When pastoralists are more like occupiers than residents only

I

I couldn’t help thinking of Kristin Ross’s The Commune Form when reading Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands by Patta Scott-Villiers, Alastair Scott-Villiers and others.

At first reading, though, these are two very different books about very different sites. Here is how Ross’s publisher, Verso, describes her essay:

When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land–from the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre–have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past.

Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatization, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.”

Here in contrast is the Summary from Scott-Villiers et al:

This working paper examines how communities along the Somalia–Kenya border navigate a landscape of war. Over decades of conflict–including civil war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency–local people have relied on their own means of governance and mutual support to repair the damage and maintain life and livelihood. The study draws on people’s reflections on their ‘middle way’, a system rooted in tradition by which they both govern themselves and do their best to avoid the dangers of the war. The informal order blends customary institutions, negotiated agreements, and far-reaching social networks to provide basic public goods and maintain the common good.

So indeed, the two publications have very important differences.

II

Yet what connects them for me is Ross’s point about the protracted occupy-movements that interest her:

Occupations that endure for so long require of the occupants a ceaseless ingenuity to come up with new and creative ways of inhabiting the conflict. Fighting about a place is not the same as fighting for an idea. Place-specific struggles create a political situation that really calls for a clear-cut existential choice. . .The Weelaunee Forest outside Atlanta will continue to be a forest, or it will become a militarized training ground for police. . .

This notion that people have now come to occupy a territory indefinitely strikes me as what some of those in the borderlands of Kenya and Somalia are also undergoing.

It might be useful to think of some pastoralists there less as residents only of drylands in which they and their families have long lived. Rather, think of them more as inhabiting conflicts which render them, like others also now there, as occupants of what are best understood as shifting borderlands. Yes, you still see them as residents, but they also act as occupiers of a territory now claimed by others as well.

For example, according to one interviewee in Scott-Villiers et al:

My name is Burhaan. I’m a pastoralist. It is the zakat season [when “charitable contributions” are made]. There is a lot of push from Al-Shabaab around the villages collecting the tax. You know this zakat has stayed for some time now, and we know what it is. I used to pay to my relatives who are poor, but now I pay to Al-Shabaab. The first time they took the tax, a few years ago, I was herding on the Kenya side and Al-Shabaab came to collect the zakat. They have people who do the counting for them. They know how many are in each herd. They tied two camels of mine. I went to the local police boss, the Officer in Charge of Security (OCS), and told him – my camels are taken by Al-Shabaab. The OCS asked me: ‘How many camels did you have, 30? And then they tied how many, two?’ Then he asked, what will they do next? I said, they will go with them and then they will come back after one year. And then the OCS asked: ‘Between now and then, what will happen to you?’ Nothing will happen to me, I replied. If I have paid my tax, my camels can graze anywhere. I’m not faced by any threat from them. That is when the OCS said: ‘If my unit goes after Al-Shabaab, I may lose soldiers. If two camels can guarantee your safety and the security for a year, it is a good deal!’ I went straight to those who took away my camels and negotiated – these animals are not all mine, I said. This is a herd that is pooled together by many people. Then they told me: ‘If you have issues to raise, you can go to a place called Busar and lodge a complaint. We have mechanisms for addressing grievances.’ I pleaded with them: ‘I don’t know that place, I’ve never been there, I’m from this Kenya side of the border.’ And then they released one camel back to me. It was a waiver. And then after from that day I have complied with paying zakat to Al-Shabaab.

III

So what? So what if pastoralists are occupants of borderlands along with others, notably the Kenya military and Islamic insurgents?

The answer that Ross’s work implies is more than interesting: Alliances by pastoralists with other very different occupiers that shift over time and sites can be ways to defend that occupied territory and appropriate it for uses and practices of each.

And why is that important? Because, as Ross also points out, defence and appropriation are not the same as resistance: “Resistance, quite simply, means letting the state set the agenda. Defence, on the other hand, is grounded in a temporality [namely, protracted conflict] and a set of priorities by the local community in the making.” Note: “in the making.”

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Sources

Ross, K. (2024). The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life. London: Verso.

Scott-Villiers, P.; Scott-Villiers, A. and the team from Action for Social and Economic Progress, Somalia (2025) Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia– Kenya Borderlands, IDS Working Paper 618, Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies. (Accessed online at https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/articles/report/Navigating_Violence_and_Negotiating_Order_in_the_Somalia_Kenya_Borderlands/28715012?file=53375021)