Conflicts involving pastoralists have been on the rise in the past two decades in West, Central and East Africa. This article argues that land alienation is a major source of this type of violence. We employ a narrow identification strategy of relevant pastoral conflicts based on the Armed Conflict Location Event Dataset and create a unique indicator of land alienation comprised of three types of land use changes (conversion of land into conservation areas, crop farms, and industrial mining projects). Relying on a disaggregated quantitative comparative design of 50 km-by-50 km cells covering the Sahelian region from 2002 to 2019, we find that land alienation is an underlying cause of pastoral conflicts. Moreover, we show that the impact of land alienation on pastoralist violence spreads over long distances and is influenced by state presence and climatic conditions. Our analysis further reveals an overlap between pastoralist violence and armed conflict. Bridging a gap between macro- and micro-level studies, we contribute to shed more light on the determinants of pastoral conflicts, a type of violence that has received scant attention in the geospatial quantitative literature.

中文翻译：

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拒绝进入：土地转让和牧场冲突


过去二十年里，西非、中非和东非涉及牧民的冲突呈上升趋势。本文认为，土地转让是此类暴力的主要来源。我们基于武装冲突地点事件数据集（Armed Conflict Location Event Dataset）对相关牧场冲突采用狭义的识别策略，并创建了一个独特的土地转让指标，由三种类型的土地利用变化（将土地转化为保护区、农作物农场和工业采矿项目）组成。依靠对 2002 年至 2019 年覆盖萨赫勒地区的 50 公里 x 50 公里小区的分类定量比较设计，我们发现土地异化是牧区冲突的根本原因。此外，我们表明土地转让对牧民暴力的影响会远距离传播，并受到国家存在和气候条件的影响。我们的分析进一步揭示了牧民暴力和武装冲突之间的重叠。弥合宏观和微观研究之间的差距，我们有助于更多地阐明牧灵冲突的决定因素，这种暴力在地理空间定量文献中很少受到关注。