As violence in Mali and Burkina Faso reached a ten-year high this year, the West African Sahel appears to be experiencing the perfect storm of climate stress, resource degradation, and violent extremism. At the center of that storm, one finds livestock herders—pastoralists—who are both vulnerable to environmental changes in the region, and historically marginalized from politics. Conflict in the region looks like a harbinger of the climate wars to come—but is it really? In research produced for Search for Common Ground, Andrew McDonnell and I found that while competition for land and water resources has increased dramatically across the region, violence associated with pastoralism emerges from a much more complex set of factors. Not surprisingly, the decisive conflict variable is governance.

Certainly, competition for critical resources like pasture and water is becoming more acute and the most credible analyses point to climate change as a clear source of change and stress in the region. And it is true that pastoralists make up a large share of certain insurgent groups, notably the Katiba Maacina in Central Mali, where several massacres recently occurred and violence is ongoing. Yet, conflicts over resources predate climate impacts in the region, having been endemic across West Africa, including Central Mali, for decades. 

The Failure of Forest Resource Access Rules

Beginning in the 1990s, countries in the region, including Mali and Burkina Faso, have tried but largely failed to establish and enforce inclusive forest resource access rules. Despite some successes, those efforts have fallen short in part because of the difficulty in addressing everyday corruption that targets livestock herders and drives them towards extremist groups.    When institutions and political actors are predatory and exploitative, environmental stress is more likely to contribute to violence.  

Data collected for the Transhumance at a Crossroads Project reveals that in the Central African nation of Chad, pastoralists must defend their animals against hyenas and other predators.  But when they cut tree branches to build night corrals or provide fodder for their livestock, forestry agents fine them exorbitantly or subject them to violent, unjust punishment. The story is very similar in West Africa and has been for years, although the fines are smaller because government agents there are slightly more accountable than those in Chad.

In some cases, decent laws have been passed but in rural areas, they matter little if unaccountable foresters can still extract rents from pastoralists who increasingly rely on tree branch cutting to make it through the long dry season.

Conflating Disputes with Violent Conflict

This lack of inclusive resource access has broader implications for conflict dynamics as it keeps livestock herders dependent on nominally illicit resource use, which can exacerbate tensions with local peasant farmers. This is illustrated by a fatal altercation that occurred earlier this year in southern Benin when a peasant farmer yelled at a herder who was standing in a tree lopping branches, they came to blows, and there were fatal reprisals. That tragic but unfortunately common event points to an important distinction between disputes, even those that are violent, and attacks.

While disputes and attacks can be related, there are important differences: disputes over resource use, even violent ones, are everyday occurrences during certain times of year in West Africa. A recent dispute in northern Benin, where villages were attacked and six people were killed, was followed by successful mediation by local authorities and security forces. Unfortunately, widely-used and highly regarded data sources such as the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) tend to conflate disputes and attacks through the use of catch-codes like “communal militia,” which can lead to misleading interpretations and analysis.

It is important not to confound this type of violent dispute with the organized and relatively large-scale attacks that affect Nigeria and Mali. While the Dogon-Fulani conflict in central Mali, for example, has a land tenure component, that conflict is more about local political supremacy and alliances than it is about access to land. 

Lagging Land Tenure Regimes

In West Africa, farmers continue to hold strong customary land tenure rights, which has many upsides, but land tenure regimes have not kept up with growing demands for resource access and are therefore a clear source of tension. Pastoralists have suffered from exclusion through agricultural development schemes, most notably in Sudan, but also benign neglect where grazing areas simply vanish from one year to the next, which is the trend throughout West Africa. On the other hand, necessary policies such as pastoral migration corridors can put farmers on the defensive because they fear that the pastoralists will claim them the land as their own. 

Given the still deeply political nature of land tenure in Africa, these policies easily become zero-sum and pastoralists are cast as outsiders and foreigners, which they often are. But especially in the current context of regional counter-terrorism measures, such exclusionary dynamics become toxic and violent, as we have seen especially in Nigeria. Those dynamics often take on a life of their own and become detached from the underlying reality of land resource governance. 

Hardening Borders

A final dimension of pastoral security is cross-border migration. Academic researchers have created a body of scientific evidence that pastoralism benefits from spatial mobility at various scales. In this case, policy has followed science in West Africa: various national laws, charters and especially the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) protocol of 1998 guarantees herders the right to cross borders with their livestock. This ambitious regional framework, however, is being undone by regional security concerns and the mounting pressure of farmer-herder conflicts. 

Despite being a signatory to the ECOWAS protocol, the Republic of Benin closed its borders to foreign herds in 2019. Continuing to cross into the country from neighboring Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria in search of dry season pasture, pastoralists are now illegally in the country and subject to harassment, racketeering, and other kinds of abuse. Illegality means pastoralists, especially the young shepherds responsible for the day-to-day care of animals, remain fringe actors, especially in the communities where they need access to resources.

Corruption and Cattle Rustling

An equally negative effect of pastoralists remaining on the fringe both politically and economically is the persistent and widespread problem of cattle rustling. Livestock remains one of the most lucrative activities in the sub-region and law enforcement remains, to put it mildly, weak. It is too easy and too tempting to operate in the illegal livestock economy for individuals who hold power either through public office, control over lethal weapons, or both. This has given rise to the kind of neo-pastoralism where elites own livestock and their herding behaviors contribute to various conflicts.

Climate wars these are not. But pastoralists in West and Central Africa are nonetheless under tremendous environmental stress and their leaders are generally not making life any easier for them. To achieve sustainable and secure livestock production, governance in the region must immediately change for the better.