In an article recently published in Climate and Development, researcher Daniel Abrahams examines how climate change alters conflict outcomes and vulnerability in Karamoja, Uganda. The case offers direct insight into both why the climate-conflict relationship can be so difficult to interpret and also the need to broaden conceptualizations of the climate-conflict relationship.

Karamoja is an arid region in the northeast of Uganda. Annual rainfall varies, but averages roughly 800mm/year, falling unimodally (i.e., rainfall in a single, continuous season traditionally from roughly April to October). Therefore, those living in Karamoja have historically relied on pastoralism and agropastoralism as their primary sources of livelihood. Mobility serves as a hedge to the region’s natural rainfall variability and long dry seasons.

Karamoja is also recovering from decades of intense violent conflict. This violence manifested most commonly as large-scale cattle raids between pastoralist groups of different ethnicities. There were a multitude of factors that drove this violence, including a proliferation of small arms which escalated following the fall of Idi Amin’s government in 1979, the commercialization of cattle raiding, and environmental shocks leading to high rates of cattle loss. Collectively, these led to the breakdown of traditional governance systems that had historically governed the raids and, as a result, retaliations and counter-retaliations that grew increasingly violent; at the peak of its violence, Karamoja was one of the most violent places on the planet.

“Land is now the biggest gun.”

This phrasing is telling. First, it reveals how the character of conflict in Karamoja has shifted. Where conflict was once defined by armed violence and large-scale cattle raids, contemporary conflict is driven by pressures on key resources and a shifting political ecology. Research participants consistently described how increasing climatic variability and unpredictability have resulted in theft, small-scale clashes over key resources, and even intrahousehold violence.

Second, though it is easy to mistake the notion that ‘land is now the biggest gun’ as simply meaning that conflict is now over land, this turn of phrase reflects something larger. It demonstrates that climate change has come to be seen as a form of violence unto itself.

For further insights on this topic, explore the three Factbook case studies on communal conflicts in the Karamoja region.
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