The following excerpt is from Razmig Keucheyan’s new book, Nature Is a Battlefield:Towards a Political Ecology(Polity Books, 2017)

Without doubt, ecological inequalities in general and, in particular, environmental racism, take on their most acute form in the postcolonial context. In a column published in the Washington Post in June 2007 the UN general secretary Ban Ki-Moon stated that the fighting in Darfur was linked to climatic pressures: “It is no accident,” he declared, “that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought.” Like all postcolonial conflicts, this war resulted from numerous intertwined factors, but Ban Ki-Moon was at least right to say that the ecology of the conflict is of decisive importance for understanding how it broke out and then went on to unfold. More precisely, we could say that political ecology provides the most adequate viewpoint for understanding the dynamic of the factors involved.

In recent years, the war in Darfur has been the object of a public awareness campaign such as few African conflicts have previously enjoyed. An international coalition called Save Darfur, bringing together dozens of churches and other organizations, has since 2004 campaigned for an end to the ‘genocide’ and for intervention by the international community. Co-founded by public figures like Elie Wiesel  and the ineffable George Clooney, the coalition’s French branch includes supporters such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and Bernard Kouchner. This conflict is usually presented as one opposing ‘Arabs’ to ‘Africans,’ with the former portrayed as Muslims having come from the North or from outside the country who commit the bulk of the abuses, as against the ‘Africans’ native to this region of Western Sudan covering approximately one-fifth of the country’s territory. The dividing line between the two groups is therefore essentially perceived as being ethnic and religious in character.