Binary, Bipartite Motifs and Counter-Hegemonic Strategies in Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist

Language use is central to Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist, negotiating a better living environment for the people of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Most literary essays on this text, however, overlook Ojaide’s deployment of language to achieve his subversive vision. The text has been interpreted as environmentalism colored by an ideology or artistic documentation of the despoiled ecosystem, its effects on humans, the flora and fauna of the Niger Delta, and the consequential eco-activism. Another read of the text, however, reveals a binary relationship of dominance and subversion in which language is significant to both sides of the intercourse. The existence of dominance and resistance, therefore, necessitates the analysis of the text drawing from the Subaltern theory, an aspect of the Postcolonial theory to which dominance and resistance are central. This essay examines the deployment of language as a hegemonic and subversive tool in the oil politics in the Niger Delta. The binary relationship is couched in bi-partite motifs captured in epithets and contrasting images. In the binary, the multinational oil companies operating in the Niger Delta yoked with the Nigerian military government, are juxtaposed with the people and the Niger Delta as oppressors and the oppressed. Through bipartite motifs that abound in the text, Ojaide concretizes the duality in the Nigerian society vis-a-vis the oil politics in the Niger Delta. In the duality, language is reinvented and mobilized significantly by both sides as a tool for demonizing and excluding each other to enable the subjugation or subversion of the other.

Engaging, Standing, and Stepping

Anthropologists and activists portray the lives and lands of Ecuador’s Indigenous Cofán people as a case study of the damage caused by petroleum extraction. Yet during my fieldwork on the issue, I began to question the nature of the Cofán-oil encounter when the community in which I worked decided to allow oil companies onto their land. In this article, I examine my own involvements with Cofán oil politics in dialogue with Stuart Kirsch’s concept of ‘engaged anthropology’ and Kim TallBear’s call for researchers to ‘stand with’ their research subjects. I argue that anthropological activism is necessarily a complex and shifting affair, especially when our collaborators’ perspectives diverge from our own regarding the best possible paths to their wellbeing. I suggest that the most ethical option is for anthropologists to commit themselves to continuous, co-con-structed partnerships in which they are perpetually prepared to transform their most basic political and intellectual positions.

Oil and Security: The Necessity of Political Economy

Many international conflicts are in some way related to energy, ever since oil became the world's preeminent strategic commodity in the early 20th century. I argue that the most important energy-related variable for international conflict is a state's net oil import position. Oil politics tends to appear in one of three ways in security studies. Some have emphasized resource wars; others have focused on the needs of oil importers; and still others on the pathologies of oil exporters. These disparate approaches, largely isolated from each other, can better be understood as relating to a single explanatory variable. Lots of other variables matter but none are as central as net oil imports. This means that to understand energy and security, a political economy framework is a necessity. For oil exporters, external petro-aggression and internal pathologies of the resource curse are the key mechanisms. For oil importers, energy consumption needs generate a plethora of mechanisms that complicate conflict dynamics. A sophisticated understanding of these mechanisms can improve our understanding of both national and global security.

The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is one of the most recognizable acronyms among international organizations. It is mainly associated with the “oil shock” of 1973 when the price of petroleum increased fourfold and industrialized countries and consumers were forced to face the limits of their development model. This is the first history of OPEC and of its members written by a professional historian. It carries the reader from the formation of the first petrostate in the world, Venezuela in the late 1920s, to the global ascent of petrostates and OPEC in the 1970s, to their crisis at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. Born in 1960, OPEC was the first international organization of the Global South. It was widely perceived as acting as the economic “spearhead” of the Global South and acquired a role that went far beyond the realm of oil politics. Petrostates such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, have been (and still are) key regional actors and their enduring cooperation, defying wide political and cultural differences and even wars, speaks to the centrality of natural resources in the history of the twentieth century, and to the underlying conflict between producers and consumers of these natural resources. Being the first study to use previously unavailable OPEC sources, it offers surprising insights into the way of thinking of the ruling elites in petrostates and to the way the world looks when seen through their eyes.

Kenaikan Harga Bahan Bakar Minyak (Bbm) Atas Nama Rakyat (Tinjauan Kritis Konsepsi Keadilan Sosial Ekonomi Ibnu Taimiyah)

The continue phenomenon of fuel prices increasing in Indonesia arealways both between the two sides (there are government andcommunity). Debating the agree side and disagree side of being the maincontents of the escort policies. But we know the socio-economicscondition of ‘tragic’ Indonesia be raised expenditures greater thanrevenues, while expenditure was only focused on subsidies ofenergywhich unfortunatelymore widely used by the upper middle classsociety rather than small communities. Besides external factors that affectthe pattern of the domestic politics of oil policy. In the position of theeconomic dilemma, the government apllying the economic logic of "ParetoOptimum ", it’s meanthat the transfering of enjoyment to be fair, but it isn’tonly focusing only on short-term policies, but also followed byreconstruction the quality of sustainable development. And Ibn Taimiyyahas one of the Islamic Economic Thinkers, which one of the legacyof thesocio- economicjustice concept to be analysis study and be the counter ofthe phenomenon of rising fuel prices and Compensation Package, as wellas to macroeconomic conditions in Indonesia.Keywords : Oil Politics, the rising prices of fuel and fuel subsidies, fuelcompensation package, The Conception of Socio-Economic Justice fromIbn Taimiyyah.