Access denied: Land alienation and pastoral conflicts

Cécile Richetta and Tim Wegenast
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Cécile Richetta: Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva
Tim Wegenast: Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz

Journal of Peace Research, 2025, vol. 62, issue 3, 643-659

Abstract: Conflicts involving pastoralists have been on the rise in the past two decades in West, Central and East Africa. This article argues that land alienation is a major source of this type of violence. We employ a narrow identification strategy of relevant pastoral conflicts based on the Armed Conflict Location Event Dataset and create a unique indicator of land alienation comprised of three types of land use changes (conversion of land into conservation areas, crop farms, and industrial mining projects). Relying on a disaggregated quantitative comparative design of 50 km-by-50 km cells covering the Sahelian region from 2002 to 2019, we find that land alienation is an underlying cause of pastoral conflicts. Moreover, we show that the impact of land alienation on pastoralist violence spreads over long distances and is influenced by state presence and climatic conditions. Our analysis further reveals an overlap between pastoralist violence and armed conflict. Bridging a gap between macro- and micro-level studies, we contribute to shed more light on the determinants of pastoral conflicts, a type of violence that has received scant attention in the geospatial quantitative literature.

Keywords: agriculture; conflict; industrial mining; land alienation; pastoralism; protected areas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:62:y:2025:i:3:p:643-659

DOI: 10.1177/00223433241252554

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