Intertribal Conflict Research Articles

Conflict over natural resources among pastoralists in northern Kenya: a look at recent initiatives in conflict resolution

AbstractThe paper describes the traditional relationship between pastoralism and the environment, and the institutions that underpin livelihood security and natural resource management. It identifies the circumstances that have led to pastoralism coming under threat and the resulting increase in inter‐tribal conflict over natural resources. The paper discusses how pastoralist institutions are changing and the role a third party can play in facilitating new institutional arrangements. Recent initiatives by non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in capacity building for environmental management and peace building are examined for the extent to which these external interventions on conflict resolution can stabilize the pastoralist system. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Memory of Loss: Ecological Politics, Local History, and the Evolution of Karimojong Violence

Since early March 1999, deadly confrontations among pastoralists and government forces in northeastern Uganda's Karamoja region have escalated. Raiding and banditry are long-established features of intertribal relations in this region, and government reprisals against such operations date from the colonial period. However, present-day violence has assumed a singular form among the Karimojong, often involving them in the murder and raiding of other Karimojong as well as people from neighboring ethnic groups. It has been argued that ongoing violence in Karamoja is the result of the acquisition of automatic weapons by the Karimojong and their neighbors. While this might explain the increased virulence of intertribal conflict since the end of the colonial era, the direction of aggression by the Karimojong against members of their own ethnic group suggests that there are other factors to be considered. In this paper, I examine the sequence of ecological, political, and historical events leading to widespread i...

Beer Drinking and Cattle Theft in Ukaguru: Intertribal Relations in a Tanganyika Chiefdom1

DESPITE the attention currently paid to certain political implications of tribalism in Africa, little social anthropological study has been concerned with intertribal relations. Yet we know that none of the tribes in Africa exists as an isolate. Even in the past each tribe's land bordered on that of several others, and trade, raiding, migration, and marriage often linked people over comparatively large and diverse areas. The little that has been written about intertribal relations in East Africa is largely concerned with the conflicts between the Nilo-Hamitic and Bantu tribes of Kenya and Tanganyika, e.g, the Masai, Kamba, and Kikuyu, and the Tatoga and Nyaturu.2 But it seems naive and misleading to picture such relations as wholly warlike. Such relations were and still are far more complex and ambivalent than has been commonly represented. In this paper I shall try to present one example of such intertribal relations. In the chiefdom of Ukaguru in east-central Tanganyika, intertribal dependence may be characterized by beer-drinking, and intertribal conflict by cattle-theft. These two activities serve as foci for the complex and ambivalent relations between two vastly different peoples.