Beyond the Resource Curse: Oil Wealth, State Capacity, and the Foreign Policy Ambitions of the Nigerian State

This dissertation develops an original theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between oil wealth, state capacity, and foreign policy ambition in the Nigerian case, challenging deterministic resource curse accounts and offering a more nuanced analysis of how oil revenue shapes, enables, and constrains Nigeria's international role. Existing resource curse theory predicts that oil dependence produces weak institutions, conflict, and foreign policy passivity or aggression, yet Nigeria has pursued an activist multilateral foreign policy over decades despite chronic governance deficiencies. Drawing on state-building theory, rentier state theory, and foreign policy analysis, this study employs a longitudinal case study design covering Nigeria's foreign policy from 1970 to 2024, tracing how oil revenue cycles have variably enabled and constrained specific foreign policy initiatives across five presidential administrations. Primary data are drawn from Nigerian national archives in Ibadan, NNPC historical records, Central Bank of Nigeria annual reports, and oral history interviews with former ministers and senior diplomats. The theoretical contribution introduces the concept of the constrained activist state to describe polities with significant foreign policy ambitions that are persistently limited by internally generated fiscal instability rooted in resource dependency. Original hypotheses about the relationship between oil price, institutional capacity, and alliance formation behaviour are tested through process tracing. Keywords: resource curse, oil wealth, Nigeria, state capacity, foreign policy.