Livelihoods, Power, and Choice: The Vulnerability of the Northern Rizaygat of Darfur, Sudan

June 28, 2023

This is a report which has some relevance to the current fighting in Sudan, in which some much older conflicts seem to have resurfaced. The RSF came from a militia that crushed the 2003 rebellion in Darfur. This report was written in 2008/9:

Livelihoods in Darfur are intimately linked to the conflict, none more so than the livelihoods of the Northern Rizaygat—a group of Arabic speaking, camel-herding nomads living in the Sudanese states of North, South, and West Darfur. They have achieved notoriety for their role in the Janjaweed—the pejorative name given to the loose groupings of armed Arab tribesmen, who, since 2003, have been integral players in Darfur’s conflict and instrumental to the Sudanese government’s counterinsurgency campaign ...

This research aims to understand the causes of vulnerability, which are often deeply rooted in history, and embedded in complex interactions between people, the environment, and institutional and policy processes. The wider purpose of this research is to promote understanding and raise awareness in Sudan and abroad of the livelihood challenges facing specific pastoralist groups in Darfur, and to promote their inclusion as stakeholders in relevant national and international processes to meet humanitarian need and promote peace and recovery. ...

See https://fic.tufts.edu/assets/Livelihoods-Power-Choice-2009.pdf

Roland Oliphant for the Daily Telegraph on 21st April 2023:

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Al JAzeera's more detailed "Start here" explanation:

So it sounds like the difference this time around is gold, ... it was in 2012 that the gold price hit US$ 2,400/Kg See Ghana river pollution: Illegal gold mining contaminating drinking water.

Here is a recent Al Jazeera discussion

For more background see this SOAS blog post dated 4th May, 2023 by Dr Susanne Jaspars and Professor Lutz Oette: Sudan's catastrophe: A long history of failed responses to structural and direct violence. From 12th June:

Here is an Al Jazeera panel discussion, also from 12th June: most of the discussants are convinced that this is entnic cleansing by the RSF militia (consistent with the report above).

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The analysis (p 22, section 4) abstracts what the authors call the livelihoods-conflict cycle:

4. The livelihoods-conflict cycle

Conflict and insecurity destroy livelihoods through a combination of direct and indirect asset-stripping brought about as a result of conflict-related processes, policies, and institutions. In turn, the livelihood adaptations that people make are themselves fuelling or driving further conflict.

Examples include the predatory grazing by nomads of farmers’ fields, the fencing-off of common grazing land for cultivation purposes, the gender-based violence used to control access to forestry resources, and the blocking of nomadic access to traditional rainy season grazing lands. These adaptations become part of a self-perpetuating livelihoods-conflict cycle where such livelihood adaptations generate further polarization between tribes. Local conflict may appear to play out at a tribal level, but in fact it is conflict between group identities linked to livelihoods and culture, particularly cultural differences in terms of the relationship to land and mobility.

These human cycles may be even more deeply intewoven with the natural cycles. Here Allan Savory is proposing that the contraction and expansion of the sahel is not just a response to externally driven meteorological phenomena, but is linked directly with the practices of transhumance and sedentary grazing. So Figure 4, in the inevitable context of the whole earth, has the feedback factors reaching all the way back to the top of the process:

This really excellent documentary series goes into details, and you can see that the ideas being put into practice here apply across the spectrum of agriculture from cottage gardening to nomadic transhumance:

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Ian Scoones on pastoralism as a global phenomenon of human adaptation

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The report above contains frequent references to this book first published in 1951 (later edition 1965, maybe 1967): The Mahdiya: A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan by A.B. Theobald ...

... and also to the later (1958) The Mahdist state in the Sudan, 1881-1898. by P. M. Holt.

These books were both written by authors connected with the University of Khartoum in Sudan, and the source of the latter seems to be primarily a large cache of documents which were hitherto unknown to most scholars but which were suddenly made available in the final years (1951-1955) of the British colonial rule, and published after Sudan's independence in 1956.