The 2020 African Union Strategy for Better Integrated Border Governance summarises peace and security challenges relating to African borders as follows:
In Africa, state borders are often not identical to peoples’ borders and hence have been known to foster three kinds of tensions: between neighbouring states, between states and their people and between states and violent actors, including international criminal cartels and terrorist groups.
Much of Africa’s 83,000 kilometres of borders run through sparsely inhabited territories where state services are scant and state authority is stretched. For many communities in these borderland areas, the essentials of life are secured not through trustworthy institutions, but through community-to-community arrangements and agreements – or coercively through guns and violence.
Pastoralists have been traversing these territories since long before formal borders came into existence, but their way of life and modes of self-governance have become inextricably entwined with contemporary border phenomena. Transhumance and pastoral mobility cut across political boundaries, jurisdictions and authorities, and though they usually do so with a high degree of cooperative engagement between local communities, they can also encounter and become enmeshed in different manifestations of borderland violence – from criminality to human rights violations, armed insurgency and inter-community fighting.
In XCEPT research in West and East Africa covering Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Uganda and Kenya in 2022–23, Conciliation Resources and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) worked with communities and local research partners to learn about how violence works in some of the key borderlands.
We found that significant borderland insecurity can be traced to national and international failure to control cross-border transnational insurgency and violent crime – contrary to predominant analyses that emphasise badly managed pastoralism for violent conflict. National, regional and international neglect of the crucial inter-state boundaries has allowed violence to persist and spiral and has damaged the lives of millions of people. Policies, attitudes and actions have obstructed, undermined, neglected or supplanted inter-community networks, allowing insecurity systems to prevail – from weak or bad governance, to inappropriate law and order or security deployments, and dysfunctional systems of accountability. More accurate, locally based understanding of the roots and manifestations violence, and of the foundations of stability is essential for developing effective borderland peace and security policies that have community engagement and support.
Analysis, key findings and priorities for improving peace and security for pastoralist communities’ peace and security in borderlands are outlined in this introduction. These are drawn from deep-dive, regional case studies based on XCEPT field and satellite research in East and West Africa, which are presented subsequently in the report. The regional case studies are referenced and footnoted. References from the regional case studies are not repeated in the introductory cross-contextual analysis.
Box 1: About the study – overview of the rationale and methodology
This study is part of the Cross-Border Conflict, Evidence, Policy, and Trends (XCEPT) research programme – a multi-year activity funded by UK International Development from the UK Government. Conciliation Resources and IDS worked with local research partners and communities to explore peace and security priorities for pastoralist communities in African borderlands – how conflicts and insecurity connect across borders, and the drivers of violent and peaceful behaviour. It focuses on two borderland areas East and West Africa, covering Uganda and Kenya, and Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. Field research was carried out primarily in 2022–23.
East Africa – Research took place among communities in Karamoja in Uganda and Turkana in Kenya, involving women, men and youth. It was led by IDS alongside local community research teams facilitated by community organisations Friends of Lake Turkana (FOLT) and Karamoja Development Forum (KDF). The East Africa study used a community action research methodology that places people affected by an issue are at the centre of research. The method is ethnographic and emphasises diversity, uses storytelling, and offers a bridge between people and policy. Data collection and analysis was supported by validation and dissemination of messages among communities, community leaders and in the policy arena.
West Africa – Research was carried out through fieldwork in pastoral and farming communities in the borderlands of northern Nigeria, particularly along sections of the Nigeria–Niger and Nigeria–Cameroon borders. Research locations were selected along transhumance corridors, in areas that pastoralists migrate to or from. Fieldwork was supplemented by analysis of satellite data, to observe changes in land use over time. The study was carried out by a team of researchers with longstanding experience in the region, including researchers from pastoral communities. Where possible, ethnographic methods were used, whereby researchers stayed in the areas among communities being studied, and men and women were interviewed. Community and academic activities garnered feedback on research findings.
Research methodologies for the two regional case studies are presented in more detail in the relevant sections below.
Key findings
Pastoralists get caught up in insecurity systems that thrive in borderlands and across borders.
Borders and borderlands far from population centres are fertile ground for violent transnational economies. States, security forces, criminals and insurgents all make use of the affordances of borders in ways that preserve, protract and escalate instability. Pastoralists can be both victims and perpetrators of violence.
Karamoja and Turkana borderlands
The Karamoja and Turkana borderland regions of Uganda and Kenya support a self-reinforcing system of instability and misgovernment. Five sources of insecurity feed one another in a vicious circle, which is aggravated by the international border: large-scale cattle raids carried out by criminal gangs and traders operating across the border; armed robbery of homesteads; violence against women and girls; human rights abuses by security forces and vigilantes; and community-to-community revenge attacks.
The security strategies of both the Kenyan and Ugandan governments have prioritised disarming pastoralists and other communities through primarily military interventions. Complicated by the scale of the task and difficulties of cross-border coordination, recurrent disarmament campaigns over many years have had little success in tackling armed criminality, while the campaigns have led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of livestock along with many human lives. Ugandan initiatives to encourage pastoralists onto farms and to eradicate ‘nomadism’ have been unsuccessful.
Violence in these borderlands is often attributed to intercommunal conflict, but its root cause is misgovernance: the failure of authorities to work with communities on basic rule of law, and national governments’ reliance on a military solution that has consistently shown itself to be ineffective and detrimental.
In the absence of effective protections, homesteads and routes to market have become more prone to armed robbery. Violence against women has increased. Rogue members of the security forces and administrations tap into cattle-raiding networks. Herders on both sides of the border argue that they need to carry arms to protect themselves: they do not condone breaking laws, but they seek security. Both governments have militarised borderland policing, including arming reservists who become part of the insecurity complex. With little power to challenge the misgovernance, some people take revenge on neighbouring communities suspected of sheltering informers or criminals.
A new disarmament campaign agreed by Ugandan and Kenyan security officials in November 2022 asserted that thousands of Turkana pastoralists from Kenya who were carrying guns inside Karamoja in Uganda should leave or be arrested. Neither government sought community support in determining or implementing this policy. In February 2023, in a cattle camp in Karamoja overseen by the armed forces, 32 herders were charged in a military court with carrying illegal arms and terrorism, and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. In May 2023, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda issued Executive Order #3 of 2023 stipulating that any Turkana herdsman entering Uganda with arms ‘must be arrested and charged with terrorism by a Court Martial’. Thousands of Turkana pastoralists moved back to Kenya, even though there was no grazing and a lack of food.
Security is a national rather than sub-national prerogative in both countries. Decisions about how and to what degree to intervene are made by the national military forces in consultation with the respective presidents. The formation and implementation of mutual development pacts are affected by the cooling and warming of relations between the two countries. For instance, negotiations over a draft cross-border natural resource sharing agreement for Turkana and Karamoja, aiming to rationalise cross-border movement and improve security and access to basic services, have been very slow – as described in more detail below. Sub-national arrangements involving Turkana County government and the political/administrative leaders in Karamoja have run up against higher-level politics.
Northern Nigeria borderlands
Violent criminality, including armed banditry, cattle raiding and kidnapping for ransom, is a serious problem for many communities in northern Nigeria’s borderland areas, where it has grown into a lucrative criminal economy in which illicit wealth derives from ransoms paid for the release of kidnapping victims. Attacks are carried out by gangs and networks between rural and urban areas, and armed gangs work with local informants to target victims. Banditry ranges from small- to large-scale, and gangs up to 50-strong can attack villages and camps in motorbike convoys armed with automatic weapons. Pastoralist communities are prone to being targeted due to the comparatively high value and liquidity of their livestock wealth – cattle can be sold quickly to pay ransoms compared with agricultural outputs. State responses have had very mixed results, and communities in some areas have looked to alternative security providers, such as vigilantes.
In the borderlands of north-east Nigeria and across the wider Chad Basin, the Boko Haram insurgency continues to cause major casualties and displacement of herders and other communities through attacks on villages and camps, raids on livestock and theft of large numbers of cattle and sheep. Criminal and insurgent violence overlaps, as insurgents use the proceeds of raids to fund their armed campaign. The insurgency has survived numerous state interventions over many years. Many thousands of herders have fled insurgent-controlled areas into Cameroon and beyond. Some have chosen to stay in or move to areas controlled by the ISWAP faction (Islamic State in West Africa Province) of Boko Haram, seeing these as comparatively more viable than other regions, including areas controlled by the JASDJ faction (Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad) of Boko Haram, areas controlled by the government, and areas with a higher presence of bandit groups. Pastoralists in XCEPT research in Borno State said that they usually do not report experiences of insurgent violence against them because of the lack of response by state authorities.
Relations among herders, farmers and other communities in borderlands, such as over access to land or water, are mediated through institutions or by individuals and are often peaceful – as discussed below. But they can become strained and deteriorate into violent conflict under certain conditions – such as if stock routes are blocked or grazing reserves diminished, which forces herders to push their animals across farms, destroying crops; or if herders allow their animals to feed on crops. Competition for access to land and water is linked to state neglect, poor policy, population growth, agricultural expansion and climate and ecological fluctuation. Competition is undermining rural communities’ resilience, and aggravating tensions between farmers and herders in Nigeria. Different social and political factors can also escalate inter-community conflict, including weak or partial institutions, prejudiced narratives and dysfunctional justice systems. These combined factors have created perceptions of an increasingly hostile environment for pastoralism – both as a livelihood and as an identity.
State- and donor-led policies and strategies to improve peace and security in borderlands need to engage meaningfully with borderland community networks.
Arrangements and agreements among pastoralists and communities are the cornerstone of peaceful and productive political economies and settlements in borderlands. But these are being strained by militarised policing, anti-insurgency operations and ineffective land management. Donor-led programmes to support inter-communal agreements are prone to breaking down in the face of unresolved crime or human rights violations by security forces.
Karamoja and Turkana borderlands
In the Karamoja and Turkana borderlands, pastoralism and inter-community cooperation are key to peaceful and productive political economies and settlements. Karamoja and Turkana culture and society are closely entwined, and people move both ways across the international border – for grazing, water and markets on the Uganda side, and to access services and markets on the Kenya side. Karamoja is at higher elevation than Turkana County, where conditions are drier. Pastoralists from Turkana move every year into Karamoja for grazing, and have done so for as long as people can remember.
In both Turkana and Karamoja, rainfall levels are low and highly variable from year to year and place to place, and are becoming more unpredictable with the climate crisis. Water scarcity and variability are why pastoralism is the dominant mode of production, and why agreements to share access to grazing and water are so important. The extensive grazing system involves mobility across often large distances, for which herders themselves largely maintain their own security arrangements. Cooperation relies on sophisticated cultural, technical and legal (customary law) norms and practices that have evolved historically. These arrangements are highly respected among borderland communities and provide the foundations of a peaceful political settlement that effectively traverses the international border and underpins a functioning borderland economy.
The contrasting national political orders of Kenya and Uganda rub against each other as they attempt to deal with the implications of this cross-border movement. Differences between Kenya and Uganda’s political and administrative structures inhibit meaningful interaction on borderland peace and security policy. Neither state has a strong record of good relations between government and citizens, and this governance disjuncture is often starker in remote borderland areas. Both Kenya and Uganda revert to a militarised approach to armed violence in the Turkana and Karamoja borderlands focused on disarming herders, even though this has done little to address the system of violent crime, abuse, suspicion and revenge to which herders are persistently exposed, while removing an important means for herders to protect themselves. State engagement with local systems of justice and policing is complicated by the different cultural foundations on which they are based. These institutions have been rejected by the state and outwardly appear defensive and atavistic; in reality, they are evolving with new influences from younger generations.
Northern Nigeria borderlands
Nomadic herders in the borderlands of northern Nigeria and its environs network with other pastoralists and communities to facilitate peaceful coexistence and movement of livestock. Pastoral movements are generally very carefully planned, with scouts sent ahead to assess the conditions along the way and at the intended destination. Pastoralists are widely dispersed and migratory, and maintaining complementary networks is crucial for gathering information and for cooperation. In-person meetings in markets and visits to camps and settlements are complemented by mobile phone contact over longer distances, helping to enable dialogue with pastoral and community leaders, and anticipate and mitigate insecurity or conflict where necessary – for example to find out about grazing conditions and the security situation in destinations and along routes herders are considering migrating to, and to negotiate safe passage.
Farmers and herders in the borderlands of northern Nigeria are not innately in conflict, despite borderland insecurity often being associated with violent fighting between them. Interactions among different pastoralist groups and with sedentary communities are largely peaceful, and migratory herders often move symbiotically among farming communities. Crop agriculture and livestock are interconnected and predominantly complementary – cattle can provide valuable manure, herds often move on from farms before the planting season, and pastoralists inject capital into local rural economies. As discussed elsewhere, tensions arise under particular conditions, circumstances and pressure that destabilise customary borderland political settlements.
Pastoralists experience multiple prejudices that perpetuate, exacerbate and escalate borderland insecurity systems.
Partisan attitudes and narratives inequitably associate pastoralists with insecurity; pastoralists feel disproportionately vulnerable to violence as a result of negligent or partial policies; and women pastoralists suffer discriminatory forms of gendered violence. Prejudices may be structural, or politically motivated and fuelled.
Karamoja and Turkana borderlands
In the borderlands of Karamoja and Turkana, pastoralists feel discriminated against and unfairly blamed for insecurity. They have disproportionately experienced violent crime and impoverishment, including as a result of neglectful and exclusionary governance.
Pastoralists are also targeted in policy interventions such as disarmament campaigns implemented by state militaries, which assume pastoralists’ responsibility for insecurity. These policies are presented as designed to safeguard communities, but in reality they have failed to provide meaningful security or have undermined it, leaving isolated homesteads unprotected from raiders and communities vulnerable to physical danger.
Women experience discriminatory forms of gendered violence, and women’s security is portrayed and understood differently to men’s. A female pastoralist in XCEPT research described being raped and robbed on her way back from market, but her predicament was not taken seriously by the authorities. Thus violence is gendered both in its effect and in the official failure to respond. The pastoralist woman in the XCEPT research referred to violent robberies at homesteads, a phenomenon that grew significantly after the disarmament campaigns of the early 2000s.
Women’s personhood and symbolic role in community reproduction is at risk as a result of rape. Gendered violence and negligence combine to prevent healing, and family members may react with revenge. Karamoja and Turkana traditional institutions both have a gendered approach to rape – if a woman accuses, her statement alone is considered adequate evidence. Gender equity is more a problem in terms of infantilisation of women being seen as in need of protection. Women are broadly supportive of men in the household carrying arms in defence of their homes and herds, and many also accept that it makes sense to promote revenge and call for counter attacks.
Northern Nigeria borderlands
Perceptions that pastoralists are exceptionally involved in or predisposed to violence are prevalent in the borderlands of northern Nigeria. Ethnic Fulani herders, especially young men, are commonly linked to kidnapping and banditry in public and political discourse, which further feeds broader stigmatisation of pastoralists as violent. Many perpetrators of kidnapping and banditry are of Fulani pastoralist descent, but membership of criminal gangs varies widely and is not restricted to pastoralist communities. Moreover, these violent actors represent a small fraction of people from pastoralist backgrounds, and pastoralists are also among the main victims of the violence. Wholesale association of pastoralists with insecurity is inaccurate and divisive, and encourages inflammatory policies, for example regarding land management or security.
Some narratives blame ‘foreign’ pastoralists for ‘importing’ insecurity into Nigeria across its borders. XCEPT research found little evidence either of disproportionate links between pastoralism and violence, or of net inward migration of pastoralists into northern Nigeria. Rather, borderland insecurity inside Nigeria is largely generated internally within Nigeria’s borders, while there is more movement of pastoralists out of rather than into the country, with pastoralists migrating from Nigeria to Cameroon and even to the Central African Republic, often in response to insecurity, as they seek more stable and predictable livelihoods elsewhere.
The perception of ‘violent foreign herders’ is prone to being cultivated and instrumentalised by state or traditional political leaders and authorities, whose interests are served by portraying ‘foreign’ herders as usurping the rights of local communities as a way to detract from governance failings or to discredit political opponents. Calling into question the citizenship of pastoralists is also a way of questioning their local civic rights, or rights of access to land and water. Such portrayals fuel stigmatisation and alienation of pastoralists, feed into rationalisation of policies aimed at excluding pastoralists politically and at blocking pastoral movement and migration as logical and effective ways to tackle borderland insecurity, and deny internal causes and drivers of insecurity.
Pastoralists’ vulnerability to and involvement in insecurity is linked to their political and social exclusion, which further acts as a barrier to finding effective and sustainable policy solutions and accountability to justice.
Authorities in borderlands are seen by many pastoralists as causing or exacerbating rather than mitigating or resolving insecurity and injustice, which enables conflict and hampers peacebuilding and reconciliation.
Karamoja and Turkana borderlands
In the borderlands of Karamoja and Turkana, many pastoralists and other communities see the lack of reliable state policing, justice and governance as fundamental to problems of insecurity. XCEPT research provides multiple examples where victims of violence or theft have received little or no assistance from authorities, causing some to arm themselves as a means of protection or to take justice into their own hands.
Many people have been injured and killed in security operations by the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, and UPDF ‘cordon and search’ actions authorise soldiers to kill people suspected of carrying guns illegally. While both Ugandan and Kenyan governments have at times attempted to re-arm dispossessed pastoralists and integrate them into their respective security forces, raiding has continued largely unabated.
The Karamoja–Turkana borderlands have a long history of military interventions going back to colonial times but which continued through independence and the Museveni regime, with large-scale campaigns in the 1960s and 2000s. In recent years, forcible disarmament campaigns have periodically inflicted violence on herders and other communities.
Northern Nigeria borderlands
Instability in the borderlands of northern Nigeria is associated with weak or absent institutions – state and customary governance, security and accountability mechanisms. Political marginalisation of communities is pervasive in peripheral rural border regions, and presents particular types of challenge for pastoralists. Pastoralists are spread across large areas and are usually a minority relative to the rest of the population, and their mobility, limited geographical concentration and minority status limits their political participation and representation – most pastoralists living in rural areas still do not have voter cards, for example. Pastoralist community governance and decision-making systems are poorly understood, and attempts to engage pastoralist communities, when they do happen, often go through urban-based, elite pastoralist ‘representatives’ who lack genuine legitimacy or authority to speak for communities.
Pastoralists are disempowered in decision-making on key issues relating to their security and wellbeing, such as access to land. Grazing reserves in northern Nigeria only support a small percentage of the country’s cattle. Grazing land has not been protected by authorities, many stock routes are blocked and water points have not been maintained, creating significant problems for herders and increasing encroachment of livestock onto crops and damaging farms, which contributes to worsening tensions between herders and farmers.
The conflict resolution function of customary governance is also being diminished. Recurrent damage to crops by different herds can go unaccounted for over time, which can lead to a sense of ‘cumulative’ grievance for farmers who feel they need to be compensated proportionately. But pastoralists complain of excessive fines, and are less and less inclined to engage with customary arbitration processes in which they feel poorly represented. This lack of recourse to seemingly unjust accountability mechanisms allows grudges to develop, which, when left unresolved, can become a precursor to violent conflicts.
Pastoralists and other rural borderland communities have limited access to education, veterinary services and health facilities. Negligent policy, and negligible implementation or investment on these issues reduces communities’ life chances and undermines livelihood diversification, with particular consequences for young people. For young pastoralists, these ‘opportunity barriers’ intersect with other threats to traditional pastoralist livelihoods within an increasingly hostile social, political and climatic environment that is limiting their capacity to move and graze livestock safely. Rural development projects that do exist rarely include pastoralist youth, who are hard to access and are not well-represented within pastoralist communities and networks. Lack of opportunity can be a factor in increased youth vulnerability to resort to violence as a means of livelihood.
Ineffective state security in many borderland areas means that some communities have looked to vigilante groups to provide protection. Vigilante groups have been active in identifying and confronting kidnappers, and have mounted effective responses in some areas. But their performance is highly variable, and vigilantes can also inflict serious harm and exacerbate divisions. A notorious vigilante group in Taraba State in north-east Nigeria is accused of stealing cattle and killing innocent people on the basis of their ethnic or clan identity. Heavy-handed and discriminatory vigilante behaviour can encourage communities to arm themselves for self-defence, and reprisal violence by other vigilante groups.
Pastoralists’ community networks and mobility have proved adaptable in response to challenges of climate change and environmental pressure which are negatively affecting their security, wellbeing and livelihoods.
This capacity to adapt highlights the value of mobility and community networking as a basis for peaceful and sustainable borderland political economies.
Turkana and Karamoja borderlands
Water in the Turkana and Karamoja borderlands is scarce, and mutual and safe access to grazing and water operates through a cooperative system of agreements and internally organised security. Communities in these borderlands today identify shifting challenges related to climate change, describing how wet and dry seasons have changed, and that rainfall is becoming ever more patchy.
In northern Uganda, Matheniko and Jie communities have shown generosity towards Turkana bringing herds out of the much dryer land of Turkana West into wetter Karamoja. This contemporary manifestation of an ancient practice shows how cooperation has a basis in climate, and how strategies for adapting to climate change can draw on these networks and relations.
Pastoralist mobility and capability for making natural resource sharing agreements is an adaptive response to low, variable and changing rainfall patterns. Climate-responsive mobility can include moving to more distant pastures to protected dry-season grazing reserves, negotiating with neighbouring pastoralists for access to their reserves, and distributing small stock among extended family.
Other techniques include exchanging grain for stock with farmers, drying milk, and collecting bush foods, increasing the number of times that a herd moves, splitting the herd into more smaller sections and scattering them to different locations, or keeping a smaller herd and relying on other sources of livelihood, including cropping or food aid, or selling animals to buy imported food in markets.
Northern Nigeria borderlands
Changes in climate and ecology are impacting pastoralism and agriculture in northern Nigeria’s borderlands. Climate change is altering rainfall patterns, increasing the intensity of heat, and affecting the availability of water in the late dry season especially (February-March). Rainfall has become more erratic, with a later start to the rainy season and breaks for weeks at a time after the onset of the first rains. Some areas have seen a prolongation of the rainy season and greater variation in the distribution and volume of rainfall. Climatic changes impact agricultural yields, the varieties of crops that farmers plant and the timing of the agricultural cycle, and influence transhumance movements such as through water stress and lack of pasture in the late dry season.
Pastoralists’ mobility allows them to respond to unpredictable and patchy rainfall and to move their herds to where there is available pasture and water. Mobility is a key adaptation of herders to variability and seasonality in climate and vegetation. By moving their livestock, herders can take advantage of grazing areas that would not sustain them on a permanent basis but which are suitable as seasonal pastures in the wet or dry season. Changes in patterns of mobility need to be managed and negotiated with affected communities so that scarcity in one area does not translate into encroachment onto cropland or conservation areas in another. Also, pastoral mobility is currently perceived in Nigeria as a problem that needs to be mitigated – as part of a policy push for increased sedentarisation – rather than as a potential solution to climate change vulnerability.