Contribute to the economic and social development of the country. In spite of this, the enclosure of the Gulf of Guinea for oil and gas commodification has led to conflicts over ocean space that was once used for small-scale food fisheries. All offshore oil rigs and other infrastructure have been banned from fishing within a 500m radius, and the oil rigs' bright lights attract fish into the 'no-go' zones, creating de facto Marine Protected Areas. It is illegal to fish around oil rigs, which leads to conflicts and growing resistance from small-scale fishers. Resources curse theory is the best explanation for conflict around natural resources in states endowed with natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa. An example of the resource curse is the conflict between small-scale fisheries and the oil and gas industry in Ghana. Resources curse tendencies are revealed in the thesis, such as corruption, mismanagement of oil rents, and growing inequality. It has been criticized, however, as uncritical, reductionist, and above all, ahistorical. Therefore, the study suggests that a different way to understand the conflict is to move beyond resource curse narratives and focus on the historical geography of resource grabs tied to the creation of enclaves and commodity frontiers. Different resource actors in Ghana's Western region understand, represent, and transform ocean space over time through the changing toponymy of maps, texts, and images. It concludes that despite the heavily commodified resource extraction along the Western region’s coast since the fifteenth century, oil and gas exploitation is the first commodity frontier to directly appropriate ocean space from fisheries. This has resulted in the enclosure and depletion of a nationally important food source. The oil and gas exploitation has therefore resulted in a decline in food security and sovereignty in a country that has a very high per capita fish consumption rate.