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About fifty kilometers north of Garissa, on the road toward the lawless border with Somalia, we reached Shambary, a Somali village—or, really, a nomadic pastoralist camp that was turning into a village as the herds died and were replaced by aid. The village consisted of little more than a collection of stick-and-burlap huts clustered around a big tree and two small adobe buildings: a one-room schoolhouse and a clinic, both empty for lack of staff. Not far away was the water pan, a football-field-sized pit of dust that was supposed to catch rainwater. The only things keeping these people alive were the occasional relief handouts and a barely functioning borehole well. In the pounding heat, one felt as if the sun itself hated Shambary.

The headman said the rains had not come for two years. His herd had dropped from fifty cows to three. Twenty men had, as he put it, “gone mad and just walked away,” abandoning their families. Some of the other men listening to the interview laughed nervously when he said this.

Interestingly, there had been no violence here. When I asked about this, people attributed the relative peace to Islam. A combination of other factors is, I believe, more important: Proximity to a mostly paved road linking Nairobi and the port of Mombasa allowed aid to reach them and offered avenues of escape for men seeking waged work. Proximity to the Tana River and its thin border of flood plain allowed some to farm. Also, the village had organized a water committee to manage the borehole and hash out who got water, when, and in what amounts, and to raise money to buy diesel for the pump. Perhaps this collective organization helped prevent violence by keeping the community united rather than allowing young men to peel off in small groups to raid.

But the most powerful factor limiting violence, I suspect, is simply the physical barrier of the desert. The dying savanna around Shambary is vast and so dry that transiting stolen cattle across it would be very difficult. Trapped by the pounding heat and sandy wastes, rival clans are essentially quarantined to their boreholes, the banks of the Tana, and the roadside “aid camps” that have formed around food-relief distribution points. These pastoralists were peaceful because they were essentially dropouts, in the process of giving up the cattle-centered nomadic life—raiding and everything else.

Evidence that peace is a by-product of ecological and economic collapse (rather than the pacific teachings of Islam) is found seven hundred kilometers further north, in the small city of Mandera on the Somalia-Kenya border. There, Kenyan Somali pastoralists, also Muslims, are engaged in all-out cattle raiding and a bloody little resource war. Every day brings new reports of clans fighting pitched battles and burning down each other’s villages: the Garre clan against the Murulle. Both are attempting to control the overstretched Lulis Dam. The violence has been intense since 2005, punctuated only by occasional punitive military operations and failed peace talks. Over one thousand families have fled the area.14

Sifting for Causality

A central question in understanding climate change and conflict is whether violence is a response primarily to scarcity or to opportunity. Do the Turkana raid because they lack cattle or because their neighbors have cattle to steal?

Two anthropologists who studied Marsabit District in north-central Kenya found that drought and scarcity were actually associated with a decline in raiding. The authors, Adanoo Roba and Karen Witsenburg, found “no evidence that violence is increasing in relative terms, nor that ethnic violence is related to environmental scarcity.”15 Instead of scarcity causing conflict among Samburu pastoralists, it led to greater cooperation, as communities came together both physically, congregating at the boreholes for water, and politically, in the organizations demanded by formal water management. Roba and Witsenburg emphasize history, human agency, complexity,