Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [30]
Not even Thomas Homer-Dixon, the scholar most associated with the argument that scarcity drives violence, argues a simple one-to-one causal relationship. Instead he attempts to tease out the attenuated links between climate, economic scarcity, state policy, and violent social conflict. Here is a good encapsulation of his thinking: “Falling agricultural production, migration to urban areas, and economic contraction in regions severely affected by scarcity often produce hardship, and this hardship increases demands on the state. At the same time, scarcity can interfere with state revenue streams by reducing economic productivity and therefore taxes; it can also increase the power and activity of ‘rent-seekers,’ who become more able to deny tax revenues on their increased wealth and to influence state policy in their favour. Environmental scarcity therefore increases society’s demands on the state while decreasing [the state’s] ability to meet those demands.”16 Thus, in Homer-Dixon’s formulation, environmental crisis is displaced through time and space: rural resource crises are often expressed as urban ethnic, religious, or political struggles over state revenues and services.
Looking more specifically at pastoralist violence in Kenya, Kennedy Agade Mkutu focuses in his fine book Guns and Governance on the role of small-arms availability in driving conflict; at the same time, he places environmental factors front and center. Mkutu argues that “when drought and famine and disease reduce the herds, the people must get more through raiding.”17
Historians of Kenya find the same. David Anderson, one of the most famous scholars of colonial East Africa, noted an increase in cattle theft during droughts. The pattern of violence seemed to be driven by a combination of need and opportunity. During drought, in decades past as well as today, herds became more concentrated around the few available water holes. With that, the opportunity to steal the neighbors’ stock increased. “Opportunist theft from other Africans required no planning or organization beyond the ability of members of a family or a group of herders to seize cattle belonging to others carelessly herded near their own stock. Such thefts were most common in the vicinity of watering places, salt licks, and dry-season grazing areas shared with other herders. Drought tended to afford greater opportunities for this type of theft, when pastoralist resources were scarce and livestock belonging to different peoples more likely to be temporarily congested together.”18
Gangsters
“Traditional” Rift Valley cattle raiding does not exist in a vacuum. From as early as the 1920s, raiding has had links to the cash economy, the economic life of towns and cities, national markets and even international trade. Very often the facilitating groups are organized-crime networks or political bosses. “By the 1930s,” writes Anderson, “theft was being committed not just as a means of wealth accumulation for the individuals involved, but as part of a wider system of trade to supply livestock to parts of East Africa where demand was high.”19 So it is to this day.
In the high, misty mountain town of Kapenguria, the capital of West Pokot, I met Edward Koech, a journalist for the Kenyan daily, the Nation. We lunched on thick greasy meat stew and blocks of soft ugali, the heavy corn mash that is the East African staple. The restaurant was full of quiet, hard-looking Pokots. After lunch, we decamped to my small 4x4 and parked on a side road to talk.
Though of the Nandi tribe, Koech has deep links to the Pokot power structure and knows the political economy of West Pokot. He confirmed that powerful businessmen and politicians fund cattle raids, commissioning seasoned warriors to organize and train groups of young men from the countryside, who then set out on extended two- and three-week missions into the Turkana or Uganda. The captured