Public Lecture – Thursday, 26 June 2014 – Professor Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

Speaker/Host:  Professor Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
Venue:  Law Link Theatre, Fellows Lane, ANU College of Law, ANU
Date:  Thursday, 26 June 2014
Time:  5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
Website:  http://ips.cap.anu.edu.au/ssgm
Enquiries: ANU Events on 6125 4144

http://billboard.anu.edu.au/event_view.asp?id=108205

A Tale of two gulfs: The social space of the frontier
Professor Michael Watts draws upon events from two very different parts of the world – the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the the Gulf of Mexico and the rise of an insurgency in the Nigerian oilfields in the Gulf of Guinea. He will use these examples to explore the ways in which frontiers become not just sites of contestation but also particular sorts of social spaces in which their dynamics reside in the materiality and specificity of the resource itself as much as in the wider regime of accumulation. Using in particular the work of Henri Lefebvre, he will focus on comparative oil frontiers as a way of exploring frontiers in general and resource frontiers in particular

SSGM SEMINAR 3-4pm Tuesday June 24| Michael J Watts, UC Berkeley

SSGM Seminar Series
Comparing Small Wars: A Political Ecology of Two Insurgenices

Speaker: Michael Watts – Professor of Geography and Director of Development Studies at UC Berkeley
3-4pm Tuesday 24 June
Lecture Theatre 2, Hedley Bull Centre
Corner of Garran Rd and Liversidge St
The Australia National University

About the Seminar
This paper compares two insurgencies in contemporary Nigeria: the radical Salafist Islamism of Boko Haram in the north, and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a secular movement for resource control emerging on the oilfields of the southeast. Two regions with differing histories, cultures and social institutions bathed in the same political order have given birth two seemingly different insurgent politics. Tijani Naniya, a historian who was Kano State’s Commissioner for Information and Culture, makes the point that against the backdrop of forty years of corruption and military rule in Nigeria, the return to civilian rule in 1999 was seen as a great opportunity. What was on offer was a range of political projects from the redefinition of Nigeria federation, to regional autonomy and resource control, to a return to shari’a. If Boko Haram invokes a return to a republic of virtue and the ideals of dar al-Islam, MEND proclaims the rhetoric of a renovated civic nationalism, of a new federalism and of community rights. Both are instances of what Nancy Fraser (2000) calls “the politics of recognition”. Each also reflects a common relation to the state: in both cases pre-existing armed groups were deployed (and armed) at a crucial juncture by the political classes for violent electoral purposes, but in each case the militants felt betrayed when their goals (implementation of religious conviction, payments for services rendered and so on) were not met. But each took form on the larger canvas of the political ecology of an oil state and what Dan Slater calls the “provisioning pacts” constituted by the operations of what I call the “logics of oil” (nationalization and fiscal federalism) both which have operated to produce a vast class of alienated youth excluded by all forms of authority: from the market order, from the state, from customary (chiefly) rule, and religious authority. It is from these dynamics that the two insurgencies emerged and took form.

About the Speaker
Michael J. Watts is Professor of Geography, and Director of Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for thirty years. He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994-2004. His research has addressed a number of development issues especially food security, resource development and land reform in Africa, South Asia and Vietnam. Over the last twenty years Watts has written extensively on the oil industry, especially in West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea; his most recent book is “The Curse of the Black Gold: Fifty Years of Oil in the Niger Delta” with photographer Ed Kashi. Watts has focused on the political ecology of oil in West Africa and on the relations between oil – understood materially, biophysically, socially and symbolically – and the field of conflict in Nigeria in particular. One aspect of this research program is to understand the relations between oil and the rise of an insurgency across the Niger delta oilfields. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 2003 and was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2004. He has consulted for a number of development agencies including the United Nations and other development organizations and has provided expert testimony for governmental and other agencies. He was educated at University College London and the University of Michigan and has held visiting appointments at the Smithsonian Institution, Bergen, Bologna, and London. He serves on the Board of Advisors of a number of non-profits including Food First and the Pacific Institute. He is currently Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Council.

 

Congratulations to Aimee Komugabe

Aimee

ANUASA congratulates Aimee (ANUASA President, 2010) on submitting her thesis entitled “Mid- to Late-Holocene Environmental Changes in the Southwest Pacific: Records from Deep-sea Black Corals” at the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

Aimee got engaged and is returning to Wellington, New Zealand, so we wish her safari njema.

Africa-Australia Dialogue 1st Symposium – June 28th La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia

AFSAAP is a co-sponsor of the forthcoming 1st Africa Australia Dialogue Symposium to be held at La Trobe University on June 28th 2014.  The Key Note Speaker, Former Zimbabwean Ambassador Jaqueline Zwambila, will join a host of other speakers to discuss the key issues. This will be a great event, and AFSAAP hopes that many of you will be able to attend.

Event details:
The Centre for Dialogue’s first Africa-Australia Symposium, following on from last year’s Australia-Africa Dialogue inaugural address by Australia’s the Hon Kevin Rudd, is a forum where experts, academics, settlement and service providers, community leaders and activists can focus on the pressing issues confronting African-Australians as well as explore Australia’s links to African countries. This inaugural Symposium seeks to raise awareness about trends, challenges and opportunities that face the African-Australia diaspora as well as advance Australian-African relations. Using data, census projections and commentary from experts in the field, the Symposium will focus on the roles individuals, governments and industry can play in addressing the future needs of a rapidly growing community as well as ascertain how to advance Australian-African relations.

More information can be found on this Symposium Flyer.

Visiting Fellowship for African Researchers

Offered by the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH), this is an exciting opportunity to enhance population and health research capacity in sub-Saharan Africa by building closer ties with research centres at The Australian National University (ANU).

In 2014-5 this program will support one African researcher (at any career stage) for up to three months at the ANU. The fellowship will fund travel, accommodation and living allowance. The researcher must be affiliated with an African research institute or university.

A primary goal of this program to establish on-going collaboration following the visit.

Applications for this Fellowship close on 31 July 2014 To learn more about the application process go here