Secessionist insurgencies revolve around ethnic and economic issues concerning Nigerian oil resources which are located in small ethnic territories. The Movement for the Survival of the Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN) is engaged in a secessionist insurgency demanding greater political and economic autonomy or outright independence. As is the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) who represent the Ibo-speaking south eastern regions and have increased their activity after the corrupt elections of April 2007 and have called for a UN supervised plebiscite. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) was originally a non-violent protest group demanding economic empowerment who then adopted armed resistance and secessionist goals after a number of violent Nigerian police and military crackdowns.

International oil companies such as Chevron, Total and Shell are also involved in the insurgent matrix. They pay local militias for protection against other groups as well as paying off local opposition groups with ‘cash payments’. Oil companies also undermine the central government buy providing ‘monthly pay and perks, including housing, transport, meals and medical services to police, army and navy personnel deployed to protect their installations’. Shell admits to importing arms and ammunition from a Lagos arms dealer for its affiliates whereas Total officially states that Nigerian officials, such as supernumerary police and commissioners, are its own employees.

In 2005 an umbrella insurgency group appeared claiming to represent the entire Niger Delta called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and has been by far the most lethal and professional of the insurgent groups. MEND demands that 20-50 percent of oil revenues be redistributed back to local communities in the oil producing regions through local community governed foundations rather than the corrupt and un-transparent patronage system used currently. Nonetheless MEND is also linked with local politics involving struggles between the ethnic groups it purports to represent as well as continued attacks on oil pipelines and refineries in order to steal oil for finance purposes (‘oil-bunkering’).

State violence is also endemic with extra-judicial killings in 2003 amounting to 3,100 deaths in the
Ogoni state alone which led MOSOP to take arms. On 19th February 2005 the Nigerian Army destroyed 78 homes and killed countless civilians in what was supposed to be an operation against a local criminal-cult group called Isenasawo after reports of communal fighting between Odioma and Obioku residents. Instead of attacking Isenasawo, who are often used by local and regional actors to secure pipelines, the army attacked innocent civilians.

3rd Myth: Globalisation is destroying the State
By arguing that the state has failed through the use of examples from places where the state was never successful in the first place is disingenuous. There is no unbroken line of descent of contemporary states from Westphalia because most modern states outside Europe, and even some inside, came into being only after 1945. Also, the idea of what states are differs across the theoretical spectrum with the Weberian one used by Lind and Hammes, in which a state possesses a legitimate monopoly on violence, inapplicable to the U.S. given that civilians and state governments are constitutionally empowered to bear arms which would mean that the U.S. is not a state. If a state is defined as a physical base composed of a population and a territorial space governed by legitimate permanent institutions then the Byzantine Empire qualifies as a state long before Westphalia enshrined the notion of sovereignty into European international law. However, sovereignty, supposedly the defining characteristic of states as self-government without external constraint, ‘like power and independence, also varies in degree among states’. Moreover, because of the skewered relationship between imperial centres and their peripheries the post-colonial state as an institution never took deep roots in all but a few examples (such as Canada, Australia and India). Indeed most new states were not even states prior to independence because they were not states within their respective imperial systems. In the case of Africa,
Most of them could be found within the elaborate constitutional framework of the British Empire which included entities such as ‘colonies’ (settled, conquered or ceded), ‘protectorates’ (including ‘colonial protectorates’, ‘international protectorates’ and ‘protected states’), ‘mandates’ or ‘trust territories’, and ‘condominia’. Many British dependencies were constitutional amalgams. The Gold Coast, for example, was a multiple dependency consisting of a settled colony (Gold Coast Colony), a conquered colony (Ashanti), a protectorate (Northern Territories), and a trust territory (British Togoland).