Cattle raiding conflict management in Kenya

Project Type:

Smaller projects: PhD

project summary

Although long perceived as a beacon of development in East Africa, recent violence has made visible the political instability of Kenya. Cattle raiding, while originally a traditional mechanism of acquiring bridewealth and redistributing resources, has become increasingly commercialised involving actors outside the pastoralist community and increasingly violent with the proliferation of small arms. Particularly in remote regions of the Horn of Africa, seasonal variability, external intervention and insecurity have impacted traditional coping strategies of pastoralist communities resulting in increased vulnerability to food insecurity, famine and destitution. It is often stated that formal policies have marginalised pastoralists and forced them into more intensive cattle raiding while weak customary governance mechanisms have failed to manage these and other natural resource conflicts. However, customary conflict management mechanisms are poorly understood and the role of civil society in natural resource conflict management has largely been overlooked. There are calls within the literature for future research to focus on both formal and informal institutional arrangements for conflict management and to investigate the role of human agency in natural resource conflict in order to manage conflicts before they become intractable.

Facts

PERIOD: 17 October 2011 to 30 March 2013
PROJECT CODE: 11-082LIFE
COUNTRIES: Kenya
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Jennifer Lauren Bond
TOTAL GRANT: 308,916 DKK

Institutions