Pastoral project & territorial conflict in southern Kenya

Interventions in the name of development often simplify complex social realities, lose sight of the relational dynamics beyond the “target group” and thus may contribute to conflict. The article “Territorial conflicts, agency and the strategic appropriation of interventions in Kenya’s southern drylands” by Angela Kronenburg Garcia (published in Sustainability 2018, 10(11), 4156) examines how a series of interventions in a dryland area in southern Kenya became embroiled in a long-running territorial conflict between the Loita Maasai (the beneficiary community) and their neighbours, the non-beneficiary Purko Maasai. Based on ethnographic research and taking a historical perspective, it shows how Loita Maasai leaders systematically appropriated these outside interventions, and reworked them with the strategic aim of stopping land loss to ongoing Purko encroachment. The analysis reveals two ways in which Loita leaders did this: i) by using interventions to stake out spatial claims to land; and ii) by capitalising on the tendency of interventions to simplify local contexts. This article contributes to the debate on the linkages between intervention and conflict by highlighting the agency of intervention beneficiaries and showing that, through their actions, interventions may unwittingly reproduce and even aggravate existing conflicts.

Posted on 26 November 2018 in Pastoralism & Natural Resources, Pastoralism & Peacebuilding