Environmental Justice and Sacrifice Zones in Nigeria’s Niger Delta: A Critical Interdisciplinary Framework

This study develops an original critical interdisciplinary framework for understanding the Niger Delta as an environmental sacrifice zone, theorising how petroleum law, political economy, and racial-ethnic marginalisation interact to produce conditions of extreme environmental injustice in one of the world's most oil-contaminated regions. The sacrifice zone concept, drawn from environmental justice scholarship in the United States, is theoretically reconstructed for application to the Nigerian post-colonial context. The research employs a multi-method interdisciplinary approach combining critical legal theory, political ecology, environmental health science, and ethnographic field research. Original empirical data are generated through 100 structured community health assessments across ten communities in Ogoniland, Izon, and Itsekiri territories, supplemented by air and water quality sampling results from 2022 to 2024 and doctrinal analysis of Nigerian petroleum and environmental law. The theoretical framework developed integrates legal, ecological, and political dimensions of environmental sacrifice zone production into a unified explanatory model. This is the first study to apply sacrifice zone theory comprehensively to Nigerian petroleum law and produces original interdisciplinary theoretical contributions of significance to environmental law, development studies, and human rights scholarship. Keywords: environmental justice, sacrifice zones, Niger Delta, critical theory, petroleum law.