Violence that enters the lives of precarious subjects exists in the form of insurgency, rebellion, and even roguery. The chapter opens with a reading of two texts: Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars, about a real-life journalist with a penchant for literary devices, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, about a fictional journalist with social realist proclivities. By employing literary devices charged with concealed violence, both texts reveal that precarity breeds insurgent violence. Each treats Delta militancy as a metaphor – a symptom of inequalities crystallized into insurgency – and traces other absent metaphors, including naturalized violence, that are laden with militancy: area boys, urban gangs, and precarious ecologies. This is followed by a reading of the “subterranean violence” in Tony Nwaka’s Lords of the Creek: rather than addressing the root cause of insurgency, Nwaka’s novel reveals how the oil fraternity and power elites manufacture a false sense of emergency to crush militants. Thus, the real emergency concealed under the second order of diegesis implodes into insurgent violence. The play of the militant tropes in the three texts is complemented by the “routine violence” in Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, where militancy becomes a response to violent disruption of the daily routines of Delta populations.

This chapter outlines the evolution of BHR since the 1990s in three stages: the beginnings, the growth phase, and, finally, the time of consolidation. Before doing so, it touches on three significant precursors, which are often overlooked in more cursory historical accounts of the BHR movement. Those are the Nuremburg Trials, the activities of Western companies in apartheid South Africa, and the opposition of the local Ogoni population against oil extraction in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Furthermore, it outlines a number of BHR initiatives such as the UN Global Compact, the UN Draft Norms and the mandate of the UN Special Representative on BHR and its main product, the UN Guiding Principles on BHR (UNGPs).The chapter describes the evolution of BHR both as a movement and as an academic field.