Rethinking ‘farmer–herder’ conflicts in the Ivorian internal frontier

Abstract

There is a heightened concern among the media, United Nations (UN) agencies, and security experts about the rising number of localized conflicts in West Africa. While many of these conflicts are labelled as farmer–herder conflicts, they are, in fact, more complex and multidimensional. This article demonstrates as much for the Ivorian case by building on the concept of the internal frontier in West African rural institutions. Population mobility has been central to state policies and practices towards the internal frontier in order to optimize conditions for economic growth and capital accumulation. Drawing on the case of Bouna, Côte d’Ivoire in 2016, this article argues that the conflict is driven by a reconfiguration of local social orders, whereby the state’s internal frontier logic faces a crisis due to the ideological contradictions between capital accumulation and autochthony.

the city of bouna, which is part of the savannah bounkani region in northeastern côte d’ivoire, became the centre of political attention when a violent local conflict, depicted as a ‘farmer–herder’ conflict, erupted in March 2016, resulting in 33 deaths, 52 injuries, and 2,640 displaced.¹ The violence inflicted by the conflict was the deadliest ever known in the Bounkani region.

This conflict has been well covered by the media, the government, and United Nations (UN) agencies, as there were fears that the conflict dynamics could be hijacked by more radical elements as has been the case in other West African countries, from Nigeria to Mali and Burkina Faso.² These fears were also supported by the fact that two terrorist attacks were carried out in June 2020 and March 2021, not far from the city of Bouna in Côte d’Ivoire. This article interrogates the framing of this conflict simply as a farmer–herder conflict. It aims to demonstrate how the conflict in Bouna needs to be situated in the dynamics of the internal African frontier.³ Building on the internal African frontier model—where entrepreneurial groups are able to transform kin, captives, and other adherents into new identities—we show that the Ivorian state developed a social and economic model around population mobility and agricultural and livestock policies in order to optimize conditions for economic growth and capital accumulation. While this model had created conflict and resistance beforehand, the 2016 conflict in and around Bouna is more complex because the state is now facing its own crisis between capital accumulation and autochthony. This ambiguity and uncertainty create a crisis of authority, which, we argue, is the root cause of the 2016 conflict in Bouna.

We collected data on farmers’ and herders’ practices and relationships, as well as on local governance issues around the 2016 conflict, through fieldwork in Bouna and the neighbouring villages of Assoum 1 and Sotité Douô. Field observation, interviews, focus groups, and informal discussions were collected in December 2020 and August 2021(see Appendix). These primary field data are complemented by interviews with socio-economic and political elites from Bouna based in Abidjan in May 2021 and with donors that have programmes in the region (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), United States Agency for International Development (USAID)) in January 2022 and 2023.⁴ Furthermore, an analysis of four national newspapers from March to May 2016 (Fraternité Matin: 12 articles, Notre Voie: 18 articles; Le Patriote: 17 articles, and Soir info: 9 articles) is used to document the exact chronology of the conflict, complemented with government policy reports from the Ivorian government, UN agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

This article is divided into three sections. The first provides the context and the chronology of the 2016 conflict. The second discusses various theoretical explanations for the conflict. Finally, the last part empirically analyses the conflict through an internal frontier lens.

Bouna—the context and the 2016 conflict

Bouna, in northwestern Côte d’Ivoire (see Map 1), is the centre of the Koulango kingdom, one of the first centralized states of ancient Côte d’Ivoire. Bouna and its surrounding rural areas are inhabited by the Koulango, an ethnic group who migrated in the seventeenth century,⁵ and several other groups, such as the Fulbe,⁶ Malinke, and Lobi, who migrated to the region from surrounding West African countries. The Lobi arrived in large numbers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from northwestern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. The Fulbe herders migrated to the north of Côte d’Ivoire initially during the 1930s, when various socioecological and political crises, and the modification of routes due to agricultural development in the Sahelo-Sudanian regions pushed many families to the south. These population flows were later amplified by years of drought, especially between 1968–73 and 1983–85.^7,8

Bouna plays an important role in the broader dynamic of pastoral and agropastoral production in the Sahel, although Côte d’Ivoire is still a major importer of livestock from the Sahelian countries. The pastoral landscape of Côte d’Ivoire is being recomposed, with new movements towards the south of the country at the edge of the savannah zone. At the same time, the agricultural map is also considerably changing with the extension of cashew fields, as well as off-season gardening. Off-season market gardening increased due to demand from large urban agglomerations, as well as the declining price of cotton, which was the region’s primary agricultural export in the early 1990s.⁹ Farmers also renewed their interest in cashew growing in the 1990s due to increased world demand for cashew kernels. The ability to diversify their agricultural system beyond cotton was made possible by several important changes, namely increased land availability, rising population density, and increasingly flexible customary land tenure, which allowed farmers to convert fallow cropland to cashew orchards.¹⁰

The political dynamics became complicated by the politico-military crises (2002–11), where the northern half of the country, including Bouna, fell under the military and administrative control of the insurgent group Forces Nouvelles (FN).¹¹ For 5 years, Côte d’Ivoire was split into two parts separated by a UN-controlled buffer zone. In 2007, the civil war ended through a peace agreement that provided power-sharing arrangements for the opposing parties. Following the 2010 presidential elections, violent clashes broke out between the supporters of the two candidates, officeholder Laurent Gbagbo and opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara.¹²

Conflicts between herders and farmers are part of the daily lives of the populations, according to the respondents we met in Bouna, Assoum, and Sotité Douô.¹³ ‘If it is about the herders and farmers, it is our daily life, there is always a palaver.’¹⁴ Specific practices have been highlighted as changing the nature and dynamic of this everyday conflict, particularly night grazing by herders and livestock killing by farmers. Night grazing is the subject of significant controversy in Bouna, with farmers accusing herders of this practice, which is viewed as a strategy to get around restrictions. One farmer told us:

At night, from 7 p.m. until 5 a.m., the herders and their herds are still in the fields, and it is in the morning at 8 a.m. that the animals leave to rest. When the farmer is in the field, the herds of oxen are in the enclosures, and it is from 1 p.m. that they go out to walk all night.¹⁵

Livestock killing by farmers is done by adding toxic products to water points or crops, as reported by one farmer:

This is not a custom but each of us knows how to take care of our area. There’s only one way to get the breeders to run away. You have to put medicine in the water and on the grass. When the oxen come to eat and fall ill, the herders do not come to the same place again.¹⁶

So, what happened in March 2016? According to reports and journal articles, the initial clashes started on 12 March in Panzarani, a village located about 15 km from Bouna. Following the damage of fields by oxen, young Lobis set fire to around 36 homes in the Fulbe community and demanded their departure. A few days after this incident, the same grievances of Lobi farmers against the Fulbe were expressed in other localities in the Bouna department, resulting in the further destruction of homes and other property. Bilate Hien, the chief of the Lobi community, declared that in one village (Kpazarani), the village chief, a Koulango in charge of the case, said that the Lobi farmer is a foreigner in the same way as the Fulbe, therefore that the crop damage will not be compensated, because his oxen only ate grass.¹⁷ In the middle of March, the prefect of the Bounkani region, Tuo Fozié, summoned the belligerent communities to defuse the situation, asking them to observe a truce during which he would travel throughout the area to meet the population.

However, this truce was not respected, as there were soon other reported conflicts. A more violent city inter-community conflict then started in the town of Bouna on 23 March and lasted for 2 days. While the conflict was still along ethnic lines, the Lobis on the one hand versus the Fulbe, Malinkés, and Koulangos on the other, the conflict became more militarized with the involvement of the Dozos (traditional hunters).¹⁸ The Koulango and Malinké populations came to the aid of the Fulbe because some oxen belonged to people from these two communities. On the 24th, young Malinkés attacked the leader of the Dozo brotherhood, Jean-Marie Palé, on the grounds that he had incited Lobi farmers to perpetrate violence against herders. The Dozo leader then called on his elements to ignite the situation and, armed with rifles, they did not hesitate to use them.¹⁹

Another incident reveals, however, that the crisis ran even deeper. Just after the conflict, on 26 March 2016, the deputy of Bouna, Dah Tikoueté Sansan, was attacked by a group of young people who had confused him with the president of the Boundaki regional council, Hien Philippe. The latter is accused, rightly or wrongly, of having armed the Dozo to attack other communities living in Bouna.²⁰ Irrespective of armament, the fundamental problem is that militias created during the 2011 post-electoral crisis, especially the Dozos, have not been dismantled. From the perspective of the Koulango, the conflict was a planned and premeditated affair as part of the Lobi’s strategy to dethrone the Koulango kingdom.

The role of the local political elite was directly addressed in a speech in Bouna by the Ivorian President on 30 April 2016, where he declared that: ‘the magnitude of damage and killings cannot be justified by a simple conflict between farmers and breeders. We know that occult hands must have manipulated, at one point, populations and pushed communities to confront each other.’²¹

The timing and location of the conflict raise additional questions about the degree to which this conflict can be characterized as one between farmers and herders. Regarding seasonality, the conflict erupted during the dry season when farmers are barely in the field. In terms of its spatial dimension, the conflict took place in the city of Bouna rather than in the fields. The interview below illustrates this fact:

But it was a conflict that took place in March. On March 24, we are practically in the dry season. How can we have a conflict between farmers and herders in the middle of the dry season? And the conflict does not take place in the bush but it takes place in the heart of the city. This means that these are fallacious arguments when it comes to farmer/herder conflict. It was a pretext because there were certainly other latent conflicts that exploded into the open, thanks to the incident between farmers and herders. People had certainly been watching each other for a long time and it immediately flared up.²²

The chronology of the events raises some interesting questions about the nature of this conflict, questioning whether the 2016 conflict could be seen as simply a spill-over effect of the daily and very small-scale conflicts between farmers and herders around the city of Bouna. So, what were the key narratives and theories used to explain this conflict?

Theories, actors, and narratives around the 2016 conflict

The escalation of an everyday farmer–herder conflict into a larger and deadlier one is the conventional wisdom about the conflict in Bouna in 2016. The media, the government, academics, and UN officials, in fact, have all framed the conflict as a farmer–herder conflict. For instance, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Hervé Ladsous, told the Security Council about areas of tension in the Bounkani region between pastoralists and farmers in Bouna.²³ Similar language was used by the US State Department²⁴ and the Ivorian Prime Minister at the time, Daniel Kablan Duncan.²⁵

Donors have also mainly followed these farmer–herder narratives in framing their peacebuilding responses. The Deutsche GIZ (in English—the German International Cooperation Society), for instance, is funding an ecological programme that focuses on the rehabilitation of the Comoé National Park,²⁶ which is near Bouna. The project considers the conflict to be due to farmer–herder relationships and, therefore, frames its solution around the broader framing of conservation and environmental peacebuilding.²⁷ Another key project in the region is Resilience for Peace (R4P), which is a 5-year USAID-funded initiative to strengthen community resilience and empowerment opportunities in order to prevent violent extremism,²⁸ with Bouna as one of their focus sites.²⁹ Here, the vulnerability of these communities and the potential link between farmer–herder conflicts and radicalization are framed in relation to the global war on terror.

Many local, national, and international media have used resource scarcity narratives to explain the conflict in Bouna.³⁰ Deforestation, a lack of grazing space, and using land for new crops were all highlighted as key drivers of the conflict.³¹ Western media tend to reinforce this framing by situating this conflict as part of a broader phenomenon of increasing deadly farmer–herder conflict in West and Central Africa.³²

Similar arguments are made in the few academic analyses of the conflict.³³ One study considers the roots of this conflict to be linked to the growing demand for natural resources and the management of agricultural lands, which were aggravated by chieftaincy struggles among different ethnic groups in the Bouna area.³⁴ Another argues that climate change, combined with population growth, has led to a shortage of cultivable land, leading Lobi farmers to exploit the transhumance tracks intended for herders and their livestock, in violation of administrative and political agreements.³⁵ Finally, one article focuses on authority relations governing land use over time, arguing how a ‘statist land regime’ in this region created social conditions amenable to the type of localized violence observed in Bouna in 2016.³⁶

Overall, media, government, academics, and UN officials all tend to characterize the 2016 conflict in Bouna as a farmer–herder conflict driven by resource scarcity. They argue that the recurrence of farmer–herder conflict in northern Côte d’Ivoire results from insufficient grass for livestock, especially in the dry season, and the extension of the agricultural land for cashew nuts or off-season market gardening.³⁷ This focus on resource scarcity, which is reinforced by climate change narratives,³⁸ remains an important school of thought in the overall scholarship on farmer–herder conflicts.³⁹ However, theories of resource scarcity have also been critiqued by some academics, who argue for a more multidimensional, complex genesis of resource and identity-related conflicts.⁴⁰ In fact, current scholarship on West African farmer–herder conflicts is rich and varied, focusing on the marginalization of nomadic people, in particular showing how they are excluded from land ownership (in relation to citizenship),⁴¹ access to water,⁴² or stereotyped as ‘nomad savages’.⁴³ This literature also emphasizes broader power dynamics, particularly the contradictions between ‘customary’ and state procedures,⁴⁴ or the relationship between agricultural and livestock policies.⁴⁵ This article builds on this literature to situate the 2016 Bouna conflict within broader structural factors like the state. It analyses the 2016 conflict in Bouna in the same light as other conflicts in Côte d’Ivoire in terms of the internal frontier.⁴⁶

The internal frontier revisited

Building on Frederick Jackson Turner’s concept of the frontier, Igor Kopytoff introduces the idea of an internal frontier in the African context. Kopytoff argues that the internal frontier is a zone of interaction rather than a boundary, where entrepreneurial individuals or groups can build kin, captives, and other adherents into new identities. His theory is particularly well suited to the West African context where local institutions are shaped by deeply rooted patterns of population movements.⁴⁷ Kopytoff’s theory of the African ‘internal frontier’ is useful in explaining population mobility during pre-colonial times in terms of the permanent process of colonization of interstitial spaces and the formation of a local political order structured around the idea of the so-called ‘first comers’ or ‘founders’.

While his theory was developed for the pre-colonial period, many scholars have adapted Kopytoff’s heuristics of the African frontier to adapt it to the evolving contemporary political dynamics, logics, and rationales of governing that shape present-day African frontiers.⁴⁸ Leif Brottem and other scholars have expanded the theory to show how local institutions function differently across geographic jurisdictions as these legal units of governance are, in reality, just clusters of settlements.⁴⁹ Due to concerns about losing land tenure rights and maintaining political power, groups holding autochthonous, first-comer host status vehemently oppose converting settlements occupied by ‘strangers’ (late-coming migrants) into administrative villages even when their size and importance would justify it.⁵⁰

This article builds on recent scholarship that considers relational spaces constituting the frontier as contact zones between social orders, whose inter-relations are characterized by power inequality.⁵¹ Furthermore, the human frontier with nature and its ensuing commodification through land, water, and soil grabs, combined with a frontier state that erases existing orders and establishes new patterns of hybrid governance, makes the idea of internal frontier highly relevant today.⁵² More broadly, recent scholarship has shown how contemporary frontiers are associated with resource exploitation in marginalized spaces and processes of socioecological transformation characterized as particularly violent.⁵³

Situating the 2016 conflict within the Ivorian internal frontier model

We distinguish four key phases in this broader structural understanding of the conflict.

First, historical and ethnographic accounts enable us to show that the political order around the pre-colonial Koulango kingdom corresponds to Kopytoff’s theory of an African ‘internal frontier’, which accounts for the permanent process of colonization of interstitial spaces and the formation of a local political order structured around the idea of the so-called ‘first comers/founders’ and the late comers.⁵⁴ The pre-colonial social hierarchy in Bouna was divided between the royal family descendants from Bouna’s mythical founder, Bunkani, and the indigenous class who had no direct ties to the royal family. However, Jean-Louis Boutillier explains that everybody eventually identified themselves as ‘Koulango’ as the kingdom gradually eroded other previously autonomous local-level political formations that structured the social life of indigenous groups.⁵⁵

During colonial times, population mobility was also an essential tool in the politics of the internal frontier. The fighting between the army of Samory Toure and the French in the 1880s and 1890s, and the strategy of the French colonial administration to base development around Lobi migration from northern Côte d’Ivoire (Doropo or Téhini) and Burkina Faso, ultimately weakened the Koulango monarchy.⁵⁶ Similar policies continued under the post-colonial government. The Koulango authorities had issues with the state policies, considering that the mass migration of the Lobi into the Bounkani region and their occupation of land in rural areas took place without their formal consent and generally weakened their authority over the land.

Another important episode in the politics of the internal frontier was a similar strategy used by the government of Côte d’Ivoire to encourage Fulbe migration following the 1973 Sahelian drought. The government encouraged the migration of these Fulbe herders as it would help the state to achieve its new goal of developing national meat production⁵⁷ through pastoral development programmes.⁵⁸

This policy led to a chieftaincy conflict between the Koulango and the Lobi. The Lobi consider that their rights as ‘non-indigenous’ are neglected in situations of conflict with Fulbe herders over land use. In the eyes of some members of the Lobi community, the heart of the problem is that the Koulango elites have granted access to land to both Lobi farmers and Fulbe herders.⁵⁹ This double land transaction is symptomatic of the conflicts that take shape both around livestock farming but also in terms of contested authorities.

The second phase of the internal frontier model started with the death of the first president of Côte d’Ivoire, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, in 1993, which marked a significant turning point in the way that the internal frontier operates in Côte d’Ivoire. The development model, which led to the ‘Ivorian economic miracle’ between 1960 and 1980, was based on a social contract between migrant planters (and, to a lesser extent, herders) and the state.⁶⁰ The exhaustion of the Ivorian development model, marked by a fall in cocoa prices at the end of the 1970s, the growing indebtedness of the state, and the drying up of sources of urban employment changed the politics of the internal frontier in that the model was increasingly questioned by local landowners.

The conditions under which foreigners in general, and the Fulbe in particular, live in Côte d’Ivoire deteriorated dramatically after Houphouët-Boigny’s death. The concept of ‘Ivoirité’, which seeks to distinguish between persons of Ivorian descent and recent migrants, was introduced by the new president, Henri Konan Bédié. One lasting impact of the ‘Ivoirité’ concept has been the Ivorian political scene’s regionalization and ‘ethnicisation’.⁶¹ Support for anti-Fulbe sentiments and actions also came from a large section of the northern elite, including students, civil servants, and merchants, many of whom strongly resented the Ivorian policy of providing infrastructure and credit to Fulbe pastoralists rather than supporting local cattle production.⁶²

Debates and changes around land tenure at the government level further complicated local dynamics. The 1998 Land Act overturned a status quo in which the government enforced the principle that working the land (mise en valeur) was the origin of land use rights.⁶³ The act was widely interpreted as mandating the registration of all unregistered rural land (approximately 98 percent of the national territory) in the name of autochthonous owners within 10 years.⁶⁴

The Land Act is very contentious, which, in some ways, allowed for a large degree of flexibility at the local level. In Bounkani, like in many other regions, some traditional village chiefs and other notables have, for example, allowed the installation of large breeders and their herdsmen in exchange for payments, without consultation with farmers and other members of local communities for the planning of land use. This is based on a long history of corruption in controlling pastoral resources.⁶⁵ In Bouna and the surrounding area, the problem is even more complex in that it is not just about the farmer–herder relationship, but also the relationship between the Koulango landowners and the farmers, who are typically Lobi. In an interview, the Koulango King accused the Lobi of not respecting the 1998 Land Act nor customary agreements by farming in an ‘anarchic fashion’ (without consent from land owners).⁶⁶

The third phase of the internal frontier model was the politico-military crises (2002–2011), which again changed the dynamics between local authorities, farmers, herders, and landowners. The tax system put in place by the rebel group FN aggravated the relationship between the Lobi and Koulango in Bouna because many Lobi believed that the rebels specifically targeted their group for payment. Some of the Lobi youth, therefore, armed themselves and attacked various FN checkpoints, which led to a violent response from the armed forces.⁶⁷ The Fulbe, on the other hand, had a different experience. While the first year of the crisis (2002) seriously hampered transhumance and the commercial transport of livestock, the rebellion ultimately enabled the Fulbe to improve their access to rangelands as the FN allowed them to move cattle from one rebel zone to another during transhumance.⁶⁸ Thomas Bassett argues that this new system was favourable for the herders because they gained access to zones that were previously considered as off-limits due to farmer hostility, and they had less concern about farmer retaliation as farmers feared rebel soldiers’ retaliation.⁶⁹

Finally, the fourth phase of the internal frontier model is the current phase. The post-2011 political environment is characterized by plural and contradicting forms of authority with respect to governance, power, and land access. In this environment, the Lobi have established alternative governance systems to rival the Koulango monarchy. The continued efforts of some members of the Lobi community to appoint a unified customary leadership, to be recognized by the National Chamber of Kings and Traditional Chiefs, and more recently to build a palace in Bouna to serve as a command base, only exacerbated the rivalry between the Koulango and the Lobi.⁷⁰ The Koulango king and the state prefect for Bouna decided to appoint a new chief for the Lobi in 2019, which is not recognized by the Lobi community.⁷¹ This local understanding of the conflict around the plural and contradicting forms of authority with respect to governance, power, and access to the land needs to be situated within the broader structural dynamics of the state policy with respect to land governance and ethnic politics.

This high level of hybridization reflects how the frontier state is in mutation.⁷² The current frontier state model is based on a contradictory philosophy between, on the one hand, a reconstruction policy devoted to a policy of ‘economic emergence’, with the promotion of the market and freely transferable land property rights on the one hand and, on the other, the idea of autochthony still reflected in various laws, including the 1998 Land Act.⁷³ The 2016 Constitution enshrines this contradiction between these economic policies and the exclusion of non-Ivorian natural and legal persons from private property and the recognition of the legitimacy of the courts specific to traditional (indigenous) chiefdoms to intervene in the settlement of land disputes. The Constitution is built on this paradoxical form of legal pluralism.⁷⁴

Central to the state ambiguity is its inability to produce a new rural land policy since the contestations around the 1998 Land Act.⁷⁵ The current government has failed to address the question, renewing the Law in 2013 and again formalizing it through the 2016 Constitution,⁷⁶ just providing technical adjustments and extending the period for recognizing customary rights by 10 years.⁷⁷ However, the 2016 Constitution has provided a framework, and Côte d’Ivoire is thus preparing to use international funding to relaunch the systematic private certification of all land at the national level (registration will only occur later as much more sensitive in that it is related to the nationality criteria), despite the risks of social destabilization. However, this legislation has been stalled by the Ministry of Agriculture against the donor’s insistence to accelerate the land reform.⁷⁸

These ambiguities around land tenure and local governance are important to understand the 2016 conflict in Bouna and its relationship to a frontier state in mutation. The demarcation of land and mechanisms for conflict resolution are two ways, in particular, to understand the 2016 conflict as part of broader structural tensions in the internal frontier that shapes farmer–herder relationships.

First, the state is establishing the demarcation of land and village areas in Bouna with the Agence Foncière Rurale (Rural Land Agency) (AFOR). This government’s mission is to negotiate land agreements between communities to demarcate village lands in the different regions of Côte d’Ivoire. Bouna is part of one of the initial regions hosting this project. In this locality, it was a question of starting from the base of the existing settlements to delimit the associated lands. According to a local politician in the region, the demarcation of village lands has created such significant tensions in Bouna between civil servants and villagers and between villagers themselves—especially between the Koulango and the Lobi—that the project was halted in the region,⁷⁹ as illustrated in the verbatim below:

We met with AFOR to ask for it to be better organised to avoid causing frustration. There were meetings with the communities, which led to the initiative of a memorandum. This memorandum was to facilitate the implementation of the process. Around this memorandum, we agreed on the fact that the territories which exist, the villages which exist, created by the decrees which created the sub-prefectures and the departments of the region should exist. They shouldn’t go away. Some of us wanted Koulango camps to be villages and all Lobi villages around to be grouped with camps. While all Lobi villages are generally larger and more expansive than encampments, they don’t want it to be Lobi villages. The Lobi make up at least 60% of the population. This fact cannot be denied. But at the signing of the memorandum, our Koulango brothers refused to sign because they consider themselves to be wronged.⁸⁰

The defiance of the Lobi elite towards the Koulango leadership was interpreted as an act of inter-community defiance. Because of the process of delimiting village territories, those in Lobi camps that have acquired village status feel that they are no longer accountable to the Koulango host villages, consistent with Brottem⁸¹ and Idelman’s⁸² arguments on the internal frontier and geographic jurisdiction discussed in the previous section. Lobi feel this new status strengthens their rights to use the land that they occupy and gives them the right to create an administration to govern the land:

There is another problem that is coming up and that we must be careful about. There are Lobi leaders who go from village to village to tell their relatives that they are no longer accountable to the Koulangos. They are just as much landowners as they [the Koulango] are. They can thus settle and install people themselves without the agreement of the Koulango.⁸³

The demarcation of land and village areas highlights the competition over authority and land control in line with the long-established contradictory norms and practices of the frontier state. The recurrent importance of the norm of autochthony in the local and national political game⁸⁴ is also reflected in the localized resurgence of violent conflicts between ethnic groups claiming the privilege of autochthony, in this case the Koulango vis-à-vis the Lobi. This is not limited to Bouna and reflects the bigger issue of land and autochthony (although most analyses on land and autochthony focus on the Western region of Côte d’Ivoire rather than the Northern one apart from Bassett 2017, who focuses on Katiali⁸⁵).

This politics of autochthony, which must be understood as a practical norm of real governance and a key operator of state practice and mobilization,⁸⁶ also creates tensions between Lobi and Koulango landowners and herders, and the marginalization and stigmatization of specific communities, in this case the Fulbe community. ‘Many of us were born here, grew up here, went to school here, got married here; did everything here. We know nowhere else but here. Many of us even have Ivorian nationality. But they continue to call us flatchê (Peulh [Fulbe] man); to consider us like foreigners. It is stigmatising. It is revolting.’⁸⁷

Additionally, state conflict resolution mechanisms and processes also create situations of ambiguity and hybridization. The 2016 State Law No. 2016-413, on transhumance and the movement of livestock, contains several provisions, in particular, the modalities of relations between farmers and herders and the management of conflicts. This law provides for the compensation of crops based on estimates by the services of the Ministry of Agriculture in the event of destruction and sets the various terms associated with the types of crops. However, levels of compensation set by the state cannot repair all the damage suffered. The system is currently penalizing the farmers with no recourse to solve the conflict, especially given that decisions are usually appealed and create further costs. A farmer described the situation as follows:

The farmer, who is the victim is told when he goes to complain, to go and file a complaint. When the complaint is filed and judged receivable, the breeder is then ordered to pay 200,000 CFA Franc to the farmer. (…) Some breeders, who have the means, are appealing arbitration decisions and go to the higher courts in Abidjan. This prevents farmers, who generally have little means, of getting there. (…) Then, finally, the farmer abandons the legal action and decides to settle his accounts directly with the breeders in the field.⁸⁸

In the end, an alternative informal system of compensation is being developed. A farmer reported the following: ‘Some time ago, a herder came to offer me money for his oxen to graze in my field because those oxen were starving. He added that even if these oxen had entered my field without my agreement, the amount he offered me would have been higher than the amount that the authorities were going to impose on him.’⁸⁹

Both examples illustrate the ambiguity of the state with respect to land ownership, geographical jurisdiction, and financial compensation, which sends mixed and uncertain signals to the various groups in Bouna. It shows how the 2016 conflict is a complex and multi-faceted conflict that goes beyond this farmer/herder dichotomy. This dichotomy is also unhelpful as it hides a key actor, namely the state, in mediating these internal frontier dynamics.

Conclusion

This article has analysed the 2016 conflict in Bouna to show the long-term structural dynamics with respect to the politics of the frontier state. This conflict, we argue, cannot be reduced simply to a farmer–herder conflict, nor to the idea that it was just about the competition between two ethnic groups over scarce resources. Our analysis shows how this complex and multidimensional conflict must instead consider the role of the state. The 2016 crisis is the result of a set of long-term ecological, economic, and political drivers, setting up a reconfiguration of the local social order through the redrawing of the politico-administrative boundaries regarding territory, natural resources, ethnicity, and citizenship. Other crises, ranging from the declining state investment in livestock farming to the decreasing global price of cotton to the political-military crisis in Côte d’Ivoire, have also accelerated changes in the local social order.

While it remains true that the Ivorian state has had a long history of marginalizing the ‘north’ and transhumant herders in general, the state is far from being absent in shaping the local social order. The state’s legal pluralism around autochthony and its changing, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory policies around land tenure are fundamental to understanding this conflict.

By bringing together several literature studies that have grown in relative isolation from one another (farmer–herder conflict, peasant studies, and the frontier state), this article analysed how the state’s economic and migratory policy, its delimitation programmes, and its biased judicial mechanisms towards farmer–herder conflicts are reflective of the competition over authority and land control in line with the long-established contradictory norms and practices of the frontier state in Côte d’Ivoire. Our findings suggest further avenues for situating localized hybrid conflicts within broader historical and structural dynamics, as well as further conceptualizing of the frontier, going beyond conventional notions of the frontier as the limit of settlement or as a space of statelessness, anarchy, or disorder.⁹⁰ Thinking about the internal frontier allows us to develop the idea of the relational spaces constituting the frontier as contact zones between two or more social orders, and the particular assumptions about the mutual constitution of centre and periphery, sovereignty and citizenship, circulation and security, and identity and difference.⁹¹

Appendix

Interviews

King adviser, Bouna, 23 December 2020.

Lobi District chief, Bouna, 23 December 2020

GIZ programme manager, Abidjan, 27 January 2023

R4P manager, Abidjan, 2 February 2022

Traditional chief, Assom 1, 24 December 2020

Political elite, from Bouna, based in Abidjan, 10 May 2021

Local politician, Abidjan, 13 May 2021

Farmer 1, Sotité Douô, 19 August 2021

Farmer 2, Sotité Douhô, 18 August 2021

Farmer 3, Assoum 1, 24 December 2020

Farmer 4, Sotité Douô, 19 August 2021

Fulbe chief, Sotité Douhô, 18 August 2021

Footnotes

Author notes