Misrepresenting livestock and crisis in the Horn: a response to Duffield and Stockton

Summary We use information from observation in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands and quantitative data on livestock exports from the Somali Horn of Africa to refute Duffield and Stockton’s argument that livestock exports from the Horn to the Persian Gulf states originate on the front lines of what they term the ‘permanent war’ in Somalia. Duffield and Stockton’s contribution to discussions of violence and capitalism offers a creative twist on Marxist theories of primitive accumulation. However, analysis of better-quality data demonstrates that their description of livestock capture and export in Somalia is delinked from current realities. Most importantly, their explanation reinscribes crisis narratives about the Horn by theorising armed groups as the only actors with effective agency in the region. We argue instead that a much broader range of actors are involved in Somalia’s livestock exports and that there are social and ecological shifts going on in the Horn’s rangelands that defy the simplistic description of armed actors pursuing ‘ecological strip mining’.