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Cited by 152Transboundary Water Resource ManagementAgriculture, Land Use, Rural DevelopmentNatural Resources and Economic Development

Climate Change, Conflict and Development in Sudan: Global Neo‐Malthusian Narratives and Local Power Struggles

Verhoeven, Harry·2011·Development and Change
DOI 10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01707.x
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Abstract

Dystopian accounts of climate change posit that it will lead to more conflict, causing state failure and mass population movements. Yet these narratives are both theoretically and empirically problematic: the conflict–environment hypothesis merges a global securitization agenda with local manipulations of Northern fears about the state of planetary ecology. Sudan has experienced how damaging this fusion of wishful thinking, power politics and top‐down development can be. In the 1970s, global resource scarcity concerns were used locally to impose the fata morgana of Sudan as an Arab‐African breadbasket: in the name of development, violent evictions of local communities contributed to Sudan's second civil war and associated famines. Today, Darfur has been labelled ‘the world's first climate change conflict’, masking the long‐term political‐economic dynamics and Sudanese agency underpinning the crisis. Simultaneously, the global food crisis is instrumentalized to launch a dam programme and agricultural revival that claim to be African answers to resource scarcity. The winners, however, are Sudan's globalized Islamist elites and foreign investors, whilst the livelihoods of local communities are undermined. Important links exist between climatic developments and security, but global Malthusian narratives about state failure and conflict are dangerously susceptible to manipulations by national elites; the practical outcomes decrease rather than increase human security. In the climate change era, the breakdown of institutions and associated violence is often not an unfortunate failure of the old system due to environmental shock, but a strategy of elites in wider processes of power and wealth accumulation and contestation.

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  • These stressors and competition for available resources may have contributed to conflicts in Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, and Kenya, although the relative causal contributions of climate change, governance, population pressures, and preexisting sectarian divisions to outbreaks of organized violence remain a subject of intense debate.

    “These stressors and competition for available resources may have contributed to conflicts in Nigeria [63], Uganda [64], Sudan [65], and Kenya [66], although the relative causal contributions of climate change, governance, population pressures, and preexisting sectarian divisions to outbreaks of organized violence remain a subject of intense debate [31, 67, 68].”

    From Climate Change, Migration, and Civil Strife. (2020) · cites this paper as [68]

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Authors
Verhoeven, H.
Affiliations
University of Oxford (GB)
Corresponding author
Verhoeven, Harry
Venue
Development and Change
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2011-05
Volume
42
Issue
3
Pages
679-707
ISSN
  • 0012-155X (ISSN-L)
  • 1467-7660
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-7660.2011.01707.x
OpenAlex
W1919515684
Cited by
152
References
59
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 2
FWCI
21.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor, 37 d)
Locations
  • Development and Change (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Transboundary Water Resource Management
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › General Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Natural Resources and Economic Development
Keywords
climate change and conflict, resource constraints, Darfur conflict, Sudanese civil war, famine, global food crisis, dam projects, agricultural development, foreign investment, human security, elite power struggles, securitization
MeSH terms
Civil Disorders, Food Supply, Population Dynamics, Power, Psychological, Sudan, History, 20th Century, History, 21st Century, Climate Change, Food Safety

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