Managing Disputes in West Africa’s Petroleum Industry

The oil industry is one of the most conflict-prone natural resource extraction environments in the world. The sheer scale of the investment, the complexities and protracted nature of the various agreements, the plethora of stakeholders and the bewildering number of interests both domestic and international all coalesce to make disagreements and disputes of all sorts inevitable in the oil industry. This chapter explores the nature and types of conflicts and the mechanisms used to produce successful mutually beneficial agreements in the region’s nascent oil industry. This chapter highlights the scope of the conflict and “peace” challenges faced by West Africa as a result of the insertion of commercial oil into its political economy. The chapter is divided into three main parts. The first section discusses the nature and types of oil-related conflicts in West Africa. Here I explore both the external as well as the internally induced factors that exacerbate such conflicts. The second part examines the nature of conflict resolution mechanisms that have been employed to resolve West Africa’s oil conflicts. In the third and final parts, I outline the limitations of the current approach and proffer solutions for managing myriad oil-fueled conflicts.