Re-spacing African drylands: territorialization,sedentarization and indigenous commodification in the Ethiopian pastoral frontier

This paper traces the re-spacing of pastoral drylands in Africa. We argue that rendering pastoral resources legible and profitable occurs both within and beyond the state. Through a multi-sited case study from Ethiopia's Somali region, we excavate different mechanisms of sedentarization, whereby processes of state territorialization and indigenous commodification become mutually entangled. Sedentarization is not imposed by the state or corporate capital, but by indigenous merchants who capture the frontier's potential resource dividend. Land appropriation in the drylands is co-produced by political claims to territory, capital investment and new technopolitics through which indigenous (pastoral, Somali) merchants and politicians become complicit with the state's project of territorialization and sedentarization in a self-governing fashion. The irony of this situation is that the (Ethiopian) state has failed to consolidate sedentarization through planned interventions. Instead, capital investment by local and transnational Somali merchants has opened up a neoliberal frontier that re-spaces drylands towards increasing sedentarization.     

Organizing Democracy: How International Organizations Assist New Democracies

Scholars in the environmental security tradition have sought to explicate the links between environmental scarcity (or degradation) and the onset of different forms of political violence and how these are mediated by institutional mechanisms. The Malthusian trap here is not a direct deterministic relationship, but rather a possibility, where environmental scarcity when it coincides with socio-economic processes of rent-seeking and exclusion triggers political conditions ripe for violent struggles. This a priori attention to scarcity as causal mechanism blurs our understanding why violence occurs in some and does not in other places. Our research strategy is therefore different: we study a case of non-violent relations between resource users under conditions of environmental scarcity (due to drought) and political instability and look into the crucial role of local institutions in governing competing resource claims. Our case from the violence-prone Somali Region, Ethiopia analyses how agro-pastoralist communities develop sharing arrangements on pasture resources with intruding pastoralist communities in drought years, even though this places additional pressure on their grazing resource. A household survey investigates the determinants for different households in the agro-pastoralist community, asset-poor and wealthy ones, to enter into different types of sharing arrangements. Our findings suggest that resource sharing offers asset-poor households opportunities to stabilise and enhance their asset-base in drought years, providing incentives for cooperative rather than conflicting relations with intruding pastoralists.     

Endogenous Versus Exogenous Rules in Water Management: An Experimental Cross-country Comparison

This paper draws on institutional and experimental economics to investigate the role of exogenous and endogenous rules in irrigation systems. The hypotheses we examine argue that despite the differences between socio-economic and political settings, (1) endogenous rule-crafting can help water users to overcome appropriation and provision dilemmas in water-scarce environments like in the East Mediterranean countries and that (2) in market-like water governance systems, institutions other than the market itself, are less influential for overcoming appropriation and provision dilemmas than in hybrid governance systems. These hypotheses are being tested comparing the results of field experiments conducted in Jordan, the Republic of Cyprus and North Cyprus with 70 farmers. Field experiments simulate asymmetric access to resources and are based on variations of the irrigation game by Cardenas et al. to model and test asymmetric distribution of investment, harvest and revenue that favours upstream users. Empirical evidence shows that externally imposed allocation rules are able to bring in more equal distribution of revenue among upstream–downstream users but is likely to reduce the volume of investment and revenue, without resolving issues of free-riding. The authors argue that given the opportunity, water users (small farmers in our experiments) are able to craft their own rules improving the overall performance of the group in terms of investment and revenue, with a parallel improvement of equity in distribution. The implications and policy relevance of such findings are briefly discussed as they contradict typical practices of top-down policy delivery in the selected cases.     

Cargo cult science,armchair empiricism and the idea of violent conflict

In this paper I develop a philosophical and methodological critique of ‘rationalist’—or ‘social scientific’—approaches to the study of civil war and violent conflict, especially the work of Paul Collier and David Laitin. Rationalist scholars purport to develop universal explanations for the outbreak and the protracted duration of violent conflict using econometric techniques and rational choice reasoning. My critique of their ‘scientific method’ can be summarised in two propositions: first, the scientific approach is considered to be a ‘cargo cult’ science—the cult being universal law-like causalities underpinning social phenomena. Second, most empirical research in this tradition is based on doubtful statistics enriched with anecdotal evidence rather than by empirical field work. Hence, rationalist scholars largely conduct an ‘armchair empiricism’ instead of immersing themselves in the complex nature of social mechanisms in a specific space-time context. I briefly sketch out an alternative approach based on critical realism and how such a research programme could work in practice for studying the political economy of violent conflicts.     

Different Concepts of Ethnicity in a Cross-Atlantic Study of Violence and Drug Use among Deviant Youth

Despite their common multi-ethnic populations, the meaning and application of the term ethnicity varies between the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. This paper attempts the construction of a racial/ethnic measure that enables meaningful cross-national comparisons. As part of the Drugs, Alcohol and Violence International (DAVI) project, the link between different measures of ethnicity and alcohol use, drug use, violence, and delinquency was studied within samples of 14- to 17-year-old juvenile detainees and dropouts in Philadelphia, Toronto and Amsterdam. Results showed a relationship between origin (the most discriminating of ethnicity measures) and alcohol and drug use, but not violence-related behaviour. Differences in substance use and violence were more attributable to differences between countries and samples than between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ youth.Annemieke Benschop (MSc) is a researcher at the Bonger Institute of Criminology at the University of Amsterdam. Lana D. Harrison (MA, PhD) is Associate Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies and a Professor at the University of Delaware (Newark, DE). Dirk J. Korf (MA, PhD) is an Associate Professor and Research Director at the Bonger Institute of Criminology at the University of Amsterdam, and an Associate Professor in Criminology at Utrecht University. Patricia Erickson (MA, PhD) is a Senior Scientist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto (Canada) and a cross-appointed Professor in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Toronto.