Criminal Resistance is a curious book. On the one hand it claims to ‘investigate the phenomenon of kidnapping of oil workers in the Niger delta’ (p. 191), while on the other there is precious little about the composition, character or trends of kidnapping in the region and a great deal (most of the book in fact) on the rise and character of one non-state armed group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a complex, shadowy and heterogeneous insurgent group (or groups) that emerged from the western delta in and around the oil city of Warri in late 2005. One might have plausibly anticipated in a book on kidnapping an account of the numbers and composition of those kidnapped (the changing proportion of Nigerian and expatriate workers), the trends in kidnapping over time, the relation between kidnapping and such phenomena as electoral cycles, the price of oil and the proliferation of clearly criminal groups who see kidnapping as a lucrative business. But these issues are never raised. There is very little effort to theorise kidnapping and draw conceptually upon studies of other parts of the world (Somalia, Colombia) with, dare I say it, ‘traditions’ of kidnapping. Oriola does attempt to enrol Eric Hobsbawm's notion of social banditry to provide a sort of framing but it is clear that kidnapping is undertaken by a wide variety of groups for different purposes (media exposure, leverage with the companies, easy money and so on) not all of which fit easily into a banditry framework.

All of that said, there is much of interest in the book. There is now, of course, a vast literature on the Niger delta (some of which, like the important studies by the Center for Advanced Social Science in Port Harcourt, and the edited collection by Obi and Rustad and the path-breaking work by the likes of Sofiri Peterside and Ukoha Ukiwo, are not cited) and much of the ground covered by Oriola is quite familiar. Nevertheless he has some interesting new data on the role of women in the insurgency, the media strategies of MEND, how the struggle is framed by insurgent groups, and two short case studies of oil-producing communities. Oriola is clearly influenced by the work on social movements and Charles Tilly's notion of contentious politics; the question of discursive framing provides the overall architecture of the three core chapters of the book (Chapters 5, 6 and 7). It is entirely legitimate that the author selects this theoretical framing, but it is curious that there is so little engagement with other ways of conceptualising and explaining the MEND story: for example the work on African guerrillas (Christopher Clapham), on insurgent organisations (Jeremy Weinstein), on agrarian structures (Paul Richards) and the dynamics of civil wars (Stathis Kalyvas).

Oriola explores how particular strategies of irony and ridicule, for example – reminiscent of Subcommandante Marcos – provide a prognosis and a motivation for militants. (It needs to be said, however, that there are no survey data or systematic attempts to derive the ideas, rationales and motivations of the combatants themselves – something that Ukoha's work and the CASS studies address.) Oriola identifies what he calls master frames (justice, true democracy, minority rights and so on) that ‘have created a war situation’. Yet much of this ground has been covered before and by the same token some key forces in the dynamics of oilfield conflicts (the corruption of chieftaincy, the porous nature of state-insurgent relations, the role of electoral violence and the Godfathers) are given very short shrift or not mentioned at all.

In the final chapter Oriola explores the repertoires of protest and focuses importantly on the role of Tom Polo as a charismatic and integrative leader capable of providing (for a time) a sort of cross-delta leadership. Across all of these chapters, however, Oriola is focusing on MEND and on, for want of a better word, the broad context of kidnapping without delving into the details of the analytical relations and causal chains linking MEND to the phenomena of kidnapping itself and how it is situated and understood in relation to a larger repertoire. In my view this is unfortunate, because Oriola clearly has a firm command of the case and there is much to learn from this book. As the author well knows, any account of kidnapping is much more than a MEND story and the social field of violence – encompassing many and quite different organisations, politics and dynamics – suggests that a full accounting of kidnapping will have to provide a much more nuanced and empirically rich analysis (as he says ‘kidnapping is a social fact that interpolates everyone in Nigeria;’ p. 191). As it so happens, when I was reading Criminal Resistance a Nigerian friend – currently an advisor to President Jonathan – was visiting my home when he received news that his sister had been kidnapped and a N500 million ransom was being demanded. This had nothing to do with MEND and was negotiated – as virtually all of these cases are – in a strange netherworld between the public and secret worlds of politics and crime in the ‘post-insurgency’ phase of the Niger Delta amnesty (signed in 2009). This case is not in any sense a representative example of kidnapping in the Niger delta but it suggests that Oriola's important book is simply a start.