Communities of Karamoja in north-eastern Uganda and Turkana in north-western Kenya live with continuous insecurity, including large-scale and frequent cattle raiding, armed robbery, rape, and human rights abuses. Efforts by communities, governments, and civil society organisations over decades have repeatedly failed to bring protection and justice to the people of these borderlands.
This case study presents the analysis of researchers from the communities, engaging with their own people as well as with officials and civil society actors, and with support from research methodologists and civil society leaders. It helps explain the origins of the system of insecurity, how it works, whom it hurts, whom it benefits, and how it is sustained. It argues for a new approach to solving the problem.
The researchers explain the action research methodology they used and argue that it has enabled people from within the borderland communities not only to see the issues more systematically, but to convey them more powerfully and with greater determination to be heard. Although insecurity in Karamoja, Turkana and neighbouring territories has been extensively researched, this is the first comprehensive study done by community for community, pursuing questions about dangers that they have lived with for a long time. They make their analysis and draw their conclusions from discussions with hundreds of men and women in the rangelands and settlements of Eastern Karamoja and Western Turkana. The researchers are Turkana, Jie and Karamojong. They consider themselves to be members of an Ateker (people of one language, living adjacent to one another, with ancestors and laws in common), which includes Jie, Karamojong (Bokora, Pian and Matheniko), Turkana, Toposa, Nyangatom and Teso peoples, whose territories span the borderland of north-eastern Uganda, north-western Kenya, south-eastern South Sudan, and south-western Ethiopia (Webster, 1973).
The research was commissioned by Conciliation Resources as 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. The XCEPT programme seeks to shed light on insecure borderlands, how conflicts and insecurity connect across borders, and the drivers of violent and peaceful behaviour.
This study is part of a series commissioned by XCEPT to understand changes to cross-border pastoral movements in Africa and the implications these have for peace and security. Community organisations Friends of Lake Turkana (FOLT) and Karamoja Development Forum (KDF) facilitated the study and the Institute of Development Studies provided methodological guidance. IDS and KDF had worked together using the same methodology to support 23 young people in Karamoja to research and find solutions to youth issues in 2013.
The context is a dryland territory inhabited by a majority population of mobile pastoralist cattle keepers. With the shifting availability of pasture and water that characterises a semi-arid environment with ever-more variable rainfall,1 the pastoralists herd their cattle over hundreds of kilometres of unfenced rangelands. Turkana County lies in a long valley whose topography creates peculiarly dry conditions. Its border with Uganda runs along a spine of hills that marks the boundary of the higher elevation Karamoja. A satellite image of the borderland, taken in the height of the dry season of 2022, shows how much drier Turkana to the east is than Karamoja to the west (Figure 1). This climatic difference explains why pastoralists from Turkana move every year into Karamoja for grazing and have done so for as long as people can remember. Turkana culture and society is closely entwined with that of the people of Karamoja. 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. The two states and their contrasting political orders rub together as they attempt to deal with the implications of this movement.
The challenge for pastoralists and governments alike is how to provide security to people and their livestock, which are highly mobile high-value assets.2 To arrive at workable solutions, the concerned parties need new insights into the system of violence, and they need these understandings to be widely agreed. However, despite decades of effort at solving the problem and considerable amounts of research, there are significant differences of opinion as to the primary causes of the insecurity and therefore how it should be addressed.
Figure 1: Research area
Researchers have highlighted arms flows, inter-community raiding, pastoralist mobility, commercial raiding, youth impoverishment, competition for natural resources, boundary disputes and problems of justice. Many of these studies have shed useful light on different and profound aspects of the problem, and this case study draws upon these sources to complement and triangulate the community analysis.
The Ugandan government emphasises the dangers posed by mobile nomadic populations carrying guns and having a tradition of livestock raiding. Its solution is disarmament and the introduction of settled livelihoods. Kenyan officials also focus on the presence of guns and the link to banditry. Peacebuilding NGOs tend to emphasise conflict between communities as a major driver of insecurity and promote conflict resolution, convening community meetings and agreements.
In this research, Karamoja and Turkana pastoralists argue that none of the actors, whether governments, civil society, the pastoralists themselves or the international community, has fully understood the interlocking workings of the problem. They describe how weak governance has allowed criminality to grow. Their criticism is levelled above all at the disarmament campaigns carried out by both the Ugandan and Kenyan armed forces. Violent in themselves, they also leave people and herds vulnerable while fuelling fear and division and giving a disproportionate degree of power to armed actors.
As one young female community researcher put it, ‘it seems as if the government does not want us to be at peace. It looks like our peace will be interfering with their peace.’
Definitions
One of the important aspects of action research is that it is those people who have a problem to solve who define the research questions that will elicit understanding and action. With support from the Institute of Development Studies in how to carry out rigorous action research, the community researchers began by observing and discussing with members of their own communities the meaning of peace and security among different people in the society to establish the scope of opinion as to what needed to be remedied.
Karamojong and Turkana people embody in their actions and words the kind of peace and security they most value and wish could be better appreciated by those who govern them. They enact what Roger McGinty (2021) calls ‘everyday peace’, a mode by which they preserve such order and mutuality as they can, despite the provocations of violent circumstances largely beyond their control.3 Everyday peace may suggest something small-scale, but it is not. It is the aggregation of everything that the people care about and work for – their families, friends, places of production and meeting, ways of life, and the agreements and institutions they make and respect to secure and manage these vital things (MacGinty and Richmond, 2013). These everyday concerns influence people’s contributions to and appreciation of how they are governed.
People explain what they want to keep safe (people, animals, homes, and belongings), the environment they wish to protect (such as grasslands, water sources, forests, sacred sites, roads, markets, schools, and health facilities) and the social arrangements that they strive to maintain (including mutual aid, hospitality, shared resources, policing, justice, and leadership). They explain the different priorities of women, young people and older men. Herders say that they feel most secure when the animals of different pastoralist groups are grazing close to one another and when their kraals (enclosures for herds at night) are close. Each protects the other. Before moving to the home territory of another group, most herder leaders negotiate access by sending envoys and making agreements. To graze and water their herds safely, they need sound agreements for sharing natural resources among one another within and across borders and they need trustworthy means of protecting their families and herds from depredation. They hope for a homestead where women, children and older people are safe, and where their belongings (which are few and often precious) are respected. They wish to move along a road freely and without fear of injury, rape, or theft. They want to sell to or buy from traders in ways that are fair, so they want to know that what and how they buy and sell is regulated and safe. They want to be able to give hospitality without fear that their visitors will harm, rob, or betray them. All this means they need to have trust in the systems of policing and justice that prevail. And, at the root, they want the security that comes with being valued and respected and having and enjoying rights as citizens of Kenya, Uganda, and the East African Community.
The next section explains the method of community action research and argues for its unique and useful contribution. The case study then moves on to exploring the historic and contemporary manifestations of insecurity. Pastoralists explain how different insecurities have consolidated and intersected over time and across borders to lock in a violent system. The problem analysis then takes us into the policy space, exploring how citizens and the two states come into engagement, contention and inertia in addressing insecurity. In conclusion, the community researchers propose a new overall analysis based on understanding the problem as a breakdown of trust between all the key actors in the system of governance.
Footnotes
1 See East Africa Appendix 1 for a brief analysis of climate data.
2 In mid-2023, one bull might have been worth US$600 in a Karamoja market prices (Harvest Money, 2023) – and a herd might have been worth anything from US$25,000 to US$100,000 depending on its size, composition, and prevailing market.
3 ‘Everyday peace’ is ‘the capacity of so-called ordinary people to disrupt violent conflict and forge pro-social relationships in conflict-affected societies’ (MacGinty, 2021).