Ebook: Disrupting Territories : Land, Commodification and Conflict in Sudan

Pastoral societies are increasingly shaped by external forces and dynamics. While celebrations in Juba marked the birth of the new Republic of South Sudan in 2011, conflicts have continued to erupt both within and between the Sudans over access to land and resources: borders are contested, territorial claims challenged by small-scale and international actors, contracts governing the extraction of resources often lack transparency and are contentious, and the legal entitlements to agricultural land are disputed. Under this new dynamic of land grabbing, the fundamental relationship between people and land has been disrupted: while the right to land has become a global commodity, for rural people land both forms their identity and constitutes their most important source of livelihood. This book explores the structural conditions that mould pastoral livelihoods in the two Sudans.The first part of the book develops a history of the political economy of the pastoral sector and looks at the impact of resource extraction: Chinese investments in oil production, competition between artisanal and industrial gold mining, and foreign agricultural land acquisitions. The regional case studies in the second part look at how specific pastoral groups have experienced the new land-grab: the impact of developmental interventions, such as enforcing administrative boundaries; loss of land to mechanized agriculture and large-scale energy projects; the consequences of disenfranchisement for nomadic households; the influence of claims of tribal autochthony on territorial negotiations, and assess the role of territorial disruption in the spread of insecurity, migration and flight. Jörg Gertel is Professor of Economic Geography at Leipzig University; Richard Rottenburg is Chair of Anthropology at the University of Halle; Sandra Calkins is a research associate in Social Anthropology at the University of Leipzig.