Understanding Kidnapping as a Political Act. A Case of the Niger Delta

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Region: Africa, grade: A-, , course: Political Science, language: English, abstract: In January 2006, insurgents in Nigeriäs Niger-Delta kidnapped four foreign oil workers working for Shell Petroleum. Since then, over 250 foreign oil workers have been kidnapped in the region. A proliferation of insurgent groups, led by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) and the Niger-Delta People¿s Volunteer Force (NDPVF), have continued to claim responsibility. These groups frame their act as woven within the fabric of politics to protest the exploitation of the region by multinational oil corporations (MNOCs) and the Nigerian government.

Mainstream literature on the region has largely focused on the nature of violence while a few of the literature on kidnapping are descriptive and have not properly situated the act within the realm of domestic and international politics. I develop a conceptual framework for understanding kidnapping as a political act in the Niger-Delta drawing on empirical evidence. I operationalize this framework by focusing on a triad of actors: insurgents, MNOCs, and the Nigerian government.

Findings show that kidnapping in the region is intractable because, in a bid to nip the act in the bud, the Nigerian government has focused on symptoms rather than the causes of the act. More so, insurgents have become a useful tool to unleash mayhem on opposition parties during elections. Kidnapping in the region will only become history if fundamental economic, social, and political questions are addressed by the Nigerian government and MNOCs.