Dr Oliver Owen

Research Affiliate

Olly's interests centre on political anthropology and the relations between governments and publics in West Africa, the configurations of material interests, experiences and meanings construed in these encounters; as part of an anthropology of the state which ‘de-naturalises’ governmental institutions to look at them as social formations. He recenelt completed an ethnography of new transformations in revenue and fiscal governance in Nigeria, looking at taxation relationships between the state and citizens, and how questions of social contract and political accountability are popularly understood. Alongside this, he continues a focus on policing structures and practices, both engaging in comparative research on policing in the postcolonial world, and working with stakeholders in Nigeria to feed research into policy debates. His new research extends time horizons forward and backward, looking at the ways both future and past are imagined through tropes such as infrastructure. He also continues other longstanding interests in history, politics and governance in the West African sub-region and is a co-researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance.

Previously he taught in ISCA and the African Studies Centre, and before that was a postdoctoral fellow running a three-year Economic and Social Research Council project entitled Social contracts in transformation: Tax reform in Nigeria at the Oxford Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House). Olly's DPhil at ISCA was an ethnographic study of the Nigerian Police Force. Before that, he worked in London and Lagos, first with West African civil society groups, as a journalist, and then analyst and development consultant covering West Africa. He has a BA in Social Anthropology from Cambridge, and an MSc in African Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Having an active programme of research engagements with policymakers and publics, since 2017, Olly has been the Research Director of the Nigeria Tax Research Network. His work on Nigeria’s World War II veterans resulted in a co-produced prizewinning short film, and ongoing work with publics in Nigeria and the diaspora to showcase and interpret soldiers’ songs in the Imperial War Museum collections.  In 2018, Olly was awarded a joint Social Science Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with Professor Wale Adebanwi to work with Lagos-based heritage groups on rail heritage in Nigeria.  In 2015, he won an ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for his research on the Nigerian Police Force. Olly was a Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology until October 2021.

Contact

oliver.owen(at)anthro.ox.ac.uk