In the last two decades, the struggles to control the oil resources of the Niger Delta have continued to be defining moments of political organizing in Nigeria. Multinational corporations such as Chevron, Shell, and Mobil, as well as the Nigerian state, engage in practices that result in the production of centralized power to strengthen the state’s hold on oil resources. However, local-level citizens and groups increasingly challenge the marginalization of their oil-producing communities. As their human and environmental rights are suppressed, they adopt alternative means of negotiating survival and other forms of power to assert communal control of their land and resources. This chapter argues that an oil economy and practices associated with it have produced three interrelated moments for Nigeria and the Niger Delta that are rooted in an extractive practice that privileges the state and multinational oil corporations and puts communities where the oil is located at a disadvantage.