Résumé
This paper analyses the current proliferation of violent conflict in the Sahel in the light of the disruption of peasant moral economies and agriculture-pastoralism relations under the impact of contemporary public policies and development dynamics. Since the early 2010s, the insurrectional wave that has swept through the central Sahel has been mainly explained in terms of increased competition in contexts of widespread poverty and degraded environments, leading to calls for more development intervention understood as a mean for pacification through the improvement of living conditions.This framing overlooks the specificities of public policies implemented in rural Sahel, its historical and contemporary transnational and extroverted character, and its effects on local politics in terms of power, wealth and class dynamics that lies beyond recurring stereotypical narratives of farmer-herder, scarcity related, ethnic conflicts. The first part of the paper combines long-term fieldwork and personal experience with scientific literature and argues that development rationales of Sahelian drylands as resource-scarce, degradation-prone environments have undermined local forms of environmental socialisation whose pastoralism is illustrative. Contrary to the conceptual frame of development where resources are understood as autonomous objects, here resources are the outcome of interactions between different human, animal and vegetal communities, and socio-political institutions allowing for multiple, flexible and negotiated access to heterogenous, highly variable environments. Interventions aimed at stabilising and artificialising production systems such as irrigation, pastoral water development, sedentarisation, etc. have induced problematic forms of specialisation and fragmentation of spaces and livelihoods, contributing to “fix” and erode both socio-environmental and socio-political “solidarities” and its cooperative potential. The second part of the paper draws on a research conducted in Burkina Faso (2019-2021) and on scientific literature to provide examples of how the escalating violence enroots in the disruption of public and customary institutions governing agriculture-pastoralism interactions in a context of saturation of space by the expansion of food and cash crops, mining, agribusiness and nature conservation activities. While deepening the historical marginalisation of pastoralists vis-à-vis the local and national State, these trends have emphasised patterns of mobility, both with and without livestock, in a increasingly dangerous and constraint socio-political environment.