Land, Climate, and Conflict: Unravelling the Nexus in Sudan, Syria, and Morocco |
In April 2003, at the outset of the Darfur crisis, the incumbent President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, asseverated “I only want land” in front of his amassed troops (International Criminal Court 2008). This statement speaks to the need to understand the systems and rules that govern the use and management of land to unpick the root causes of conflict. This essay will argue that climate change is an indirect cause of conflict. This indirect link between climate change and conflict depends on the strength of land tenure governance. Taking a nuanced approach, this essay will adhere to the ‘threat multiplier’ framework (Centre for Naval Analyses (CNA) Corporation Military Advisory Board 2007), to argue that climate change has an amplifying effect on the occurrence or intensification of conflict risks only where there is the presence of poor land tenure governance. Given the breadth that this topic encompasses, conflict will be delimited to civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa region. Climate change will be analysed through slow onset droughts widely agreed to be induced by anthropogenic climate change. To demonstrate this theoretical framework’s value, this essay will examine three case studies of Sudan, Syria and Morocco.
This essay proceeds in four sections. First, this essay will situate its contribution in debates enveloping the climate-conflict nexus. The second and third sections will illuminate the importance of poor land tenure governance in establishing climate-conflict causality by shedding new light on the cases of Sudan and Syria rooted in public consciousness. The fourth section will provide a comparative case of Morocco to demonstrate that robust land tenure governance serves as a stopgap to climate change’s effect on the occurrence or intensification of civil war.
Climate change-conflict nexus
Much ink has been spilled over the causality debate. For now, the debate remains deadlocked. Arguments committed to proving the causal relationship were originally steeped in largely neo-Malthusian terms, attempting to make sense of a world ridden with conflict, despite the dominating Fukuyama (1992) discourse brimming with post-cold war optimism (see Homer-Dixon 1999; Klare 2002; Smith and Vivekanada 2007). While others, in fairly equal measure, and often laden with excoriating tones, have leapt at the chance to disprove this causality given the ostensibly baseless empirical and theoretical approaches of their colleagues which rely on inferences in lieu of evidence (see De Châtel 2014; Selby et al. 2017; Mach et al. 2020). Within the broader field, it is important to situate these critiques decrying a lack of evidence to prove causality within a much longer tussle to unpick the causes of civil war (see Nathan 2005). By contrast, the pendulum swung heavily away from this linear debate with the advent of Goodman’s paradigm shifting ‘threat multiplier’ thesis (CNA Corporation Military Advisory Board 2007) to demonstrate how climate change exacerbates existing social, political and economic vulnerabilities to indirectly amplify threats of conflict. Now the mainstay in the climate security discourse, adjacent literature has rebutted the view that the relationship demands a straightforward, linear explanation (Centre for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board 2007; Hendrix and Salehyan 2012; Gleditsch and Nordås 2014).
This essay will carve out a new angle in existing literature by arguing that the strength of land tenure governance is of primary importance to indirect causal claims. This original theoretical framework benefits from a novel application of contrasting three case studies of Sudan, Syria and Morocco. This approach sheds light on the root causes of conflict and jointly provides a new conceptual approach for peacebuilding programs to understand the conditions in which climate change can spark or nourish conflict. Related scholarship, while minimal, has sought to provide reprieve to the gap of studies dissecting the relationship between land governance and certain climate mitigation and adaptation measures (see Hunsberger et al. 2017; Froese and Schilling 2019). Scholars have unpacked the political economy in reference to drought (De Châtel 2014; Selby et al. 2017; Ide 2018), and, less frequently, examined land tenure specifically in relation to one state (Syrian Network for Human Rights 2023). However, the centrality of land tenure governance applied across civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa region is yet to be examined.
Sudan
As far as the public’s collective memory goes, the Darfurian crisis may be the most emblematic case of the first conflict to be directly linked with climate change. It was the voice of former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon that marked an inflection point in providing authority to the advent of climate linked to security (Moon 2007). Subsequently, climate-war narratives perpetuated in relation to Darfur by Sachs (2008) – first spearheaded by the likes of Kaplan (1994) – linked Darfur’s soaring population directly with declining rainfall leading to lethal competition over land and water. This linear story perpetuates the notion of Darfur as a blank slate upon which climate change wreaks havoc. Instead, it was the nature of land tenure governance that was central to the indirect link of droughts with civil war.
On the surface, it is clear that prolonged violence that has plagued Sudan has been consistent with droughts, to the point of heightening in the lead up to the uprisings in Darfur. In 2003, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, both Darfuri rebel movements, instigated an armed rebellion against Al-Bashir’s government (Parker et al. 2017). In response, the government permitted militias or ‘Jangaweed’ to launch violence against primarily the non-Arab population across Darfur which degenerated into the protracted state of crisis (Day 2023, 283; Parker et al. 2017). While Darfur’s decent into crisis in 2003 was marked by a particularly turgid bout of violence, it was nestled into a period between 1956 and 2005 of an almost incessant state of war between the North and South (Ndongo and Mae 2013; Day 2023). Over this period, and reaching back over the last century, desert area has expanded, shifting approximately 50 to 200 kilometres southward over previous semi-desert regions according to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2007). The slow onset desertification compounded in the lead up to the Darfur crisis which induced significant stresses onto largely pastoralist societies in Darfur (UNEP 2007). Prior to 2003, rainfall fell sharply, and desertification occurred at the time when pastoralists migrated south, linked to subsequent clashes with agriculturalists. This escalated in accordance with largely low intensity conflict until 1999 through to major violence in February 2003 (Mazo 2009; Daoudy 2021). At large, strong correlations can be demonstrated between annual temperature variations and the presence of civil war (Burke et al. 2009).
These strong correlations of droughts and civil war suffered in Sudan only occurred in connection with poor governance over land tenure. In the lead up to the Darfur crisis, several notable shifts impacting the population’s substantial reliance on subsistence agriculture to produce severe negative externalities (Republic of Sudan 2006; Berdal et al. 2013). First, fundamental shifts in long-standing governance mechanisms over land tenure frameworks removed deeply held notions of societal conflict mitigation (Mazo 2009). Prior to 1970, determination of property rights were resolved through locally established, traditional customs (Mazo 2009). Customary land tenure provided sedentary groups collective rights to the land around their village (Olsson 2010). Following 1970, these were replaced by the imposition of prescriptive statutory regulations under the Unregistered Land Act (1970). These regulations were realised through the subsummation of land by the government where there was no prior formal registration (Olsson 2010; Pantuliano 2017). Without traditional local customs of land tenure regimes, a yawning chasm of conflict resolution mechanisms to mitigate conflict was left behind. This manifested in land grabbing from pastoralists primarily made up of ethnically African Darfurians.
Secondly, in Darfur, this was compounded with vacuums in administrations to impose access to land rights in the lead up to the conflict in 2003 such as the government supported division of Dar Masalit in 1995 into 13 emirates (Abdul-Jalil 2006). This produced a chasm of local administration which spurred ethnic violence, plunging Western Darfur into a declared emergency region until 1999 marked by a void of allocation of land for settlement and agriculture (Abdul-Jalil 2006). Therefore, the antithesis of Polgreen’s (2007) argument that climate change was less important than land governance by the Government of Sudan in the conflict is true. It is the mismanagement of land tenure governance that was the lynchpin in fuelling the drought’s effect on conflict. This poor governance compounded with the resource scarcity from the longstanding and escalating desertification which led to competition over decreasing swathes of now contested arable land. This contest helped to prompt pastor-herder conflicts as livelihoods deteriorated (Ndongo and Maes 2013; Republic of Sudan 2006) and around two million people became internally displaced (Berdal et al. 2013) damaging the “moral geography” (De Waal 2005, 87) of Darfur.
Droughts compounding with poor governance frameworks fuelled underlying ethnic grievances and horizontal inequalities to spark violence. Darfurian society comprises of traditional divides between the primarily African Darfurian sedentary agriculturalists and the Arab Darfurian nomadic herder population (Prunier 2008; Ndongo and Maes 2013). The reduction in precipitation associated with regional climate change has emerged as a structural stress factor on pastoralist societies, particularly in Darfur who were driven further south due to desertification (UNEP 2007). These experiences........