Theorising the onset of communal conflicts in Northern Ghana

ABSTRACT Communal conflicts present a severe threat to human security, resulting in the death of thousands of people every year. The communal conflict in Dagbon in the Northern Region of Ghana, for instance, led to the murder of the King of Dagbon and 40 other people. This conflict has attracted debates which are centred around attempts to explain its onset. But the understanding of this phenomenon is still incomplete. In particular, there is inadequate detailed information about what actually started the conflict. This article aims to fill this knowledge gap by engaging the greed-grievance theories to comprehensively understand the conflict’s onset. This article contributes to the theoretical understanding of communal conflicts, which is of both scholarly and policy importance. Navigating insights from theoretical literature and content analysis of secondary data, it finds that perceived injustice and land wealth were the motivating factors in the onset of the conflict in Dagbon in 2002.