Securing Nigeria’s oil pipelines: delegation and hybrid security governance

How does delegating oil infrastructure security to politically embedded non-state actors (re)shape the political relations through which oil is governed? This article addresses this question by examining the case of pipeline surveillance contracts awarded by the Nigerian government to former militant leaders in the Niger Delta. It shows how these contracts function as delegated security arrangements, through which the state incorporates former militant leaders, with political, social, and territorial capacities, into its limited capacity to combat artisanal oil refining and secure its oil pipelines, producing a hybrid form of security governance. Drawing on ethnographic data, informal conversations, and scholarly and secondary sources, the article argues that delegation is not merely a neutral response to limited state capacity, but a form of political brokerage linking the security of critical oil infrastructure to the distribution of patronage, the cultivation of political alliances, and strategic calculations during election periods. The article contributes to debates on natural resource infrastructure management and hybrid security governance by showing that delegation can exceed formal state objectives, generating political and institutional effects that extend beyond the function being delegated.