The Making of a Petro-State

This book illustrates the ways in which Uganda is transforming into an oil producing country, framed here as a ‘petro-state’. In contrast to the term’s traditional usage, here ‘petro-state’ highlights the deliberate attempt to reorient the political economy of Uganda towards its future production of oil. The expectation of ‘petro-dollars’ has compelled the state to structurally change its institutional infrastructure and attempt to reconfigure the socio-economic and spatial orientation of the population. This book presents the power relations and the dynamic struggles entangling the key actors in the process of making oil production possible in Uganda. It takes a Foucauldian approach to the question of government and power to express how the oil-related projects of development in Uganda are meant to multi-dimensionally improve the population.

The author is a political geographer and currently a postdoctoral researcher involved in the ‘Africa Multiple’ Cluster of Excellence based at the University of Bayreuth, who has a keen interest in the politics of resource extraction in Sub-Saharan Africa, resource-related mobility struggles and the power matrix that produces contextually specific resource complexes.