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- Convenors:
-
Han van Dijk
(Wageningen University)
Cyrus Samimi (University of Bayreuth)
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- Stream:
- Environment and Geography
- Location:
- David Hume, LG.11
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Since the outbreak of civil conflict in Mali in 2012, political instability in the entire Sahel has increased. Many conflicts are framed around ethnicity and religion but in reality centre on natural resources and the relations between migrants and autochthones but are disguised as matters of religion or ethnicity.
Long Abstract:
Over the past years years political instability in the Sahel has increased. Conflicts between migrants and autochthones are on the increase. These conflicts are often phrased in terms of religion, extremist Islam and ethnicity. However the root causes go much deeper than this, and are related to population growth, climate change and bad management of conflicts. Yet these factors have been there for a long time. What are the factors that may explain the sudden increase in these conflicts over the past 5 years? What are the reasons for these ruptures in social and political relations? How are they related to contemporary issues such as increasing migration, the emergence of Islamic extremism and local militias and external and regional military interventions? What is the role of framing by governments and social media of specific population groups as associated with Muslim extremism? Or do we need to address underlying factors such as increasing population density and resources scarcity resulting from climate change and environmental decline?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Tobias Haller (University of Bern) Andrea Pase (Università di Padova) Angela Kronenburg García (UCLouvain) Marina Bertoncin (Università di Padova)
Paper short abstract:
We address the issue of the turmoil in the Sahel from a resource access, spatial and institutional change perspective, showing how in Niger, Ghana, Lake Chad Area land grabbing, mining and large scale infrastructure projects contribute to institutional change in the commons and conflicts.
Paper long abstract:
We address the issue of the turmoil in the Sahel from a resource access, spatial and institutional change perspective. Many of the problems in the Sahel might look like being related to demographic pressures and climate change only. However, a closer look into concrete cases shows that these are long-standing issues for which pastoralist and farming groups had developed coping strategies and institutions. These enabled the management of land and related common-pool resources (CPRs) such as pasture, fisheries and water in the area, in flexible ways. The actual turmoil is based, among other aspects, on problems of institutional change and new resource frontier contexts, as part of historical processes that undermined common property regimes by introducing state and private property leading to various forms of enclosures and instabilities. We present illustrative studies of landgrabs in Ghana, green grabbing in Northern Cameroon, mining and large-scale irrigation schemes in Niger and Lake Chad region. These cases show how pastoral groups and marginal farmer-fishing communities are losing access to CPRs, leading to problems of environmental degradation (lack of mobility, coordination of resource use and to pollution in mining and agro-industrial farming). The enclosures are often legitimated by negative discourses used by states and companies for labelling local communities. Such constellations lead to conflicts over resources as well as to local responses of resistance (ranging from weapons of the weak and legal strategies to open conflicts). Finally, these resource-related dynamics of conflict and resistance relate to the recent political instability in the Sahel.
Martin Schmiedl (Mendel University in Brno)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper focuses on the issue of intrastate conflicts in Sahelian states. Employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), this work aims to show the complexity of factors contributing to intrastate conflicts.
Paper long abstract:
As some seminal works shows (Collier, Hoeffler 1998; 2002; 2004; Collier, Hoeffler Rohner 2009; Gurr 2015; Fearon, Laitin 2003; Sambanis 2001 etc.), the specific reasons for intrastate conflicts are not easily identified. In most contexts, several different conditions play significant roles. The proposed paper offers methodological considerations in the study of conflicts by demonstrating the explanatory power of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). This method specifically allows for the study of the ways in which multiple conditions are interrelated in the occurrence of intrastate conflicts. Various factors are taken into consideration and examined in terms of their relationships with other factors. Unlike the previous studies that have been using statistical methods with the focus on the impact of separate variables the paper advances the methodological landscape of security studies by highlighting the complex entanglement of conditions leading to intrastate conflicts in the Sahel region. Drawing from a wealth of diverse data such as Mo Ibrahim Index, World Bank Databank or Polity IV, the paper follows up on some previous studies (e.g. Benjaminsen 2008; Benjaminsen et al. 2012; Raleigh 2010 etc.) and would like to show how conflict incidence is based on interconnected relations of such conditions as population density, access to water and land, state repression or economic well-being. In which way is population density connected with access to water leading to intrastate conflicts? Is there any interdependent influence of human well-being, state repression, urbanization and quality of democracy on conflict incidence?
Samir Djelti (Mascara University Algeria) Hadjer Belghoul (Mostaganem university)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to explain forced migration within the general forecast of the osmosis theory of human migration. In addition, it shows the importance of projecting and planning for forced migration. It concludes the projection of the force and the trajectories of forced migration in the region.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to explain forced migration within the general forecast of the osmosis theory of human migration. In addition, it shows the importance of projecting and planning for forced migration. Based on the osmosis theory, the force and the trajectory of forced migration are explained. This study concludes that, the force of forced migration is determined by the high migration pressure between the concerned, the neighboring, and the developed countries. Furthermore, forced migration is oriented by the level of borders permeability in the region.
Such understanding of forced migration means the possibility its projection and consequently the possibility of avoiding its negative effects on humanity in general and on societies in particular. Moreover, these negative effects could be transformed into safe, orderly and regular migration. The projection of forced migration is through regional scenarios of the osmosis model of migration. Different scenarios of the future of the Mediterranean migration will be drown. Such understanding and projecting forced migration strengthen and facilitate the achievement of the objectives of the refugees global compact.
Lotje de Vries (Wageningen University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the crisis in the Central African Republic through the lens of responses to local violence. It argues that the imagined fault line of religion is reinforced through international response while others are largely ignored.
Paper long abstract:
Similar to the crisis in the Sahel, conflict in the Central African Republic has been on a sharp increase since six years. In addition, similar to the crisis in Mali, the international response has been unprecedented compared to earlier crises. With the UN Peacekeeping mission now active for more than four years, one would hope that the crisis would decrease, the opposite, however, is the reality. This paper will explore why this is the case and argues that rather than subduing fractures in society, the international response risk to reinforce certain fault lines while ignoring others. Religion was considered the master-cleavage, while in reality, also other sources of tensions contributed to local outbursts of violence. This produced two results. First, religion effectively increasingly has become a source of violent conflict. Second, other fractures and causes of competition in society remain unaddressed. Both dynamics contribute to the seeming intractability of pathways to solutions.