3 May 2021

ELF community and working group on pastoralists and conflict in Equatoria is deliberating on the raging conflict between cattle keepers and the local communities in Equatoria.

ELF is assessing the factors, causes, consequences and its implications to present findings and recommendations to actively address the underlaying factors to the conflict.

The South Sudan peace process has focussed on ending the bloody conflict that started in December 2013 by striving to settle the political contest between President Kiir and Vice President Machar. The subsequent conflict that erupted in 2013 between the Dinka ethnic group aligned with President Kiir and the Nuer ethnic group aligned to Machar has obscured an equally devastating low-intensity conflict.

Left unresolved, it will have far-reaching and adverse multigenerational consequences on Nation-building and State building. The international community has dedicated its intellectual, financial and political energies to accommodate the two protagonists in a power-sharing agreement. It has failed to recognise the broader national, regional and global implications of the low-intensity conflict, whose motives appear to be directly linked to the lack of implementation of the signed 2018 peace agreement.

In this paper, ELF draws attention to the pastoralist induced low-intensity conflict that is being buttressed by land grabbing of Equatoria lands.

ELF traces the history of the conflict to other regions. It concludes that while many Push and Pull factors contribute to the conflict, influential individuals and ethnic-based political motives are responsible for mobilising and perpetuating the current low-intensity conflict. Political elites mobilise Tribal militia forces to provoke inter-communal clashes between pastoralists and farmers populations in Equatoria to advance their narrow personal economic interests. In the process, they confiscate traditional and communal lands. 

The policy briefs and recommendations by the working group will be published in this section of the ELF_PPP website.