Climate Shocks and Pastoralist Migration in South Sudan: An Ecological Approach for Political Cooperation

In this important, multidisciplinary, open access study, Daniel Akech Thiong shows that the relations between climate disaster, pastoralist migration, and intercommunal conflict in Africa reach farther, both in time and space, than we realize.

Focusing on the climate-shock-induced migrations of the Dinka people of South Sudan’s Jonglei state into the Equatoria region, Thiong investigates the long-term ecological roots of conflicts among pastoralists, or between pastoralists and agriculturalists, over access shrinking waterholes and grazing zones. In so doing, he not only offers important correctives to prevalent, short-term narratives around individual political conflicts-narratives that provide little fodder for any long-term solutions--but also sheds new light on the role of governance, both national and local, in creating or mitigating the conflicts. Thiong in fact reveals examples of unusual cooperation between diverse ethnic groups amidst climate-change-induced disasters, and these findings shed new light on similar developments elsewhere in Africa, all of which offers new lessons for those who wish to mitigate future clashes related to climate-shock-induced displacement and encourage social stability.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Daniel Akech Thiong was born in southern Sudan (now South Sudan) and spent his early life in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. He is currently an independent consultant on the politics and economics of South Sudan who also runs a scholarship programme for refugee students as part of the Walking Buildings Project. Thiong’s writing has appeared in the Oxford Journal of African Affairs, openDemocracy, and African Arguments. His previous book, The Politics of Fear in South Sudan, was published by Zed Books in 2021.