When frustrations move to center stage in analyzing pastoralist relations

I

It’s common to think of frustration as distinctly personal–at least until I get to the point of explaining why you and others are the cause of these frustrations. At that point, frustrations aren’t just interpersonal; the type of relationship we have with each other may well not exist without that glue of frustration. As Adam Phillips, the psychoanalyst, and others have underscore, you know you’re connected precisely when and because it’s that frustrating (e.g., Phillips 2012).

Take a random walk through recent pastoralist literature and you will find explicit references to: frustrated pastoralists and communities (Nori 2022, passim); frustrated politicians in pastoralist areas (Allouche et al 2025, p.16); security forces frustrated by pastoralists (Casola 2022, p. 25); pastoralists frustrated by security forces (Scott-Villiers et al 2025, p. 29); pastoralists frustrated with researchers (Bell et al 2025, p.10/17), and frustrated researchers in pastoralist areas (Semplici et al 2024, p. 13). In addition, there are frustrated younger men in pastoralist Kenya and their frustrated elders (Muneri 2024, passim; Hazama 2023, p. 267), along with frustrated—well, you get the picture.

Pastoralists are frustrated, researchers are frustrated, NGO staff are frustrated, and so too government officials. In fact, that is how they know they’re connected: They frustrate others and others frustrate them. Bluntly put, they wouldn’t be in these relationships if they weren’t frustrated. (Indeed, there wouldn’t be pastoralist counternarratives without frustrations.)

So what?

II

Now, here is where things get interesting from a pastoralist development perspective!

–To start with, in relational terms a center of gravity around frustration highlights what’s missing in notions of “resilience in the face of uncertainty.” Handling their joint frustrations is what pastoralists, NGO staff, researchers, and government officials do between putatively bouncing back and bouncing forward.

This is why it’s such a big issue to determine just who pastoralists are in fact interacting with. Are they actually frustrated with this really-existing government official or that actually-existing NGO staff person? Or is it that the others are more a nuisance for them, if that? Is the researcher actually frustrated with the pastoralists s/he is studying and, if so, in what ways is that frustration keeping their relationship going? Answers to such questions problematize not only notions of caring (West et al 2020), but also any binary between private self and public role.

–The follow-on analytic step then is to look at other major pastoralist binaries and see to what extent, if any, frustration relationships problematize them as well. The reader is already familiar with the debunking of any hard and fast line between nature/nurture and ecosystems/humans, so no need to repeat the familiar criticisms here. What does need highlighting, I believe, is the critics’ own use of a binary, that of justice/injustice, as if there were in fact just systems which can or should correct for the equally well-known injustices pastoralists undergo and have undergone.

The twofold obstacle to any such conclusion is that (1) all manner of injustices are incurred without specific reference to principles or norms of justice and, anyway (2) those principles and norms prove contradictory, inconsistent or ambiguous when it comes to specific contexts (Douglass 2025). (And that is precisely where frustrated expectations are active relationally!) This is both an empirical and theoretical argument most recently associated with the political philosopher, Judith Shklar:

What sort of problem is injustice? One way of thinking about it is as an ethical problem. If not the first virtue of social institutions, justice is one of the most important moral values that should guide our reflections on politics. Injustice negates (or is a departure from) justice and is therefore a problem. Understood this way, there is a strong case for maintaining that we require principles of justice to evaluate cases of injustice: we can only identify the nature and scale of injustices with reference to some prior idea of justice. As should now be evident, this is not Shklar’s approach to theorizing injustice. She instead starts from our experiences of injustice and explores the political problems to which they give rise. The sense of injustice that we all experience should be understood in reference to the plural, competing, and ever-changing expectations that exist within any society, which cannot be formalized into determinate principles of justice. As this sense of injustice is a deep and inescapable feature of all social life, there is a political imperative to find ways of living together that can mitigate it as effectively as possible without (at the extreme) descending into cycles of violent revenge. To understand the problem of injustice in this way is to treat it as a political problem, first and foremost, rather than as an ethical one.

Such a sense of injustice repeatedly appears in the pastoralist literature (e.g., Krätli and Toulmin 2020, p. 68). That there is pervasive injustice across many pastoralist areas and that the frustrating challenge is a political one in preventing or coping with ensuing cycles of violence is captured by many pastoralist observers, including Nori (2022; see also Benjaminsen and Ba 2021):

Political leaders, mafia-like organisations, and insurgent groups have successfully manipulated ethnic identities, political asymmetries, and local grievances to mobilise support for their activities. These provide weapons, salaries and opportunities to seize power at the local level, and with these the promise of redressing the many injustices faced by pastoralists and thereby transforming the local political economy. Cases include Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the Sahelo-Saharan fringes, Boko Haram in the Lake Chad region, Al-Shabaab in the Somali ecosystem, and other organisations operating across SSA drylands and beyond, where local communities are drawn into a ‘war economy’ dominated by politicians, smugglers commanders, and fighters whose interests lie in generating new forms of power, protection and profit. . .

In other words, it should not be surprising when existing local justice systems are commended for providing some everyday order and stability (e.g., Scott-Villiers 2025, p.35).

Why? Because even weak systems demonstrate the frustrating–really, frustrating–importance of giving injustice and grievances their due, whatever the global justice systems appealed to (see also Douglass 2025; on local and global justice systems and their tensions, start with Elster 1992).

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References

Allouche, J., C.Y. Yao, K.S. Amédée 2025. “Rethinking ‘Farmer-Herder’ Conflicts in Ivorian Internal Frontier.” African Affairs 123/493: 449–467 (access online at https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/123/493/449/7951617)

Bell, A. R., O. S. Rakotonarivo, W. Zhang, C. De Petris, A. Kipchumba, R. S. Meinzen-Dick. 2025. “Understanding pastoralist adaptations to drought via games and choice experiments: field testing among Borana communities.” Ecology and Society 30(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-15836-300125)

Benjaminsen, T.A., B. Ba 2021. “Fulani-Dogon Killings in Mali: Farmer-herder conflicts as insurgency and counterinsurgency.” African Security (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392)

Douglass, R. 2025. “Who Needs a Theory of Justice? Judith Shklar and the Politics of Injustice.” American Political Science Review: 1–12 (accessed online at http://cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/who-needs-a-theory-of-justice-judith-shklar-and-the-politics-of-injustice/5B25A4AF90526DAE217F93E87765E074)

Elster, J. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens, Russell Sage Foundation: New York NY

Hazama, I. 2023. “Man-Animal Social Relationship as Source of Resilience,” Chapter 9 in Reconsidering Resilience in African Pastoralism: Toward a Relational and Contextual Approach, Eds. S. Konaka, G. Semplici and P. Little, Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press, Japan

Krätli S., C. Toulmin 2020. Farmer–Herder Conflict in Sub-saharan Africa? IIED, Briefing. International Institute for Environment and Development, London (accessed online at http://pubs.iied. org/17753IIED)

Muneri, E.W. 2024. Intersectional Subjectivities, Embodied Experiences, and Everyday Responses among the Maasai Pastoralists Amidst Environmental Changes: Insights from the Mara in Kenya, PhD dissertation, Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (accessed online at https://sussex.figshare.com › ndownloader › files)

Nori, M. 2022. Assessing the Policy Frame in Pastoral Areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Research Paper No. RSC 2022/03, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Italy (accessed online at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4071572 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4071572)

Phillips, A. 2012. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY.

Scott-Villiers, P., A. Scott-Villiers, 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: 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)

Semplici, G., L.J, Haider, R. Unks, T.S. Mohamed, G. Simula, P. Tsering (Huadancairang), N. Maru, L. Pappagallo, M. Taye 2024. “Relational resiliences: reflections from pastoralism across the world.” Ecosystems and People, 20(1) (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2396928)

West, S., L.J. Haider, S. Stålhammar & S. Woroniecki 2020. “A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations.” Ecosystems and People, 16:1, 304-325 (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395916.2020.1814417)