The relationship between pastoral nomads and sedentary farmers in the savannah dry-lands of Africa has often been depicted as one of ‘polarized opposition’ between typical ‘herders’ and typical ‘farmers’. However, in reality one seldom finds communities representing such exact types. The interaction between pastoralists and farmers is so complex that it cannot be adequately understood by using a simple herder/farmer dichotomy. Depending on varying situations such interaction can involve cooperation and complementarities and/or competition and conflict.

Fredrik Barth has suggested three alternative ways to analyse nomadsedentary relations in the Middle East: understanding nomadic societies in their relations to their total environment, as an outcome of their interconnectedness with sedentary peoples and as a prerequisite for their very emergence and persistence, or by focusing on the total activities of a region (and not on two kinds of society). Regarding this last approach Barth states: ‘What I am proposing, then, so as to bring nomadic and sedentary populations into a common analytic framework and understand the forms and variations in the relationships between them is (a) to look at them as participants in a common regional economy, (b) to understand the character of the productive regimes that each is associated with, and (c) to analyze the class relationship between them’ (Barth 1973: 11−17).

Following Barth, Babiker (2001) has argued that the focus on the herder/farmer distinction would render the comprehension of complexity and the dynamics of resource competition rather inadequate. He gives two important reasons for objecting to the dichotomous approach. The first reason is that it ignores the importance of scale and multiplicity of analytical levels, on which claims of access and control of resources are usually contested, negotiated and settled (e.g. household, village, region and nation). The second reason is that the approach disregards the importance of processes of social differentiation in the dynamics of resource competition and conflict. I agree that this is a more sensible approach to understanding the dynamics of resource-based conflicts in African dry-land savannah of which Sudan’s central regions are the best example.