Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Land Tenure and Conflict Dynamics in Pastoral Areas of Southern Ethiopia

今天，非洲畜牧业正在经历一系列重要的社会变化，这些变化往往是由新的土地和市场相关政策造成的。本研究考察了集中的国家政策干预如何影响埃塞俄比亚南部古吉-奥罗莫人的牧民生计，重点关注政策干预、地方土地权属制度以及社区之间和社区内部的资源冲突。将采用不同的定性和定量方法相结合，以便全面深入地了解政策对该地区生计战略、土地权属制度和冲突的影响。该项目将有助于了解如何在不同文化背景下解决冲突，并将更广泛地应用于社区内部和社区之间预防冲突的相关政策。它还将解决国际机构（包括美国政府）和政策制定者对非洲长期贫困及其与内战关系日益增长的担忧。这些研究成果将在了解贫困社区冲突的原因以及如何通过改进发展政策和项目来预防冲突方面具有很强的应用价值。通过了解地方资源获取战略和规则如何以政策干预的形式与更广泛的权力结构相互作用，该研究将指出预防冲突的可能途径。

African pastoralism today is undergoing a series of important social changes that often result from new land and market-related policies. This study examines how centralized state policy interventions affect the pastoral livelihood of the Guji-Oromo of southern Ethiopia, by focusing on policy interventions, local land tenure systems, and resource-based conflicts between and within communities. Combinations of different qualitative and quantitative methods will be employed to enable a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of policy impacts on livelihood strategies, land tenure systems, and conflicts in the region. The project will contribute to understandings of how conflicts are resolved in diverse cultural settings and will have a broader application to policies related to conflict prevention within and between communities. It will also address growing concerns among international bodies (including the US government) and policy makers regarding chronic poverty in Africa and its relationship to civil war. The research outputs will have strong applications for understanding the causes of conflict in impoverished communities and how they might be prevented through improved development policies and programs. By understanding how local resource access strategies and rules interact with broader power structures in the form of policy interventions, the study will point to possible avenues of conflict prevention.