Beyond resource scarcity: developing an integrated framework for analysing farmer-herder conflicts in the Global South
2025
Evans Amoako Amoah | Julian Bloomer | Tom Campbell
Farmer-herder conflicts in Africa have attracted growing concern and debate in academia, media and among policymakers, with a key focus on the apparent increase in the frequency of such clashes. Studies on farmer-herder conflicts in the sub-Saharan Africa have been a point of study for a number of decades. Different theoretical lenses have been applied, including–a political ecology framework and a human security perspective. These frameworks have been applied separately in many research settings, to study farmer-herder conflicts in the African context. Most studies tend to approach these conflicts either through an environmental security approach, emphasising resource scarcity and climate change, or from a security perspective that prioritises conflict escalation and intercommunal violence. Bridging this gap, this critical review has developed the novel HESP Framework - which stands for Human–Ecological Security and Power - linking the human security and political ecology perspectives into a coherent, multi-scalar model. This integrated framework can explain not only why farmer-herder conflicts emerge, for example, due to land tenure policies, climate stress, and elite capture but also how they affect people differently based on their social position, livelihood strategies, and access to protection or justice. This framework can provide a new and more robust approach to understanding farmer-herder conflicts.
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