Life in the Time of Oil

" Life in the Time of Oil is important, providing rich empirical insight organized in an accessible and focused analysis that interrogates the continued promotion of resource-based capitalist development in Africa today."—Africa
"Overall, Leonard advances a convincing and credible argument that the failure of the oil project has not only happened at the macro level, but has also done lasting damage to communities in the local and everyday sphere."—Journal of Development Studies
"Lori Leonard's signature achievement in this book is that she offers an ethnographic analysis of a development project that is simultaneously an examination of oil companies and the practices of global capitalism and an account of the experience and consequences for ordinary people who are touted to be beneficiaries but in fact often end up victims."—Daniel Jordan Smith, author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
"Between 2000 and 2008 a hugely ambitious oil development, the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project, rose and dramatically fell. One of the largest private sector investments on the continent, this joint venture between a consortium of global oil companies, the World Bank, and the governments of Chad and Cameroon, was designed to deliver oil to the world market and provide a new model for accountable resource exploitation in a sector typically seen as cursed. Life in the Time of Oil charts the catastrophe, and tragic failure, of what came in the wake of first oil. Unlike so much of the resource curse literature which studiously avoids examining the actual practices of oil companies and project financiers, Lori Leonard takes us into the heart of the beast. A rich and compelling if ultimately bracing tale of imperial hubris, rough and tumble politics, and the duplicity of what passes as corporate social responsibility. An important and compelling book."—Michael Watts, Professor, University of California, Berkeley