Ethnicity or Environment? Assessing the Roots of Conflict in Darfur, Sudan, during the 1980's

Abstract

The ongoing scholarly debate about the relationship between environmental change and the outbreak of violent conflict has not resulted in concrete answers yet. Therefore, this thesis applies a different approach that does not take environmental change as a separate causal factor, but instead assesses it in the wider process of the outbreak of conflict that includes other factors as well. This will be done in the light of two events in Darfur, Sudan, in the 1980’s: the 1984-1985 famine and the 1987-1989 conflict. Setting the “environmental approach” against the “political approach” of these case studies, it will be argued that separately, these approaches are lacking in presenting a complete view, whereas taken together they provide a much more comprehensive understanding of conflict in Darfur. This has implications for the way conflicts are being analysed and how the relationship between environmental change and conflict is understood. Environmental change is a real-world problem that has the possibility to severely affect societies. However, it is not a one-dimensional factor with the magnitude to cause conflict on its own. Therefore, labelling violent conflicts like the one in Darfur as “climate conflicts” undermines the various other dynamics behind their processes.