Essentialising critical geopolitics of the farmers–pastoralists conflicts in West Africa

Abstract

This article canvasses for a critical geopolitical treatment of the farmers–pastoralists conflicts in West Africa. It has been argued that geopolitics research in political geography have placed more emphasis on discourse study neglecting ethnographic methods such that the literature is in danger of becoming both monotonous and skewed. In this situation, the writings relegate or even obliterate people’s experiences and everyday comprehension of the issues under study. Consequently, it has been suggested that ethnographic participant observation could be used to address these disparities and open new research frontiers. Nonetheless, Martin Muller argues that despite the incorporation of ethnographic methods in critical geopolitics such research lacks theoretical rigour and requires a re-conceptualisation of discourse to incorporate a poststructuralist framework of Laclau and Mouffe capable of treating geopolitical meanings and identity production as both discourse and social practice. In this paper, these debates are weaved around the literature on the farmers–pastoralists conflicts in West Africa fleshing out the essentials of a critical geopolitical analysis of the conflicts which involves both discourse and ethnographic study that are founded on Laclau and Mouffe political discourse theory.