How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan

Abstract

Given the current turmoil in the Sahel and Sudan, this debate piece addresses an important absence in the commentary. While self-serving explanations relating to climate change, avaricious generals and entrenched ethnic tensions abound, there is little on the deepening crisis within the agro-pastoral economy that directly affects millions of toiling people across the entire region. With reference to the spectacular, but largely ignored, growth in livestock exports from the ostensibly impoverished Horn to the urbanising Gulf states, we argue that over several decades, neoliberalism has transformed the erstwhile reciprocity between ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’ into a relation of permanent war. Favouring armed actors, the historic affinity between merchant capital and raw violence as an economic relation has produced a violent and expansive extractive economy. This internationally facilitated mode of appropriation, with its associated acts of land clearance, dispossession and displacement, is the root cause of the current crisis.