Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to discuss the increasingly tense relations between farmers and herders on one hand and the state of Ghana on the other.It explores the background but importantly analyses the state's responses to what is increasingly seen not only as a domestic but a regional security challenge.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to discuss the increasingly tense and violent relations between farmers and herders on one hand and the state of Ghana and its agents on the other. It explores the background, but importantly analyses the state's responses to what is increasingly seen not only as a domestic but a regional security challenge.

While the paper argues that this crises has caught the attention of securocrats and policymaker alike, we argue that the manner in which the crises has been handled by the Ghanaian state - from the sub-regional, national, regional and district - demonstrates a lack of appreciation of the complexity of intervening and interlocking interests and factors driving the farmer/herder crises in the country. To that end, the paper will seek to explore these factors and how they function in individual or combine in complex ways to create a state of insecurity and how the narrative and of exclusion, victimhood and dispossession all aggrieved parties fuels further violence and increasing instability.