Land factor in wars and conflicts in Africa: the case of the Nuba struggle in the Sudan

By: Guma Kunda Komey (PhD)

Abstract
This paper premises that the roots causes of the conflicts in Africa, at their different levels of scale, are multifaceted; but at the centre of these root causes situates the question of land access and ownership rights. The centrality of the land factor in conflicts in Africa stems from the fact that it is a survival and an economic livelihood base, and an icon for social and political identifications to the bulk of the rural indigenous peoples. The clue here is that the interests and rights of these majorities are hardly harmonized with the land policies.
In view of this, the paper intents to demonstrate how land as a contributing factor to the contemporary conflicts in Africa is in itself as a result of cumulative processes of colonial and post-colonial land tenure policies and politics. It then continues to pinpoint how the African states’ exclusionary land policies and politics of limiting or denying the communities from land rights, play a crucial role in triggering local conflicts which, in many instances, have escalated into large scale wars. Moreover, it shows how in the process of the prolonged conflict, the endangered communities may obsessively activate other forms of belongings such as ethnic or autochthonous identities in promoting their political struggle with strong tie to their territoriality. The paper’s main line of argumentation is empirically grounded in a fieldwork-centred ethnographic material from the peripheral region of the Nuba Mountains, Sudan.

Author:
Guma Kunda Komey (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Juba University, Sudan. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher at ‘Difference and Integration Research Centre’ of the Universities of Martin-Luther and Leipzig, Germany. His recent research focuses on land and conflicts, territoriality, autochthony, ethnicity, and politics of identity, difference and boundary making.

E–mail: gumabrain@hotmail.com.

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