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Innovations in peace and security
In recent years in Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia violent incidents have claimed increasing numbers of lives. Incidents of political intimidation, cattle rustling, smuggling and other kinds of crime have spread fear, disrupted trade, hampered livestock production and impeded mobility. In a climate of political instability and judicial incapacity in the unruly borderlands of East Africa, a small but nonetheless significant number of young pastoralists, entrepreneurs and officials have gained power and wealth.
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Pastoralist citizens hoped that government and NGO promises of peace and investment would be successful. But as the situation got worse, they began to discuss new ways of tackling the problem. They argued that no beneficial innovation in the rangelands, the markets or any part of pastoralist life could happen while this level of violence prevailed.
Over a period of seven years the innovation has gradually expanded. At first individual traditional leaders worked on discrete interventions. Today's work involves interconnected efforts by a coalition of pastoralists and others, affecting whole conflict systems. Pastoralist capabilities to maintain peace are being developed in contemporary conditions. While innovative, their work is anchored in tradition: in pastoralist culture, law, religion and understanding. Linking old and new forms of authority, they are experimenting with bringing together customary and state law in a basic framework of acceptable justcie. It includes a wide range of people, young and old, women and men, peace makers and trouble makers.
Pastoralist elders from the Kenyan Pastoralist Shade Initiative in northern Kenya and sourthern Ethiopia have designed a study for the Future Agricultures Pastoralist Innovation Systems research programme looking at what is making this particular innovation work. Their study will track the development of the new peacemaking approach and outline how the innovation is unfolding. The focus will be on a peace process between the Gabra and Borana of Kenya and Ethiopia. It will look at the actors and their actions, knowledge, powers, connections and differences. It will clarify the systems that limit and define the innovation and shape it as time goes on. It will take account of the political and cultural reasons that agreements and disagreements unfold as they do.
Their findings will be put together and published here and on the Future Agricultures website as well as in a full colour booklet and an Institute of Development Studies working paper.
Institute of Development Studies Working paper published on the Status of Pastoralist Voice in Ethiopia
This paper is concerned with the workings of voice among pastoralists in Ethiopia. It documents how diverse pastoralist men and women - young and old, rich and poor - call on one another and on representatives and officials in efforts to achieve cooperation and influence. Diverse pastoralists explain how successful voice is the result of interconnectedness and opportunity. Individual influence varies wth a speaker's social and political connections, with his or her determination, skill and experience, and as a consequence of geography and politics.
In this study we learned that to be successful as a pastoralist in Ethiopia is to be 'competent' and to be competent is to have voice. People want to build capabilities to develop and manage assets, make demands, and secure and give support. Competence can be appreciated in their mobility, visibility, audibility and action: moving to watering and grazing places at the right time, bringing up children and managing the household well, being seen doing business in town, speaking effectively at clan and government meetings, being generous in welfare and wise in justice. Competence and voice are the basis of wealth and a bulwark against hard times, going beyond ideas of social, economic or political capital to embrace Amartya Sen's notion of capability and agency, constantly renewed in interconnection and discussion (Sen 1999).
In speaking, people are seeking binding responses, although often all they get are false assurances or rebuff. Poor pastoralists, clustering in increasing numbers around the edges of settlements, say that they are becoming powerless objects of state welfare, disconnected and unable to regain competence, still less contribute to society's wellbeing. The response of pastoralist leaders has been to increase the level of engagement between different pastoralists, while increasing the intensity of their public engagements with the state.
The study was undertaken for the UK DFID funded Democracy Growth and Peace for Pastoralists project in the Spring of 2009.
Click here to download the Working Paper
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