Notes on Land-based Conflicts in Kenya's Arid Areas

Abstract

is a post-doctoral researcher within the research unit "Resilience, Collapse and Reorganisation" in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne. His current research focuses on land-use change, conflicts, and the transformation of social-ecological systems in East Pokot, Kenya. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg with a multi-sited ethnography on rural-urban migration in Namibia. Michael Bollig is a professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne. He is also director of the Cologne African Studies Center (CASC) and spokesperson for the DFGfunded research unit "Resilience, Collapse and Reorganisation". He has conducted fieldwork with pastoral communities in northern Kenya (Pokot) and northern Namibia (Himba). His main research interests are humanenvironment interactions, political ecology, transition of local knowledge, and conflict.

Three Views of a Secret: Land Rights and the Constitution of Local Citizenship in West Africa

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“…Combining these three viewpoints can make up a key element in the decoding of the specific technologies mobilized in the registering (the wording of laws and decrees, the printed forms, agreements, taxes, etc. ), as seen in the Kenyan example recently discussed in a previous issue of Africa Spectrum (Boye and Kaarhus 2011;Greiner et al 2011).…”

Reviewing the links between climate change and resource conflict

“…They revealed that issues concerning unclear land boundaries and illegal sale/lease of land were drivers of conflict within the area. As Greiner (2013) has shown with respect to Kenya, that resource conflict has become part and parcel of politicized claims over administrative boundaries, struggles for exclusive access to land, and attempts to safeguard ethnically homogeneous electoral bases. Similarly in the Nigerian context, the issues are not unrelated to divisive state and local government policies that discriminate on ethnic and religious grounds (Human Rights Watch, 2013).…”

The role of elite rivalry and ethnic politics in livestock raids in northern Kenya

“…Historically, livestock raiding in north-west Kenya was mainly peaceful from 1929, after the colonial pacification of the Turkana (Spencer 1965; Lamphear 1976; Greiner et al . 2011), until independence. Violent raids in northern Kenya re-emerged with the onset of Ngoroko raids in the mid-1960s (Tablino 2006; Bollig & Österle 2007).…”