Certainly.
Initially, in the first Darfur conflict, which was around 2003 or so, what was thought to be one of the primary drivers of that conflict was climate change, which drove a lot of the nomadic population south from the Sahara into central and southern Darfur. They interacted with the farming population over grazing resources.
Previously, there was a lot of north-south movement seasonally by the nomadic population. They would come down into the farming areas using corridors that everybody knew about and they would interact with the farming population. There were agreements between the two with regard to when they would enter the agricultural areas and graze and when they would not. That was fairly resilient up until the time when the Sudanese government decided to change things and favour the nomadic population. Now they could enter the farming areas anywhere they wanted, ignore the previous rules, the governance structures and the customary land rights restrictions that were there, and do what they wanted. That really aggravated, in an earlier way, the ongoing conflict.
That's a tough one to solve. It's difficult to get back to a situation where everybody knows the rules and you can co-operate on coming and going.
It does resonate today, though, in terms of civil society. There is a high value there. The Sudanese civil society is robust. We saw in 2009, out of that UN effort, many of what we call “mini peace accords” between one constituency and others, with constituencies supporting opposite sides in the conflict. They know each other. The constituency of the RSF knows who the constituency of the farming population is. They live amongst each other. They have descendants and relatives, so they would stitch together a small peace accord amongst themselves. There would be commerce back and forth, etc., and they would agree to these things.
Once we saw one, we started to ask where else they were. They were, in fact, sprinkled around the area.
Supporting that would be an interesting effort. There's a lot of capacity internationally that has direct access to those constituencies on the ground. That could actually be used.
With the civil society there that actually belongs to opposite constituencies in this conflict, you could, from the outside, ask what they need. More importantly, you could actually ask them what they have for us, such as evidence of what they're witnessing getting to the outside. It could be proposals for what would they suggest in terms of an on-the-ground, civil society effort involving women and others to stitch together these small-scale, constituency mini accords where the constituencies are on the opposite sides of the conflict.
That's a sort of bottom-up effort that can be done. You'd have to pair that with top-down sanctioning of actual combatants that are active on the ground.