Presentation short abstract

This paper contests prevailing narratives that attribute conflict and migration in the Sahel primarily to ethnicity, climate change, or poverty. It identifies five distinct regimes of dispossession which exacerbate both migration and the growth of armed groups, as reactions to perceived injustices.

Presentation long abstract

This paper contests prevailing narratives that attribute conflict and migration in the Sahel primarily to factors such as ethnicity, climate change, or poverty. Instead, we underscore land dispossession as a central, yet insufficiently examined, driver of both phenomena. Drawing on peasant studies and political ecology, and based on many empirical studies we identified five distinct, regimes of dispossession: peri-urban, large-scale agricultural, pastoral, community, and licensed dispossessions. These different regimes of dispossession may overlap and are not mutually exclusive. They are influenced by state policies, elite capture, social differentiation and global economic pressures, resulting in coercive land redistribution and the marginalisation of rural populations. We contend that dispossession exacerbates both migration and the growth of armed groups, including jihadist movements, as reactions to perceived injustices. By reevaluating concepts such as moral economy and primitive accumulation, the paper offers a new understanding of the crises in the Sahel, using land and migration as key points, to emphasize the need for historically and politically informed analyses rather than reductionist explanations.