Two new reports surveying the strategic trends that are likely to shape the next few decades of global politics point very clearly to the prospect of a severely resource-constrained world. Released two days apart, both the new Chatham House report on Resource Futures and the US National Intelligence Council report on Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds raise a number of important questions relating to conflict and security.

According to the Chatham House report,

The spectre of resource insecurity has come back with a vengeance. The world is undergoing a period of intensified resource stress, driven in part by the scale and speed of demand growth from emerging economies and a decade of tight commodity markets. Poorly designed and short-sighted policies are also making things worse, not better. Whether or not resources are actually running out, the outlook is one of supply disruptions, volatile prices, accelerated environmental degradation and rising political tensions over resource access.

The report outlines what the authors refer to as volatility being “the new normal.” For this reason “High and fluctuating prices are spurring new waves of resource nationalism and making unilateral and bilateral responses more attractive.” This should be cause for concern, especially in relation to the ways in which the response of governments and other actors to scarcity (or at least perceptions of scarcity) can interact with existing tensions and conflicts between and within communities. As the report highlights, “In addition to efforts to reduce demand at home, governments and other actors have moved to ensure access to affordable resources, reshaping the landscape of international politics. The return to largely protectionist and beggar-thy-neighbour manoeuvres – often in reaction to short-term supply bottlenecks or perceptions of scarcities rather than actual ones – can act as fuel to the fire.”

As well as mapping the consumption and trade trends across a series of important resources, the report also discusses the impact of external variables such as population growth and climate change. These are “multiple stress factors” which “render countries vulnerable to different types of shocks such as environmental disasters, political unrest, violent conflict or economic crises – increasing both local and systemic risks. Such factors can create new tensions and flashpoints as well as exacerbating existing conflicts and divisions along ethnic and political lines.”

The report includes a section on resource conflict flashpoints (p. 114) which outlines fifteen different potential flashpoints relating to territorial/economic zone disputes in resource-rich areas, shared water resources and transboundary river systems and resource-related rebellion and insurgency. The report is also linked to an interactive website that maps some of these trends and potential flashpoints.

The day after this report was released, the US National Intelligence Council released their own on the key trends over the next twenty years that the United States will need to adapt to or try and shape in order to “think and plan for the long term so that negative futures do not occur and positive ones have a better chance of unfolding.”

Among other so-called mega trends such as urbanisation and changing demographics, the report echoes the Chatham House research by pointing to an increasingly complex situation in terms of global resources. The report argues that,

“We are not necessarily headed into a world of scarcities, but policymakers and their private sector partners will need to be proactive to avoid such a future. Many countries probably won’t have the wherewithal to avoid food and water shortages without massive help from outside. Tackling problems pertaining to one commodity won’t be possible without affecting supply and demand for the others.”

The key trend or ‘tectonic shift’ as the report calls it is that “demand for food is expected to rise at least 35 percent by 2030 while demand for water is expected to rise by 40 percent. Nearly half of the world’s population will live in areas experiencing severe water stress. Fragile states in Africa and the Middle East are most at risk of experiencing food and water shortages, but China and India are also vulnerable.”

While this may lead some towards overly pessimistic conclusions about a world defined by instability, human insecurity and geopolitical tensions, it is refreshing to see the NIC emphasising the importance of how the US can respond now. In his forward, the Council’s Chairman Christopher Kojm states that “We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. It is our contention that the future is not set in stone, but is malleable, the result of an interplay among megatrends, game-changers and, above all, human agency.” It is worth noting the deliberate use of the phrase ‘alternative worlds’ in the report.

While some degree of adaptation to these structural trends mapped out by both Chatham House and the National Intelligence Council will undoubtedly be necessary, the importance of both of these reports is that they remind us of the need for clear and far-sighted thinking on policy responses now. The worst case scenarios that these reports discuss are not inevitable and risks can be mitigated. National security policymakers will do well to study the scenarios outlined in these two impressive reports and to try and understand the drivers and ‘tipping points’ that lead to certain pathways. Both reports offer prescriptions for current decision makers (the Chatham House recommendations on ‘targeted resource dialogues’ and ‘coalitions of the committed’ are particularly worthwhile). While volatility and uncertainty might be the ‘new normal’ in global resource politics, one thing is entirely certain – inaction and ‘business-as-usual’ when facing “a critical juncture in human history” is a recipe for disaster.

Ben Zala is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester.

Image source: Stayraw

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a significant, if controversial, development in international affairs. China has proposed its own semi-official version of R2P called “Responsible Protection”.

Author’s Note: This article highlights issues discussed in more depth in various publications, including Andrew Garwood-Gowers, ‘China’s “Responsible Protection” Concept: Reinterpreting the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Military Intervention for Humanitarian Purposes’ (2016) 6 Asian Journal of International Law 89 and Andrew Garwood-Gowers, ‘R2P Ten Years after the World Summit: Explaining Ongoing Contestation over Pillar III’ (2015) 7 Global Responsibility to Protect 300.

Introduction

Over the last decade and a half the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle has emerged as a significant normative development in international efforts to prevent and respond to genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. Yet it has also been controversial, both in theory and in practice. R2P’s legal status and normative impact continue to be debated in academic and policy circles, while its implementation in Libya in 2011 reignited longstanding concerns among many non-Western states over its potential to be misused as a smokescreen for regime change. These misgivings prompted Brazil to launch its “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP) concept as a means of complementing and tightening the existing R2P principle. China, too, has proposed its own semi-official version of R2P called “Responsible Protection” (RP). This contribution explores the key features and implications of the lesser known Chinese initiative.

The R2P Principle

Image by UN Photo via Flickr.

R2P first appeared in a 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), a body set up by the Canadian government to consider how the international community should address intra-state humanitarian crises. However, after the initial concept proved contentious a modified version of R2P – labelled “R2P-lite” by one commentator – was unanimously endorsed by states at the 2005 World Summit. In its current form R2P consists of three mutually reinforcing pillars. The first is that each state has a responsibility to protect its populations from the four mass atrocity crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing). Pillar two stipulates that the international community should encourage and assist states in fulfilling their pillar one duties. Finally, pillar three provides that if a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations the international community is prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Action under pillar three can encompass non-coercive tools such as diplomacy and humanitarian assistance, as well as coercive means including sanctions and the use of force. The international community’s pillar three responsibility is framed in conservative terms, creating only a duty to consider taking appropriate action, rather than a positive obligation to actually respond to a state’s manifest failure to protect. Crucially, the UN Security Council remains the only body that can authorise coercive, non-consensual measures under pillar three. R2P does not grant states a right to undertake unilateral humanitarian intervention outside the Charter’s collective security framework. Overall, R2P is best characterised as a multi-faceted political principle based on existing international law principles and mechanisms.

The most well-known instance of pillar III action to date is the international community’s rapid and decisive response to the Libyan crisis in early 2011. The Security Council initially imposed sanctions and travel bans on members of the Gaddafi regime before passing resolution 1973 authorising the use of force to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack’’. China, Russia, Brazil and India each abstained on the vote to mandate military force against Libya. As the extent of NATO’s military targets and support for the Libyan rebels became apparent, many non-Western powers criticised the campaign for exceeding the terms of the Security Council resolution. For these states, the eventual removal of the Gaddafi regime confirmed their perception that R2P’s third pillar could be manipulated for the pursuit of ulterior motives such as the replacement of unfriendly governments.

The post-Libya backlash against R2P was at least partly responsible for Security Council deadlock over Syria. Russia and China have exercised their vetoes on four separate occasions to block resolutions that sought to impose a range of non-forcible measures on the Syrian regime. At the same time, there has been renewed debate about the strengths and weaknesses of R2P’s third pillar. In late 2011 Brazil’s RwP initiative proposed a series of decision-making criteria and monitoring mechanisms to guide the implementation of coercive pillar three measures. While RwP initially attracted significant attention and discussion, Brazil’s foray into norm entrepreneurship was short-lived and R2P has remained unaltered.

Reframing R2P as “Responsible Protection”

China’s traditional insistence on a strict interpretation of sovereignty and non-intervention has made it uncomfortable with the coercive, non-consensual aspects of R2P’s third pillar. As a result, Beijing has consistently emphasised the primacy of pillars one and two, while downplaying the scope for pillar three action. In this respect, its decision not to veto resolution 1973 on Libya came as something of a surprise.

China’s contribution to the post-Libya debate over R2P’s third pillar is less widely documented than Brazil’s efforts. In mid-2012 the notion of “Responsible Protection” was floated by Ruan Zongze, the Vice President of the China Institute for International Studies (CIIS),  which is the official think tank of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although China has not explicitly adopted the concept as a formal policy statement on R2P, its implicit endorsement means it can be described as a “semi-official” initiative.

RP is primarily concerned with R2P’s third pillar and, in particular, providing a set of guidelines to constrain the implementation of non-consensual, coercive measures. It consists of six elements or principles, which are drawn from just war theory and earlier R2P proposals such as the 2001 ICISS report and Brazil’s RwP. In this respect, RP represents a repackaging of previous ideas, rather than an entirely original initiative. However, by reframing these concepts in stricter terms it reflects a distinctive Chinese interpretation of R2P that seeks to narrow the circumstances in which non-consensual use of force can be applied for humanitarian purposes.

The first element draws on the just war notion of “right intention”. It provides that the purpose of any intervention must be to protect civilian populations, rather than to support “specific political parties or armed forces”. This conveys Beijing’s concerns over the motives and objectives of those intervening under the banner of R2P, as expressed during the Libyan experience. Element two relates to the “right authority” criterion. It reiterates the longstanding Chinese position that only the Security Council can authorise the use of coercive measures, and that there is no right of unilateral humanitarian intervention granted to states.

RP’s third element is based on the traditional principle that military intervention should be a “last resort”. Its call for “exhaustion of diplomatic and political means of solution” is consistent with Beijing’s broader policy preference for diplomacy and dialogue over forcible measures. However, insisting on a strict, chronological sequencing of responses may deprive the international community of the flexibility needed to ensure timely and decisive action on humanitarian crisis. For this reason, some clarification or refinement of element three may be needed. The fourth element of RP draws on aspects of the just war principles of “right intention” (like element one) and “reasonable prospects”. In relation to the latter, it provides that “it is absolutely forbidden to create greater humanitarian disasters” when carrying out international action. This stipulation reflects Beijing’s position that external intervention often exacerbates humanitarian crises and can ultimately cause more harm than good.

Element five of RP provides that those who intervene “should be responsible for the post-intervention and post-protection reconstruction of the state concerned”. Although the notion of a responsibility to rebuild appeared in the original 2001 ICISS report it was not included in the text of the World Summit Outcome document in 2005 and therefore does not form a component of the current concept of R2P. It is unclear whether China’s RP concept is explicitly seeking to resurrect this dimension or whether this element is simply intended to emphasise Beijing’s broader perspective on peacebuilding and development in post-conflict societies. Finally, element six calls for greater supervision and accountability of those carrying out UN authorised civilian protection action. This is a similar demand to that made in Brazil’s RwP proposal, though little detail is given as to what form any such monitoring mechanism would take.

Conclusion

Overall, the Chinese notion of RP is an attempt to reinterpret and tighten the content of R2P’s third pillar so that it aligns more closely with Beijing’s own normative preferences and foreign policy objectives. Compared to RwP and the ICISS report, RP outlines a narrower set of circumstances in which military intervention for humanitarian purposes would be appropriate. Some aspects of the proposal would certainly benefit from clarification and refinement.

However, it is notable that despite strongly criticising the way R2P was implemented in Libya, China has chosen to engage with, and actively shape, the future development of the norm. This illustrates the extent to which China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, is enmeshed in the ongoing debate over R2P. In fact, RP is explicitly framed as an example of China “contributing its public goods to the international community”. In the future we can expect China and other non-Western powers to play increasingly influential roles in the development of international security and global governance norms.

Andrew Garwood-Gowers is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He has written extensively on R2P and the law governing the use of military force, with publications in leading journals including Global Responsibility to Protect, the Asian Journal of International Law, Journal of Conflict and Security Law and the Melbourne Journal of International Law.

Many have argued that civil wars are more likely to occur along religious divisions. But evidence indicates that intrastate conflict is actually more likely within linguistic dyads than among religious ones.

In the 1990s Samuel Huntington argued that conflict across civilizational or religious lines would replace the ideological divisions that had defined political struggles during the Cold War period. Opining that Islam has ‘bloody borders’, he believed that conflicts would be particularly prevalent between ‘Muslims’ and ‘non-Muslims’. This led Huntington to further suggest that a future clash between ‘Islamic civilization’ and the West might occur.

Since September 11^th 2001 and the subsequent proclamation of the “War on Terror,” Huntington’s thesis has gained widespread attention among political leaders and citizens around the world. In 2014, for example, Tony Blair asserted that “religious difference will fuel this century’s battles.” During the 2016 US presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump seemingly subscribed to Huntington’s ideas when calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the country to prevent violent attacks on US citizens.

Whereas many social scientists would agree that ideological conflict between communism and capitalism, both between and within states, has declined since the end of the Cold War, no agreement exists about what, if anything, replaced ideology. Most scholars who study internal conflict or civil war would not distinguish between linguistic, religious, and racial markers but rather classify these categories as part of the larger concept of ethnicity. Yet some conflict researchers follow Huntington and identify religious differences as particularly conflict-prone. In doing so, important alternatives such as ethno-nationalist mobilization based on linguistic identities often receive too little attention.

Are internal conflicts mostly about religion or language?

Image by Christiaan Triebert/Flickr.

In a study that is forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, I and my co-authors Lars-Erik Cederman (ETH Zürich) and Manuel Vogt (Princeton University) conduct such a comparison. We analyse the probability of internal armed conflict between linguistically and religiously distinctive groups between 1946 and 2009.

Contrary to Huntington’s thesis, linguistic differences show a strong and robust relationship with the outbreak of intrastate conflicts. In fact, we find that linguistic divisions are more conflict-prone than religious differences.

These findings continue to hold when we focus only on the years since 1990 – the period to which Huntington’s thesis should be the most relevant. Our results further suggest that in no world region are religious differences more likely to be associated with internal armed conflict than linguistic divisions. We find the strongest support for a greater conflict-proneness of language compared to religion in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Even in the Middle East, we find a slightly higher, if uncertain, probability of armed conflict across linguistic than religious lines. The Middle Eastern finding at least in part results from multiple Kurdish rebellions in Turkey, Iraq, and more recently Syria as well as smaller uprisings of linguistic minorities in Iran.

When focusing only on conflicts that involve Muslim groups, we do not find substantial differences to other world religions. Although the majority of all armed internal conflicts today take place within Muslim-majority states, the majority of Muslim groups do not engage in violent rebellion. Our analyses also reject the thesis that Muslim groups disproportionately engage in conflict with non-Muslim groups.

Why Linguistic Differences?

Instead linguistic differences continue to be more frequently related to armed uprisings within states. While the brutal civil war in Syria captured headlines over the past years in many Western countries, destructive conflicts across linguistic lines haunt South Sudan, Burma, and Turkey.

Of course, linguistic differences are more widespread than religious divisions. In other words, ethnic groups in any given country are more likely to be divided by language than by religion. Notwithstanding these differences in frequency, our results indicate that linguistic divisions are disproportionately more often related to armed conflict than religious distinctions.

In our forthcoming article, we argue that it is the power of nationalism that makes linguistic divisions more conflict-prone than religious ones. Language gained political relevance in the late 18^th century when the French Revolution transferred political authority from absolutist rulers to the people. About the same time that political power became vested in European peoples, the industrial revolution created incentives to further homogenize European nation-states. Mass schooling and mass newspapers laid the basis for imagined national communities.

These developments provided both motive and opportunity for violent conflict across linguistic boundaries. Where members of ethnic groups are barred from having their children taught in their native language or experience linguistic discrimination in the job market and their interaction with the state, some of them will voluntarily assimilate into the dominant culture, but others develop grievances and may even refuse assimilation.

The elites of such discriminated groups can voice these grievances through publications in their own language and use it to express nationalist aspirations and demands. When the host state is unable or unwilling to address these demands, violent conflict becomes more likely. These dynamics are illustrated by Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war between Singhalese and Tamils, and recurrent Kurdish rebellions in Turkey.

Given the link between industrial advancement and language-based nationalism it is unsurprising that we find higher rates of linguistic conflict in the relatively highly developed regions of Eastern Europe and Asia rather than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Central and Eastern Europe may even be considered as the cradle of linguistically-based nationalism.

The multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires did not fulfil the modern creed of “one people, one state,” and violently disintegrated during World War I. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia followed suit in the early 1990s. To this day, Turkey has not come to terms with its Kurdish minority, and once more experiences internal conflict.

Yet the idea of nationalism did not remain contained to Europe. A highly flexible concept, it informed the national liberation struggles of former colonial subjects against the European colonial powers. The lines of division here were usually race and language rather than religion. For decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a conflict between Hebrew-speakers of European origin and Arab speakers, who had lived in Palestine for centuries. Only in the past two decades has it taken on more religious undertones.

Policy Solutions?

Linguistic and religious differences will remain with us for the foreseeable future. However, very few of these fault lines can be expected to erupt in violent conflict. Whether linguistic differences transform into seemingly incompatible nationalist projects, or whether religious divisions into ostensibly intractable positions, depends on how political leaders from different groups interact with one another.

Frequently armed rebellion emerges in politically highly exclusive and discriminatory contexts. Where political leaders with specific linguistic or religious backgrounds are barred from decision-making that affects their groups, conflict is more likely to break out than in states where they have some influence in government circles. Exclusion along ethnic lines creates clear insiders and outsiders, fosters grievances among the excluded, and suggests that there is “no other way out” but violent resistance. Zimbabwe, both under Smith and Mugabe, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and Burma to the present day are examples of ethnically exclusionary regimes. Each of these states also experienced violent rebellion by excluded groups.

In another joint study published in “Peace and Conflict 2016”, we show that excluding political elites with different linguistic or religious backgrounds from governmental power is pervasive in the Middle East and North Africa. So is political discrimination that denies the Palestinians in Gaza citizenship rights, keeps the Shia from voting in Qatar, or persecutes Kurds for political reasons in Turkey.

Figure 1 displays the average population share that experiences discrimination for different world regions and years. The data derives from the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset available at https://growup.ethz.ch/pfe.

Figure 1 reveals that ethnic discrimination remains staggeringly high in the Middle East although the region has experienced some improvements over the past twenty years. That religious differences in the Middle East erupt into violent conflict may be less of a surprise once this context is taken into account.

Our research thus suggests that avoiding ethnic exclusion and discrimination through power-sharing in multi-ethnic governmental coalitions will reduce the likelihood of armed conflict across both linguistic and religious lines. Elite accommodation in power-sharing coalitions has contributed to greater stability in such diverse places as Bosnia, Nigeria, Burundi, and Malaysia regardless of the type of ethnic differences. Although no panacea, power-sharing is associated with a substantial decrease in the likelihood of internal armed conflicts compared to exclusive environments.

While there has been a trend towards ethnic accommodation since the end of the Cold War, we do not know enough about its origin. Future research needs to investigate the causes of accommodation in greater detail and pay particular attention to appropriate solutions for violent conflict across linguistic lines relative to religious differences.

Nils-Christian Bormann is lecturer and Humanities and Social Science Fellow in the Politics Department at the University of Exeter.

Manuel Vogt is a visiting postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and senior researcher at ETH Zürich.

Lars-Erik Cederman is Professor of International Conflict Research at ETH Zürich and the author of Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The crisis in Darfur has been called the first genocide of the 21^st century. There have been many explanations offered for this human tragedy. But what is often overlooked is the economic value of violence for the Sudanese State and the way that politics and resources have been connected to it across time.

Intractable conflicts and mono-causal explanations seldom make good bedfellows. Never is this more the case than in Darfur, Sudan, which over the last 15 years has witnessed death and suffering, 2.5 million people displaced and a descent into chaos, aided and abetted by complex, shifting internal dynamics and a large number of uninformed and all too often, unprincipled outside interests.

Described as the first genocide of the 21^st century, early explanations for the conflict were attributed to longstanding tensions between “Arabs” and “ Africans” – a sort of stereotypical farmer versus nomad binary, which created violence  backed by militias from both sides. Tribal divisions were also used to create ideas about innate differences, with Sudanese Government ministers such as Dr. Mustafa Osman Ismail, claiming that death and displacement could be attributed to “tribal fightings” between “rebels who belong to specific tribes, fighting a militia who also belongs to specific tribes” (sic.) Others claimed that the war was environmental in nature, with tensions emanating from the loss of nomad livelihoods due to desertification and the creep of the Sahara to the south. Finally, writers such as Mahmood Mamdani argued that the conflict should be attributed to colonial center-periphery relations and the propensity of administrators to write “race into history” through administrative tribalism and the creation of hierarchies of power and privilege.

The Economic Value of Violence

Image by UN Photo via Flickr. 

In the search for an answer to the crisis in Darfur, all of these explanations emphasized clear distinctions between the characteristics and behavior of parties to the conflict, while paying less attention the larger context around the violence. That larger context relates to the economic value of violence for the Sudanese State and the way that politics and resources have been connected to it across time. Throughout Sudan’s history, whether in colonial times during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (when cotton production and gum arabic became key commodities for export to the West), or in the post-colonial period where land, oil and minerals have played central roles, it is the need for people, labor and resources embedded in contested tracts of land, that has galvanized the political elite and driven their behavior forward. Darfur has played a key role in this regard, supplying labor to Aba Island, White Nile for cotton picking and votes of allegiance to Sudan’s Umma Party. The region has also supplied bright, but otherwise disenfranchised young men for Hassan al-Turabi’s brand of Political Islam, premised on the reward of inclusion and moral salvation. Over time, a landscape of difference has emerged which is connected to resources and that is driven by political or religious ideology, backed up by violence. Those who are outside the centers of power and who attempt to claim their rights or their own share of resources have typically been viewed as a threat and as a result, have been subjected to disproportionate levels of violence in order to protect elite interests.

In Darfur, the extreme violence that accompanied the start of the crisis in 2003, emanated from fears that the region would join forces with the South and take up arms against the ruling political class.  However, rather than seeking a political solution to this problem, the people were subjected to horrific violence which included murder, rape, the burning of villages, land dispossession and enclosure of the remaining population in camps. As part of the effort to quash dissent, the Government used tried and tested methods of deploying proxy militia groups to take on the dirty work of clearance and control. Viewed from the ground, these developments created an over-simplified understanding of the crisis on the part of media, policymakers and NGOs that what was going on in Darfur was in fact a race war – an age-old conflict between “Africans” who cultivated crops in villages and “Arabs” who lived as nomads on the edge of the Sahara. Yet this convenient subterfuge of a “racial war” belied the actual reality on the ground, where racialized identities were often blurred and where most groups farmed and moved animals as part of everyday life. It also camouflaged a central strategy of the political elites which has been called “aktul al ‘Abid bil ‘abid” (kill the slave by the slave) and which has been deployed over and over again in Sudan to clear territories – particularly those that might have resources that the government can use.

Across the life of the conflict, activists have advocated for all kinds of strategies to thwart the violence: publicity campaigns, diplomacy, ICC warrants and divestment, to name but a few. However, most of these approaches have failed to appreciate the way that violence is linked to economics in Sudan and how this creates pressure for the State to maintain a large patronage network and a military and intelligence infrastructure in order to survive. Resources mean power, but to stay in power requires feeding the insatiable demands of supporters who are part of this network; it also requires rewarding those who are part of informal networks such as proxy militias, with either money or loot.

Yet as the financial needs have grown, the government’s coffers have gone into terminal decline.  In particular, since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 and the decision of the South to secede from Sudan in 2011, the resource base of the Sudanese government has shrunk dramatically. Over this time, unsustainable foreign debt, international sanctions, the loss of 75% of oil reserves to the South, the loss of half of Sudan’s fiscal reserves and the loss of two thirds of Sudan’s international payments capacity has crippled the state’s ability to function. These problems have made borrowing impossible and left its strategy to stay in power increasingly untenable. Faced with extreme financial pressure and limited capacity to deliver, resource extraction has become the central plank of Sudanese policy, precisely because it is one of the few ways to realize cash quickly in an economy whose other sectors have atrophied due to war. Darfur has proved to be an irresistible draw in this regard because it has substantial gold deposits, land use policies that are conducive to dispossession and a population that has been traumatized due to war.

Gold Mining on the Cheap

In what some might consider an unlucky coincidence, the downsizing of government coffers coincided with the discovery of gold in Northern Darfur at the end of 2011, in an area called Jebel Amer. Once virgin territory, and home to the Beni Hussein people, it didn’t take long for the ground to be pockmarked with thousands of tiny “artisanal” mine-shafts as the efforts to produce gold ramped up. Mining permits, which should have been sanctioned by the Sultan of the Beni Hussein, have instead been passed into the hands of government sponsored militias to administer, while locals have simply been refused access to their land.  In 2013, 70,000 people were displaced in a short period of time in the area, and according to Amnesty International hundreds more were killed (Insert links). Strangely reminiscent of colonial tactics of terra nullius, land that was once full of people living their daily lives has been miraculously declared “empty”. This “empty” land is now open to gold speculators and mining agents to go about their business instead.

Casualties from land clearance are one part of the story, but another part concerns the dangers of the mining process itself. In Jebel Amer where the search for gold has turned the area into something reminiscent of the Wild West, the drive for profit has superseded the need to pay attention to geology. “Artisinal” mining, while sounding quaint, is anything but: it is dirty, dangerous, with few safeguards to protect those involved. In one area of Jebel Amer where 95 miners were trapped, it was revealed that a main shaft of 60 meters had been dug with 22 smaller shafts radiating off the bottom. Not surprisingly, its stability had been compromised leading to implosion from within. Similar problems occurred at Kori and Abdulshakur mines with 37 lives lost, although in remote areas devastated by conflict, information is in scarce supply.

Sustainability in these areas is hardly a concern of mining supporters. If deaths from unsafe mining have impacted the local population, then another major issue is environmental toxicity and the use of mercury, cyanide and other poisonous chemicals to extract the gold. These chemicals have played havoc with the local environment and led to the loss of farmland for years to come.  Those whose ancestral lands have been affected have noted cases of soil erosion, sinkholes and land and groundwater contamination. Noting the bad taste of the local water, locals have also pointed to the growth of diseases and skin complaints that were never seen before.

Those who stand to gain from these practices, have no interest in stopping them. In particular the notorious Janjaweed Leader Musa Hilal, has taken personal charge of the gold mining operations as a way to augment his earnings and his political clout vis a vis the government in Khartoum. Embroiled in a heated argument with the government in 2013 over his compensation for militia activities, he has now installed himself in the gold mining areas of Jebel ‘Amer and is reputed to be personally earning $54 million per year for his efforts. This astounding sum of money would appear to be corroborated by a recent UN Security Council Panel of Experts’ Report in April 2016, which claims that $123million from gold extraction is now fueling the violence in Darfur, despite all efforts to institute sanctions, travel bans and asset friezes.

If expecting Musa Hilal to mend his ways is a stretch too far, then at least we might expect the international community to take action. Yet here too, the Security Council is involved in a heavy bout of geopolitics with Russia and China lining up on one side, and the UN Panel of Experts on the other. Demands that Russia be allowed to “edit” the UN Experts’ report and remove critical paragraphs are hardly that surprising given their deep involvement in gold mining activities both in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan, where they have been awarded large blocks for exploration. Close friends such as the Government of Qatar have also provided support with the supply of equipment for gold mining, and according to locals, with the purchase of ore from local producers so that it can be disguised later once it has left Sudan.

Creating sustainable security in this context requires a multi-faceted approach, which on one hand stands up to the perpetrators of violence and on the other, rejects ill-gotten gains filtered through external markets so that they come up clean.  It also requires pressure for land reform, so that speculators cannot so easily make a play to grab land that is not theirs. It is not enough to sign peace agreements in lavish hotels in Doha, Qatar, when the situation calls for a much deeper analysis of why Darfur has been entrapped in a spiral of violence for so long. As history has shown, the international community’s penchant for quick fix peace agreements is worthless without the fundamentals to govern peace over the long term. Perhaps it is now time to look below the surface of the violence in Darfur and make the effort to understand the social and political landscape from which these problems first took root.

Dr. Anne Bartlett is Associate Professor in the School for Humanities and Languages at UNSW (Australia). She has worked on Darfur and Sudan for over 15 years, during which time she has undertaken research on armed groups and also the effect of humanitarian intervention on the cities and population of the region. Bartlett has published extensively on the Darfur crisis and has given numerous talks on the subject worldwide. She is currently President of the Sudan Studies Association.