Given that there have been three major peace processes in Sudan’s troubled western province of Darfur, the current escalation of violence indicates that perhaps something about existing approaches is failing to hit the mark. Identifying what is missing is vital – not just for Darfur, but for other areas with similar challenges of state fragility, poverty, and competition over natural resources.

There are clearly major problems with the political process regarding inclusivity and representation. Resolving these issues is of course essential, but that is not the end of the story. The current upsurge in violence – 450,000 displaced in 2014 and another 100,000 in January 2015 alone – has as much to do with increasingly complex and multi-layered disputes over land as with the high politics of the formal peace process.

There is a major disconnect here: a war that is about both a national political struggle and a complex web of land conflicts, but a peace process that is framed around national politics with little substance on land and natural resources.

The Doha Document for Peace in Darfur states that “competition over pasture and water between herders and farmers is a serious problem in Darfur which shall be addressed in a comprehensive way.” However, the document fails to develop the treatment of land and resources into a strategic program, so it is of little surprise that a comprehensive treatment has failed to materialize. In the governance vacuum created by a decade of violence, endemic conflict over land has also spiraled out of control.

The reason for this gap in response appears to be a combination of the framing of the conflict and a lack of awareness about what an appropriate response would comprise.

Much of what was written outside Sudan about Darfur was intended for a generic debate about the links between conflict and natural resources and therefore fails to provide a nuanced contribution to the specific challenge within Darfur. The region became a hotly disputed “case study” in Western academic and policy fora, but these often-selective readings of the conflict provided little assistance to peacemakers working there, where the inconvenient complexity of the conflict could not be ignored.

The challenge now is to revisit Darfur on its own terms. My new paper in the International Journal of Water Resources Development aims to do this by reviewing the discourse within Darfur, first to identify priorities for peacebuilders in Sudan and then to identify what can be learned elsewhere.

Framing the Conflict

Those making the case that natural resource scarcity has been a driver of violent conflict in Darfur point to the convergence of rising populations, declining rainfall, and failing governance since the 1950s.

Displacement following drought in 1984-85 contributed to a breakdown of governance and large-scale tribal clashes between 1987 and 1989. Local conflict related to land continued through the 1990s and reached another crescendo in 2002-2003 over control of grazing on Darfur’s central highlands and along essential livestock migration routes.

It is evident that we’re going through another violent contestation over control of land today – this time in the governance vacuum created by the chaos of the last decade and with the spoils of war being land illegally vacated over that period. The cycle of failing governance and conflict in the context of climatic shocks is clear.

But, very reasonably, this framing of the conflict has also been refuted as masking fundamental political drivers. Darfur’s historic marginalization within Sudan came into clear focus during the early 2000s when a deal was being negotiated between Khartoum and what would become South Sudan.  That it was known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was more than mere irony for the Darfuris. A new political dispensation was emerging and Darfur’s chronic political exclusion was evidently set to continue.

This articulation of Darfur’s grievances is corroborated by the fact that the major peace negotiations in the last 10 years have been between the Khartoum government and Darfuri rebel groups and do not relate to control of land and natural resources but are categorized under power-sharing, wealth-sharing, and security.

Also conspicuously absent is a significant environmental shock to trigger such a massive flair up of violence. Rainfall has been on an upward trend since the mid-1980s and looking back further climatologists define the trend as flat with high variability.

So the argument that Darfur should be understood as being primarily a political conflict on a national scale is clearly a strong one.

Frustratingly, this leaves us with two credible yet competing narratives. The key to understanding the Darfur conflict, therefore, is to examine how these dynamics are interwoven – to move the debate beyond competing case studies. The premise of my paper is that this is not only more useful as a contribution to peacebuilding within Darfur, but also provides a more valuable contribution to policy debates elsewhere.

Drawing on Local Sources

Twelve years on from when Darfur burst into flames in a way unseen since the 19^th century, I ask what the discourse that took place within Darfur in the intervening years says about the links between natural resources and conflict. My review focuses on water, energy, and food, considering both long-term trends and the impact of ongoing violence and instability.

As pressure on land use has increased, traditional systems of governance have been stretched. Darfur has undergone considerable changes in land use as rain-fed agriculture has expanded, choking migration routes for cattle. Such tensions are being resolved elsewhere in Africa by governance arrangements that have evolved to enable equitable adaptation of both farming and livestock livelihoods.

However, when tension spills over to violence, as has happened in Darfur, then the collaboration between livelihood groups needed to reform and adapt traditional governance arrangements may no longer be achievable. When the government is party to these conflicts, their role in enabling such reforms is also undermined.

Worryingly, in addition to the negative feedback between failing governance and conflict, it is clear that economic distortions driven by the peacebuilding and relief economies are also undermining equitable and sustainable management of natural resources in Darfur. One of the more worrying aspects of the relief economy is how chlorinated water supplied for free has effectively subsidized a massive brick-making industry which is driven in large part by the influx of cash and the rental demands of the international community. This industry has been a significant driver of deforestation, depletion of aquifers, and loss of good agricultural land.

What emerges from the analysis is that international intervention inevitably alters expectations for post-conflict governance. This may be by raising expectations of state service provision that are not environmentally or economically viable in the long run. There are a number of examples of displaced persons camps that have exhausted local aquifers, for example. Where these camps are close to each other – or to large cities – then risks of even larger-scale scarcity are exacerbated. As well, as a result of displacement, massive urbanization, and loss of governance, the potential impact of significant drought in Darfur is greater overall.

In some cases, creative programming that has focused on strengthening collaboration amongst livelihood groups has increased resilience. Support to village development committees and the introduction of new approaches to community based natural resources management have shown signs of increasing resilience as well as contributing to local peace initiatives.

Part of a Bigger Picture

Darfur’s nexus of environmental, political, and population issues is not unique. Major transitions are taking place in land use, livelihoods, social structures, and economies across the Sahel. As Darfur has shown, in the absence of well-funded and capable institutions of government, many traditional systems of environmental governance have given way to the rule of the gun.

This is a compelling reason to support and strengthen local governance in other areas at risk of conflict. The urgency to work with local governments across the Sahel and Horn of Africa before conflict makes the task much harder is clear.

The case for investing in environmental governance as part of peacebuilding and post-conflict operations is also clear. To do so, however, requires capacity to develop nuanced contextual understanding of the interface between environmental and political conflict dynamics and to work in genuine collaboration with local organizations.

Currently, alongside informal local conflict resolution, there are some initiatives to support the rebuilding of environmental governance. But scale-up is limited and the operating space for such work is narrow. (These will be discussed in a follow-up to this paper.)

There are clearly significant lessons to be learned from the efforts made so far in the search for peace in Darfur, many of which would be of value elsewhere – not the least of which is the need for a more nuanced framing of conflicts in order to design peace processes that effectively target the complex issues underlying violence, be they political, environmental, or both.