Oromo and Dinka: Conflating Environmental and Liberation Struggles

Abstract

Explaining the root causes of insurgency and liberation movements in Africa, particularly resource wars and violent livelihood struggles, is often neglected. This chapter is an attempt to redress that neglect. It introduces the cases of the Oromo of Ethiopia and the Dinka of Sudan to illustrate the fact that their liberation struggles are essentially resource struggles emanating from bitter historical experiences, in which they lost control of the land, the main source of their livelihood. Compression of the environmental space has contributed to fierce competition over relatively scarce resources; this competition has developed into political conflicts and liberation struggles. The nature of these liberation struggles depends largely on the state and the institutional mechanisms which it employs to contain or reinforce unjust resource allocation regimes. Two issues arise from characterising liberation struggle as resource struggle: firstly, the fact that people derive much of their collective identity from the struggle for a common resource against their competitors, including the state and transnational corporations. Secondly, that the state acts as an institutional mechanism for articulating general public interests through democratic or authoritarian means. In states where resource expropriation is used for enhanced political mobilisation, particularly in situations of real or imagined scarcity, regional resource conflicts can develop into insurgency and liberation wars. The Dinka and Oromo case studies demonstrate the relationship between such constellations of state-society relations and their potential drawbacks.