Climate Change, Conflict and Development in Sudan: Global Neo‐Malthusian Narratives and Local Power Struggles

Abstract

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top-down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab-African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled ‘the world's first climate change conflict’, masking the long-term political-economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.

Water Security in Times of Climate Change and Intractability: Reconciling Conflict by Transforming Security Concerns into Equity Concerns

“…By applying this reasoning to the case of COP21, it could be argued that power-holders-through reifying climate change as a threat to global order and sidelining the interest and position dilemmas that underlie security-have managed to both co-opt the international community and hoodwink the general public in a single sweep. As reviewed above, this concerns a particular post-normal governmentality founded on a human security paradigm that attributes conflict to changes in environmental degradation and bio-physical variables rather than the institutional structures that are maintained to reproduce inequities and which are frequently the real roots of conflict [23,58]. Governmentality here refers to the orchestration of practices (in this case the rationalities espoused by the security discourse) by which global citizens are governed [59].…”

“…The water security discourse principally maintains its reified storylines at transnational level-by default legitimizing those country representatives participating in the negotiations that already tend to be the dominant power-holders (e.g., armed groups, political units and nation states). Yet, the overwhelming incidence of violent conflict occurs at subnational level, with a marked increase in civil war [22,23].…”

Development as a Battlefield

“…The research on which my study is based follows the same path, shedding new light on the Islamists in 2 Apart, that is, from various studies by scholars such as R. Brown who analyzes in detail the attitude of international donors to the crisis in the Sudanese economy in the 1980s; see, especially, Brown (1989 and. 3 On this issue see Verhoeven (2011) and also Brachet and Bonnecase (2013). 4 See also the work of the Feinstein International Center of Tufts University, http://fic.tufts .edu/research-item/sudan-environment-and-livelihoods/ (accessed on 29 April 2016).…”

The politics of African energy development: Ethiopia’s hydro-agricultural state-building strategy and clashing paradigms of water security

“…Many are actively seizing on the opportunities presented by technocratic discourses to redefine their national politics, their relationship with local communities and their ties with neighbours-cum-rivals/potential partners. I thus argue that water security is not predominantly determined by exogenous biophysical factors but becomes endogenous to the strategies and (mis)calculations of political elites [10].…”