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It is often argued that environmental scarcity was a trigger and source of violent conflict, in particular in African countries. At the root of such arguments is a simple environmental determinism, which understands scarcity as undermining co-operative relationships between competing resource users. Robert Kaplan popularised this thesis in his argument about "The Coming Anarchy", where he interpreted recent civil wars in Africa as an advent of a fundamental environmental crisis. In our view, this conception disregards the crucial role of local-level institutions in governing competing resource claims. In this paper, we present a case study from the violence-prone Somali Region, Ethiopia. We analyse how agro-pastoralist communities develop sharing arrangements on pasture resources with intruding pastoralist communities in drought years, even though this places additional pressure on their grazing resource. A household survey investigates the determinants for different households in the agro-pastoralist community, asset-poor and wealthy ones, to enter into different types of sharing arrangements. Our findings suggest that resource sharing offers asset-poor households opportunities to stabilise and enhance their asset-base in drought years, providing incentives for co-operative rather than conflictive relations with intruding pastoralists. We conclude that it may depend on potential incentives arising from institutional arrangements, whether competing resource claims in periods of environmental scarcity are resolved peacefully or violently.

In the light of a growing number of unstabilized regions of warfare or post-war conditions, this paper investigates how civilians survive in the context of a civil war. It analyzes livelihood strategies of farmers in the war-torn areas of Sri Lanka. The analytical framework is based on a revised form of DFID's sustainable rural livelihoods approach placing particular attention on the institutional reproduction of household capital assets in the war economy. The paper delineates a three pillar model of household livelihood strategies focusing on how households (i) cope with the increased level of risk and uncertainty, (ii) adjust their economic and social household assets for economic survival, and how they (iii) use their social and political assets as livelihood strategies. Empirically, the paper analyses four local case studies from the east of Sri Lanka. A key conclusion from the empirical studies was that even though the four case studies were located geographically very close, their livelihood outcomes differed considerably depending on the very specific local political geography. The role of social and political assets is thereby essential: While social assets (extended family networks) were important to absorb migrants, political assets (alliances with power holders) were instrumental in enabling individuals, households or economic actors to stabilize or even expand their livelihood options and opportunities. Hence, civilians are not all victims, some may also be culprits in the political economy of warfare. From a perspective of war-winners and losers, war can be both, a threat and an opportunity, often at the same time.

The present paper investigates how ethnic violence and civil war in Sri Lanka have affected local property rights institutions . I use local case studies to analyze the institutional relations and alliances between civilians and combatants in the emergent society of violence that shapes local communities in civil war. My focus will be on how civilians from different ethnic groups utilize social and political capital assets to secure entitlements to natural resources. The findings of my research suggest that resource entitlements in Trincomalee are "ethnicised" in the sense that opportunities and access to resources are unequally distributed among the three ethnic groups (Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims), because these groups are unequally endowed with political capital. Patron-client networks based on ethnicity shape the relative bargaining power of local actors. This system reproduces perceived grievances among the different ethnic groups and thus reproduces the conditions for ethnic violence.

This paper argues that the current EPRDF/TPLF government emulates the imperial ambition of high-modernist development in Ethiopia’s “last” frontier – the pastoral lowlands. We show that two pillars...

This paper analyzes frontier dynamics of land dispossessions in Ethiopia’s pastoral lowland regions. Through a case study of two sedentarization schemes in South Omo Valley, we illustrate how politics of coercive sedentarization are legitimated in the ‘civilizing’ impetus of ‘improvement schemes’ for ‘backward’ pastoralists. We study sedentarization schemes that are implemented to evict pastoralist communities from grazing land to be appropriated by corporate investors. It is argued that frontier imaginations of pastoral lowlands legitimate coercive practices of ‘emptying’ the lowlands for investments. ‘Improvement schemes’ enroll private investors and enterprises affiliated with Ethiopia’s ruling party in the politics of ‘thickening’ state presence in the pastoral frontier. Agricultural extension packages serve to expand state control over sedentarized pastoralists and make lowland resources more extractable, for investors and for the ruling regime.

Starting from the presupposition that areas of limited statehood (ALS) are not ungoverned, but ‘differently’ governed, this chapter proposes a spatial grammar that analyses authority and governance as a socio-spatial relationship. This spatial grammar distinguishes four types of dynamic socio-spatial relations—territory, place, scale, and network—and enables us to spatially analyse (a) how political authority is contested, claimed, upheld, and disrupted; (b) how political life is negotiated, regulated, and practised; and (c) how these practices and their effects are spatially situated. We apply this spatial grammar to four case studies, each providing insight into one type of socio-spatial relations. These cases from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), explain how the negotiation, contestation, and disruption of political authority is spatially situated and embedded in ALS. A spatial grammar focuses on the shifting, overlapping, and contradictory practices of claiming political and regulatory power.

A growing literature debates the proposition that insurgency in ‘small wars’ is primarily driven by opportunities to exploit or loot abundant natural resource and by feasibility factors. While recent studies on the geography of opportunity feasibility and predation have qualified some of these broad claims the literature is still in need of a better understanding of the micro geographies of small wars. Through a critical discussion of this literature I will argue for an analytics of ‘telluric geographies’ that studies the geography of rule violence and affect in small wars.

There are two antagonistic, but equally influential traditions in the study of the nexus between resource use and violent conflict. One works through a Malthusian frame linking resource scarcity with violence, the other school of thought establishes a nexus between resource abundance and the incentives to use violence for rent monopolisation in a political economy of war or markets of violence. The tacit essentialism inherent in both schools of thought has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by geographers and anthropologists. To escape such essentialism requires a more detailed study of the dynamism of the political economy of (civil) war and its spatial dynamics, the political geographies of violence. In this paper, we study endowments and entitlements of people depending on common-pool or open-access resources in war-affected areas of Sri Lanka. Rural spaces in the war-affected areas became both a strategic retreat for fighters and an important common-pool resource on which a large part of the rural populace depended for their survival. Our research illustrates how the political geographies of war affect access regimes and entitlements to common-pool resources and thereby confine the livelihood opportunities of resource users. These dynamics of the political economy of war cross different scales and go beyond simple place-based struggles, for they are rooted in broader spatial dynamics of warfare creating place–space tensions in the sense that spatial dynamics of military control impinge changing access regimes upon specific places.

This article analyses ethnic antagonisms and related political discourses in Sri Lanka after the ceasefire agreement in 2002 using the Derridean notion of vouyou (rogue) and Agamben's concept of state of exception. In all three ethnic groups in Sri Lanka, we can observe discourses on ethnicity, space and territories that create fictions of ethnic homogeneity and purity based on a social construct of the ethnic other as “rogue”. Roguishness is linked with issues of territorial control, political justice and virtual or real “rogue states”. It is also pertinent in the justification of violence and the differentiation of just(ified) and unjust(ified), roguish violence and the rivalry over sovereignty. I will argue that these “rogue others” are needed to legitimize a state of exception where force stands out-of-the-law, but needs to be justified as being within the law, since the state of exception is part of a project leading to an ideal state-to-come. This ideal state-to-come to is to be a “pure” state-to-come, in the form of the “pure” Singhalese–Buddhist state, the Tamil homeland, and more recently, the Muslim homeland as expression of distinct Muslimness. Derrida argues that identifying “rogues” is rationalizing and covering deeper rooted fears. In Sri Lanka, the rogue rationale reveals deeper lying anxieties that link security with ethnic homogeneity and the ethnic self and insecurity with multi-ethnicity and the ethnic other. The ethnic other is a force preventing the (ethnically) pure state-to-come to come into being.

In his classic The African Frontier,1 Igor Kopytoff provided a powerful explanation of the processes of pacification and inculturation of precolonial African peripheries. For Kopytoff, the frontier was “an area over which political control by the regional metropoles is absent or uncertain”.2 Kopytoff’s understanding of frontier is essentially one of a politically constructed space: “The frontier is above all a political fact, a matter of political definition of geographical space”.3 His work is primarily motivated by this distinctive understanding of peripheral African spaces and places. In this chapter, we draw attention to the analytics that can be garnered from Kopytoff’s work on the frontier, which allows understanding contemporary political dynamics in some parts of the African continent. We are primarily interested in a discussion of the logic or rationale of governing that shapes present-day African frontiers. In other words, we propose using Kopytoff’s heuristics of the African frontier, but apply them in empirical contexts different to those where Kopytoff did in his original work: postcolonial, not precolonial, Africa is our empirical site. In order to achieve this, we first develop a typology of the political frontier and illustrate it with two case studies from eastern Ethiopia and northern Benin.

This paper analyses the commodification of post-tsunami aid in Sri Lanka, a process that 'contaminated' the 'purity' of good intentions with the politics of patronage and international aid. It argues that gifts are not just material transfers of 'aid', but also embodiments of cultural symbolism, social power, and political affiliations. The tsunami gift re-enforced and reconfigured exchange relationships among different patrons and clients in Sri Lankan communities, perpetuating the political economy that has driven social conflict and discontent in the post-independence years. Beyond dominant rationales of ethnic or political party patronage, the paper finds that gifts by disingenuous patrons not only became patrimonial, but that the patrimonial rationale emerged as much from above as from below--a dynamic that became nearly inescapable and self-reinforcing. Through three case studies, we explore the intricate chain of relations, obligations, and expectations pertinent in the co-evolving, but often contradictory, gift rationales that permeate the practices, performances, and discourses of tsunami aid.

Economists have developed a number of theories based on warlord or bandit models to explain intra-state conflict and civil war. These models assume rational agents that agitate in a kind of institutional vacuum. This view is flawed. Ethnographic studies from civil wars suggest that livelihoods and institutions in the context of a war economy are very complex, more complex than those models suggest. We do not find an institutional vacuum – or anarchy – but a hybrid set of overlapping and contradictory sets of rules. This paper applies several concepts of institutions discussed in literature on new institutional economics and sociology to an analysis of the emergence and logic of the rules of the game in the political economy of civil wars. The analysis indicates that contracting in civil wars, whether complete or incomplete – and the opportunity to grab (Skaperdas), to loot (Collier) and to exploit others (Hirshleifer) – takes place on many different scales and between different agents, not only among combatants. This creates a complex, dynamic and hybrid institutional amalgam of coercively imposed rules, traditional norms and co-existing formal institutions.

This paper revisits the rationalist conceptions of warlordism in civil wars, which has amounted into the greed hypothesis as opposed to grievance. This argument states that rebels are not motivated to generate public goods - the betterment of society - but seek private gain. Violence becomes a function to generate wealth. While initial studies focused on explaining why civil war breaks out in the first instance, there is now increasing interest in modelling violence and warlordism in ongoing civil war. In this paper, I sketch out and critically discuss the rationalist approaches in this so-called greed-grievance debate and will then concentrate on one particular aspect in the broader greed-grievance literature: the modelling of warlordism in ongoing civil warfare. A contextual model is suggested to explain the dynamics of violence in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict, which distinguishes extrinsic (‘greed’) and intrinsic (‘pride’) motivations.

he Indian Ocean Tsunami has invited unseen scales of generosity, both by 'ordinary' people and by donor governments. The Tsunami fitted nicely into a conception of 'natural' disaster that invites images of innocent, 'pure' victims. There is nothing you can do when Nature comes over you with her destructive forces. This is different in the case of famine or civil war these kinds of disasters seem to be contaminated by human evil. And still, even though we have seen these impressive expressions of generosity at different levels and in different contexts, the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC) in its recent report enumerates a number of failures in the delivery and practice of post-Tsunami aid (Cosgrave 2006). Nature does not humiliate aid can and I would like to argue it probably has done so to a significant degree in the post-disaster response in South Asia. This humiliation has happened in the very process of translating the tremendous celebration of generosity in the West into practical aid for people affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. More than one year after, there may be time to reflect critically upon the Tsunami experience of generosity and to complement the observations made in the recent special issue in the G] on the spatialities and temporalities of the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Nigel Clark described the immediate, unconditional acts of generosity, giving and kindness in the Tsunami-affected areas in his thoughtful piece for the G] special issue (Clark 2005). Those local acts of generosity had, however, quickly come out of sight, and public attention shifted to the geographies of our generosity in the West: who was giving how much? Which national governments donated most? In which country were private donations highest? Which TV gala yielded the l rgest amount of donations? It became almost like a spo ts competition over who was the most generous. Social pressure was high to be generous and to donate, often more than many people have ever donated for a single charity case before. But, as the TEC report states: 'the international aid community as a whole undervalues the very important contribution of local communities to their own survival and recovery . . . The international media also overlook local actors and focus on international actors' (p. 9). Whose disaster is it then? My core proposition in this brief essay will be that the way that generosity was practised in the West had a significant impact upon how aid was implemented in the Tsunami-affected areas. Overall, I want to argue that those practices of generosity have had rather ambivalent effects.

This paper traces the ethnographies of conflict and development in Sri Lanka on two levels of analysis. First, it examines two related discourses in the policy arena of Sri Lanka, one looking at the peace–development nexus, the other at the paradox of welfarism and clientelism in Sri Lanka's polity. Second, it analyses the political field of relief and development practice—its order and disjuncture—as it presented itself during times of ongoing warfare. The empirical studies build on ethnographies of a bilateral German–Sri Lankan development project operating in the war-affected areas of Sri Lanka. Four trajectories of politics and practices in aid and conflict are discussed to illustrate the ambiguities and complexities of multiple perceptions, rules and discourses, which influence the work of aid agencies operating in spaces of military contestation. The analyses suggest that clientelism as a deeply embedded system of ordering and meaning production can be found in both the peaceful areas and the war zo...