Supporting Pastoralist Livelihoods in Eastern Africa Through Peace Building
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Local/Global Encounters
Supporting Pastoralist Livelihoods in Eastern Africa Through Peace Building
JEREMY LIND
ABSTRACT Conflict reduction and peace building initiatives have become the latest development fashion to support insecure pastoralist livelihoods in eastern Africa. Jeremy Lind argues that common approaches in this area are weakened by the predominant understanding of conflicts involving pastoralists as competition over scarce resources as well as the relative inattention to the situation and particular needs of the destitute population. KEYWORDS conflict; armed violence; peace building; development; pastoralism; Kenya
The promise of peace in an impoverished land Conflict reduction and peace building activities have become an important focus of aid and donor agency efforts to improve the livelihoods of livestock-keeping groups that inhabit a large swathe of eastern Africa straddling the borders of southern Somalia across into eastern Ethiopia, northern Kenya, southeastern Sudan and northern Uganda. The development of this impoverished region has been path dependent and is rooted in colonial perceptions of the insignificant value of what were considered to be ‘low potential’ dryland areas as well as a belief that customary pastoralism was an outdated form of production. This paradigmatic view of pastoralism and inherent development bias in favour of ‘high potential’ farming areas in countries in eastern Africa persists up to now, observed in the inequitable distribution of public funds and government services to the disadvantage of pastoralist areas. These structural dynamics frame a situation of chronic instability, conflict, and armed violence in the region and tie into a crisis in pastoralism that is characterized in part by significant humanitarian challenges and heightened levels of severe poverty (Markakis, 2004; Buchanan-Smith and Lind, 2005; Nori et al., 2005). Livestock holdings have declined to a point of material insignificance for a significant and growing proportion of the pastoralist population in eastern Africa that can be considered as destitute and is unable to meet its annual food needs even in years of ‘good’ rainfall. Aggravating this crisis is the near comprehensive loss of herds across entire social networks meaning that it is difficult to reconstitute livestock herds at a household level through reciprocal ties that customarily bond different herding units. The widespread loss of herds has accelerated a shift in livestock keeping societies away Development (2006) 49(3), 111–115. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100279
Development 49(3): Local/Global Encounters from having herds as the focus of household production and contributed to a routinization of survival work to generate nominal amounts of income and livelihood in place of animal products. Although there is no singular reason for the crisis in livelihoods of livestock keepers in eastern Africa, many pastoralists themselves place explanatory emphasis on the role of armed violence in their own downward trajectories in liveli
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