil have come to represent an ancestral promise of wealth’ (p. 4). While this is developed remarkably well in the third chapter, it appears that Adunbi struggles to draw the connection between the mythology of oil and contemporary violence in other chapters. This struggle undermines the intellectual promise of the book by pushing what it claims to be central to its analytical margins.

These issues nonetheless, Adunbi has delivered a sorely needed intervention and anyone interested in reading the Niger Delta through fresh eyes will find this book of immense value.