Climate Insecurity as Political Production: Environmental Stress, Governance Failure, and Pastoralist-Farmer Violence in the Horn of Africa

This article develops politically produced climate insecurity as an analytical lens for understanding how environmental stress becomes violent through governance failure, territorial politics, and livelihood disruption. Rather than treating the topic as a descriptive case note, the manuscript positions climate security in the horn of africa: environmental stress, governance failure, and the political production of pastoralist–farmer violence within wider debates on African political order, state formation, and institutional design. The paper is anchored in Jonglei, Karamoja, and Borena / the Somali Region, and it uses the topic brief's theoretical architecture to ask three linked questions: through what causal pathways does declining rainfall and shrinking pastoral territory produce inter-community violence in jonglei, karamoja, and the somali region and what is the relative weight of environmental versus governance and economic factors? How do state responses to pastoralist–farmer conflict disarmament campaigns, administrative boundary decisions, security force deployment shape conflict dynamics more significantly than the environmental trigger itself? What are the implications of climate security framing for policy does it produce more effective conflict prevention or does it depoliticise conflict in ways that serve elite interests and deflect accountability? Methodologically, the article translates the proposed design into a publication-ready strategy built around geospatial analysis correlating chirps rainfall data with acled conflict events in the horn 2000–2023; subnational comparison of jonglei (south sudan), karamoja (uganda), and borena (ethiopia); political ecology fieldwork including pastoralist and farmer community interviews; policy analysis of igad climate