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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts by Leif Brottem.
  • To Fight Climate Change and Insecurity in West Africa, Start with Democracy

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  November 19, 2021  //  By Leif Brottem
    West,African,Sheperd,Watering,His,Animals,At,A,Natural,Pool

    Secretary of State Blinken is right to focus on climate change and democracy during his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. At the top of his and everyone else’s mind should be the question: will democratic backsliding in countries like Benin make it more difficult to deal with the effects of climate change? Even more worrisome: will it worsen conflict hotspots, such as the West African Sahel, where climate change is playing a role? All eyes should be on coastal West Africa as countries such as Benin deal with violent insecurity and climate pressure creeping down from the Sahel. My ongoing research in Benin suggests that the country’s democratic local institutions, despite all their faults, are the country’s best defense against the breakdown in rural governance that has befallen Mali and neighboring Burkina Faso. 

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  • Climate War in the Sahel? Pastoral Insecurity in West Africa Is Not What It Seems

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  November 30, 2020  //  By Leif Brottem

    As violence in Mali and Burkina Faso reached a ten-year high this year, the West African Sahel appears to be experiencing the perfect storm of climate stress, resource degradation, and violent extremism. At the center of that storm, one finds livestock herders—pastoralists—who are both vulnerable to environmental changes in the region, and historically marginalized from politics. Conflict in the region looks like a harbinger of the climate wars to come—but is it really? In research produced for Search for Common Ground, Andrew McDonnell and I found that while competition for land and water resources has increased dramatically across the region, violence associated with pastoralism emerges from a much more complex set of factors. Not surprisingly, the decisive conflict variable is governance.

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