About

Omolade Adunbi is a professor of Afroamerican and African Studies in the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, with a courtesy appointment as a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. He is a political and environmental anthropologist whose research explores issues related to governance, infrastructures of extraction, environmental and climate politics, human rights, power, violence, culture, transnational institutions, multinational corporations, and the postcolonial state. Adunbi has received the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award in 2016 and the John Dewey Award for excellence in teaching in 2022 at the University of Michigan. His notable publications include the book Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria, which won the 2015 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology, and Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria, which interrogates the idea of free trade zones and their relation to oil refining practices and infrastructure. His current research project focuses on the intersection of social media, climate change, and environmental politics. Adunbi is actively involved in campus teaching, including in the University’s LSA Honors Program and Program in the Environment, and serves as the director of the African Studies Center. He is also a faculty associate in the Donia Human Rights Center and the Energy Institute.

Research topics

• Engineering
• Geography
• Thermodynamics
• Physics
• Mechanical engineering
• Meteorology
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Mathematical analysis
• Economy
• Environmental science
• Business
• Waste management
• Archaeology
• Economics

Selected publications

• Spaces of private conservation: State effects and hierarchical autonomy in private wildlife conservation

  Political Geography · 2026-03-12

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Extractivism as Whiteness:

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-01-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Who Morality <i>Epp</i>?”

  Current Anthropology · 2025-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 2009, the Nigerian government set up a presidential amnesty program for militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of the country. From its inception, the program was enmeshed in a series of contradictions that are connected to the political economy of oil in Nigeria. In this article, we situate the practice of youths faking militancy to seek enlistment in the amnesty program in the context of a declining traditional obligations system and emergent responses of youth to family moral guidance. Based on accounts we collected from youths who sought enlistment in the 2017 special amnesty program organized by the government of Ondo State, Nigeria, we argue that the acts of nonmilitant youth seeking amnesty depict popular dissatisfaction with economic exclusion and also their awareness of the absence of ethical order in processes of accessing economic opportunities in Nigeria.

  PublisherDOI

• 11 Extractivism as Whiteness: the racial construction of oil enclaves in Nigeria

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-01-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• AFR volume 93 issue 5 Cover and Front matter

  Africa · 2023-12-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban NigeriaDaniel E.Agbiboa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)

  PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2023-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Peer Reviewed

  PublisherDOI

• Victoria Bernal, Katrien Pype and Daivi Rodima-Taylor (eds), Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media. New York NY: Berghahn Books (hb US$135/£99 – 978 1 80539 029 9). 2023, vii + 245 pp.

  Africa · 2023-10-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Victoria Bernal, Katrien Pype and Daivi Rodima-Taylor (eds), Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media. New York NY: Berghahn Books (hb US$135/£99 – 978 1 80539 029 9). 2023, vii + 245 pp. - Volume 93 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• The Petrostate in Africa

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History · 2023-12-13

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Oil exploration in Africa began during the colonial period. The discovery of oil in many African states and its attendant promises of development has been a double-edged sword for the continent. In many African countries, discovery of abundant oil fields coincided with independence, entrusting the management of huge oil reserves to the postcolonial states that emerged from the rubble of colonialism. Oil has made Africa a strategic energy source for the rest of the world. As of 2017, Africa was estimated to contain upward of 126 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, constituting about 10 percent of world reserves. Yet the search for more oil continues in many African countries. Oil generates immense revenue for states that have it but it also makes them susceptible to a boom-and-bust cycle that mono-economies often confront. The finite nature of oil and the technology that is needed to extract it have made oil a beautiful bride for multinational corporations and the state which partners with them. Elite competition is often the norm in states rich in oil, where its control is often accompanied by access to the huge resources, with no benefits accruing to the larger population. The process of elite accumulation of oil rent has preoccupied most scholarship on Africa since the 1970s, when many oil-rich states experienced a boom—hence the notion that such countries on the continent are a petrostate. Petrostates are susceptible to the resource curse of mono-economies, according to the analyses that have dominated the political economy literature for the better part of the last half century.

  PublisherDOI

• AFR volume 92 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

  Africa · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• AFR volume 92 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  Africa · 2022-05-01

  articleOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Leslie Bank

  19 shared

• Laura Mann

  19 shared

• AbdouMaliq Simone

  19 shared

• Harri Englund

  19 shared

• Mike Mcgovern

  19 shared

• Jonny Steinberg

  19 shared

• Thomas J. Bassett

  19 shared

• Benjamin Soares

  19 shared

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  Yale University

  2010

• MA , African Studies

  Yale University

  2004

Awards & honors

• 2016 Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award
• 2022 John Dewey Award for excellence in teaching
• 2015 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology from the R…