196
8
give climate change a considerable role as a driver of the growth and expansion of
jihadist groups in the Sahel. Headlines from leading media are for instance: ‘How
climate change fuels extremism’ (CNN, March 2019); ‘Drought, expanding deserts
and “food for jihad” drive Mali’s conflict’ (Reuters, April 2015); and ‘Climate change
is aggravating the conflict in Mali’ (BBC, January 2019), while Le Monde claims that
‘because of climate change and economic policies, the traditionally difficult situation
of nomadic pastoralists in the Sahel is being further degraded to a point where
numerous Fulani take up arms to make their claims heard. In majority Muslims,
they provide increasing numbers of troops to the jihadist movements that destabilise
the region’ (our translation from French) (Le Monde, May 2017).
The current scholarly literature on the recent political development in Mali does,
however, focus less on climate change and more on how global political economic
developments and Islamist thinking and organization relate to national dynamics.
This literature has discussed the largely overlapping topics of international jihadism
and its tributaries in the country, drug trafficking and hijacking of hostages as
sources of funding for armed groups, the dynamics, politics and history of the
Tuareg rebellions, the current crisis in the national democratic system and the weakening of the state, the international military intervention and possibilities for peace
and stability, the complex and changing Islamic national landscape, and the Malian
crisis as a fallout from the Libya conflict.
While many of these contributions are important and give a rich background to
the current political crisis in Mali, we argue that a focus on the local political context, and in particular the political ecological context, is necessary in order to more
fully explain the expansion of armed groups in the country (Benjaminsen and Ba
2019). This local context is, however, often neglected in the large and rapidly increasing scholarly literature on jihadism in Mali and the Sahel in general.
In order to understand why people join ‘jihadist’ groups, we argue that it is necessary to understand the political ecology of land and natural resources governance.
In the context of land-use conflicts in the central Mopti region, such an approach
implies studying peasant motivations in relation to the politics of natural resource
access as well as how shifting authority and power relations impact on this access.
In short, the rural peasantry, and especially pastoralists, tend to support jihadist
groups, because of an anti-state, anti-elite and pro-pastoral jihadist discourse,
because people have become increasingly fatigued and disgruntled by a predatory
and corrupt state, which extracts rent from the rural peasantry, and because the
development model imposed by the state and international development assistance
has not responded to pastoral priorities.
Examples of rent-seeking include land-use conflicts not being resolved, because
local officials and judges have received payments from both parties to support their
claims, leading to a lack of adjudication, as well as the practices of the Forest Service of
for instance randomly fining women collecting fuelwood and herders grazing livestock.
Jihadists leaders generally manage to play on these feelings among pastoralists in
particular. The neo-patrimonial state that is the main reason for many of the land- use
conflicts in central Mali has in this manner prepared the ground for a gradual jihadist take-over. The result of this growing anti-government sentiment is that many
Chapter 8 · Climate Change, Scarcity and Conflicts in the Sahel
8
give climate change a considerable role as a driver of the growth and expansion of
jihadist groups in the Sahel. Headlines from leading media are for instance: ‘How
climate change fuels extremism’ (CNN, March 2019); ‘Drought, expanding deserts
and “food for jihad” drive Mali’s conflict’ (Reuters, April 2015); and ‘Climate change
is aggravating the conflict in Mali’ (BBC, January 2019), while Le Monde claims that
‘because of climate change and economic policies, the traditionally difficult situation
of nomadic pastoralists in the Sahel is being further degraded to a point where
numerous Fulani take up arms to make their claims heard. In majority Muslims,
they provide increasing numbers of troops to the jihadist movements that destabilise
the region’ (our translation from French) (Le Monde, May 2017).
The current scholarly literature on the recent political development in Mali does,
however, focus less on climate change and more on how global political economic
developments and Islamist thinking and organization relate to national dynamics.
This literature has discussed the largely overlapping topics of international jihadism
and its tributaries in the country, drug trafficking and hijacking of hostages as
sources of funding for armed groups, the dynamics, politics and history of the
Tuareg rebellions, the current crisis in the national democratic system and the weakening of the state, the international military intervention and possibilities for peace
and stability, the complex and changing Islamic national landscape, and the Malian
crisis as a fallout from the Libya conflict.
While many of these contributions are important and give a rich background to
the current political crisis in Mali, we argue that a focus on the local political context, and in particular the political ecological context, is necessary in order to more
fully explain the expansion of armed groups in the country (Benjaminsen and Ba
2019). This local context is, however, often neglected in the large and rapidly increasing scholarly literature on jihadism in Mali and the Sahel in general.
In order to understand why people join ‘jihadist’ groups, we argue that it is necessary to understand the political ecology of land and natural resources governance.
In the context of land-use conflicts in the central Mopti region, such an approach
implies studying peasant motivations in relation to the politics of natural resource
access as well as how shifting authority and power relations impact on this access.
In short, the rural peasantry, and especially pastoralists, tend to support jihadist
groups, because of an anti-state, anti-elite and pro-pastoral jihadist discourse,
because people have become increasingly fatigued and disgruntled by a predatory
and corrupt state, which extracts rent from the rural peasantry, and because the
development model imposed by the state and international development assistance
has not responded to pastoral priorities.
Examples of rent-seeking include land-use conflicts not being resolved, because
local officials and judges have received payments from both parties to support their
claims, leading to a lack of adjudication, as well as the practices of the Forest Service of
for instance randomly fining women collecting fuelwood and herders grazing livestock.
Jihadists leaders generally manage to play on these feelings among pastoralists in
particular. The neo-patrimonial state that is the main reason for many of the land- use
conflicts in central Mali has in this manner prepared the ground for a gradual jihadist take-over. The result of this growing anti-government sentiment is that many
Chapter 8 · Climate Change, Scarcity and Conflicts in the Sahel