Transnational trade regulation as a model for peace and transparency: The Case of the Niger Delta and an Oil Certification Regime

This dissertation evaluates the proposal for creating an international oil certification regime as a strategy for curbing the trade in stolen erode oil, using Nigeria's Niger Delta region as the main case study. In other words, it explores the possibility of regulating international oil trading through a certification process similar to the one currently in place for regulating trade in "blood diamonds" known as the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme. At the background of this research is the understanding that the much discussed "resource conflict" phenomenon which has characterised the political economy of many resource-rich developing countries like Nigeria, arise in most part because, illegally extracted mineral resources in the hands of insurgents and other illegitimate and corrupt entities, flow freely on the international market. Illegal oil bunkering operations in the Niger Delta has become resource conduit and facilitator for erode oil's black market. In effect, it exacerbates systemic corruption and sustains the region's conflict with the attendant human rights violations. And there is the potential that it could spread across the West African sub-region as more oil frontiers are established, thus the urgency for it to be tackled in similar way as conflict diamonds.;The dissertation's overarching theoretical discourse hinges upon the knowledge that the making of international law is currently witnessing new trends and development, shilling from the hard law regulatory mechanism to soft law regimes. The modern trends thus acknowledges the participation of non-state actors, especially the Multinational Corporations (MNCs) in global legislative and regulatory processes, which give rise to proliferation of soft law based regulatory regimes. The dissertation thus draws upon the same convivial earnestness of the international system that produced the Kimberley Process, to argue for a similar oil industry certification regime.;In essence, this work conceptualizes trade in illegal erode oil ("blood oil") as a transnational organized crime, involving international syndicates working together from across international borders, and depends much upon critical but unacknowledged complicity of the global North whose acceptance of such tainted commodity has been unwavering. With the failing of the unilateral efforts of weak Nigerian state to contain the problem, the dissertation argues that an effective remedial blueprint must be one located within a multilateral regulatory machinery of the international system. Such regulatory (certification) mechanism, like the Kimberley Process, would largely involve non-state actors, particularly the oil MNCs and the global oil industry itself, such that the market-embedded regulatory scheme (in the nature of soft law) co-opts and triggers off every part of oil trading chain to become a continuous and perpetually vigilant self-regulatory system.;By exploring the international oil trading modalities and the oil forensic fingerprinting, the dissertation further argues that a certification scheme with an oil fingerprinting component is possible and can be established in the oil industry, but demands meaningful commitment and requisite political and economic will on the part of the major oil MNCs, their home states and key international institutions, particularly the UN and OPEC, who must cooperate in the initiative as a matter of necessity.