ABSTRACT
In summary, this chapter analyzes the complexity of the phenomenon of kidnapping. Drawing on the political process paradigm, the major socio-political, economic and historical contours in Nigeria, particularly the Delta, serving to produce kidnapping episodes are interrogated. Factors such as inattention to earlier forms of protest, routinization of violence, constitutional reforms, backfire on military lesson in the Delta, actions of oil corporations; the Kaiama Declaration and the Niger Delta terrain among others are underscored. This chapter also enunciates three major emotive factors-othering of foreign oil workers, the Abuja-Oloibiri nexus and the specters of the past-in conducting the “emotion work” (see Perry 2002: 111) for kidnapping and other violent repertoires of protest. However, it is difficult to know which of the aforementioned factors played the most important role in bringing about the wave of insurgency in the Delta. The standpoint is that kidnapping of oil workers in the Delta is a phenomenon with several contributory factors. This chapter provides the socio-political context, historical background and economic conditions that have fostered kidnapping at the spaces of oil infrastructure in the Delta. This achieves one of the objectives of the book: how the political process of Nigeria helps to shape kidnapping of oil workers in the Delta.
