Nomads and settled peoples clashed primarily because they needed the same land and water for fundamentally incompatible purposes. Farmers cleared grassland to grow crops, while herders needed that same grassland to feed their animals. This basic competition over how to use the earth’s surface created friction that repeated across centuries and continents, from the Mongolian steppe to the West African Sahel. But land was only the starting point. Military advantages, climate shocks, political structures, and broken economic relationships all fed into a cycle of tension that could escalate from uneasy coexistence to open warfare.
Competing Uses for the Same Land and Water
The most fundamental driver of conflict was straightforward: crops and livestock cannot share the same ground. When farming communities expanded their fields, they did so by clearing savanna, forest, and grassland that herders depended on. Research in the region around the W Biosphere Reserve in Benin found that cropland expansion was the direct driver of shrinking grazing area. Farmers plowed right up to riverbanks, ponds, and streams, cutting off the watering points that herders’ cattle relied on during the dry season. In that study, 78 out of 86 pastoralist respondents reported losing access to water sources because of farming encroachment.
This wasn’t just about acreage. Farmers were drawn to pastoral land precisely because years of cattle manure had enriched the soil, making it ideal for crops. Herders watched their best grazing zones get converted into fields fertilized by their own animals. Meanwhile, plowing near waterways accelerated siltation, causing ponds to dry up faster. The result was a shrinking, fragmented landscape where livestock routes were blocked and seasonal grazing patterns became impossible to maintain.
Climate Shocks Forced Movement
Nomadic peoples moved with the seasons under normal conditions, but climate disruptions could push entire populations into new territory. During the Little Ice Age, temperatures in the eastern and central Mongolian steppe dropped by 0.6 to 0.7°C in the 1550s. That small-sounding shift had serious consequences for grassland productivity. Between the 1590s and 1650s, grazing carrying capacity across various pastoral regions declined by 8% to 30% compared to the previous century’s average.
When the grass couldn’t support herds, nomadic groups had limited options: move south toward agricultural societies, compete with other nomadic groups for what remained, or starve. The Mongolian Left Wing tribes migrated southward during this period, increasing their interactions (and tensions) with agrarian communities along the frontier. This pattern repeated in different forms across history. Drought, cold snaps, or desertification didn’t just inconvenience nomads. These events made migration a survival necessity, and that migration brought them into direct competition with settled populations who saw them as invaders.
Raiding, Trading, and Tribute
The economic relationship between nomadic and settled peoples was complicated, often involving trade and violence simultaneously. Nomadic societies typically produced meat, leather, wool, and horses but lacked grain, metals, textiles, and manufactured goods. They could get these through peaceful trade, but the threat of force was always present in the background. As one analysis of large empire formation put it, nomadic political organizations had to draw resources from agrarian societies “by robbing the farmers, by extorting tribute from agrarian states, or by controlling trade routes.”
The Crimean Khanate illustrates how raiding and trading weren’t opposites but could reinforce each other. Port cities like Caffa provided a ready market for captured slaves, which created additional incentives for raiding settled communities. The Comanche on the southern Plains developed a similar system: they raided settlements in Texas and northern Mexico for goods and captives, then traded with communities in New Mexico. These weren’t chaotic acts of random violence. They were economic strategies built around the reality that nomadic groups needed agricultural products they couldn’t produce themselves.
Tribute systems formalized this dynamic. Some settled communities paid regular goods to nomadic groups in exchange for being left alone. The Viking danegeld is a well-known example: coastal communities in the British Isles made scheduled payments to avoid unpredictable raids. When tribute payments broke down, whether because a settled state refused to pay, collapsed economically, or decided to fight back, raiding resumed.
Military Advantages of Nomadic Life
Nomadic societies held several military advantages that made conflict a viable and often successful strategy. They could mobilize a larger percentage of their population for warfare than settled societies could. Nearly every adult male (and in some cultures, women) rode and fought, while agricultural states had to leave most of their population behind to tend crops.
Nomads were skilled riders from childhood, mounted on hardy horse breeds capable of covering enormous distances. They didn’t need supply trains because they could survive off their herds, drinking mare’s milk and eating dried meat while on the move. Settled armies, by contrast, required wagons of food, established camps, and reliable supply lines. This logistical freedom let nomadic forces strike quickly, retreat into steppe or desert terrain that farming armies couldn’t follow them into, and choose when and where to fight.
Settled peoples responded by building massive defensive systems. The Parthian Empire constructed a network of outposts and fortresses in the Gorgan region specifically to protect against raids by nomadic tribes. The Seleucids adapted Greek military architecture to create new categories of defensive structures designed to counter Central Asian nomadic incursions. The Great Wall of China served a similar purpose. These fortifications are themselves evidence of how persistent and serious the military threat was. You don’t build walls stretching hundreds of miles unless raiding is a constant, existential problem.
Social Cohesion as a Weapon
The 14th-century North African scholar Ibn Khaldun developed one of the most influential explanations for why nomadic groups repeatedly conquered settled ones. His key concept, asabiyyah (roughly translated as group solidarity or social cohesion), described the intense bonds of loyalty that held nomadic tribes together. In his framework, the harsh conditions of nomadic life forced tight cooperation. Defense of the tribe depended on recognized warriors united by kinship and shared identity. Every member had collective responsibility for the group’s survival.
Settled urban populations, by contrast, outsourced their security to rulers, governors, and hired soldiers. They didn’t need the same fierce tribal loyalty because the state handled protection. This made them individually comfortable but collectively weaker. Ibn Khaldun argued that nomadic groups with strong asabiyyah would periodically sweep in and seize power from settled societies whose solidarity had softened through generations of urban life. The conquerors would then settle down themselves, gradually lose their own cohesion over three or four generations, and eventually fall to a new wave of nomads with stronger bonds. He saw this as a recurring cycle rather than a one-time event.
Bias, Marginalization, and Modern Parallels
These conflicts didn’t end in ancient history. In the contemporary Sahel region of West Africa, clashes between pastoralist Fulbe communities and farming populations continue, driven by an interconnected web of climate change, desertification, population growth, weapons proliferation, and political marginalization. But framing these as simple “farmer-herder conflicts” obscures what’s actually happening.
West African governments have systematically marginalized pastoralist communities. Coastal states like Benin and Ghana view mobile herding as archaic and push sedentarization policies, promoting ranching systems despite evidence that pastoralism is more viable in arid environments. Fulbe communities face denial of basic rights including voting and political representation. Biased judicial institutions add to their exclusion. Stereotypes portraying them as criminals, outsiders, and violent extremists are so deeply ingrained that non-Fulbe criminals sometimes imitate Fulbe appearance to deflect blame.
The deeper pattern is familiar across millennia: settled, state-building societies tend to view nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples as threats to be controlled, contained, or forcibly settled. Policies designed around farming interests treat mobile herding as a problem to be eliminated rather than a legitimate way of using land. When pastoralists lose access to grazing routes, water, and political voice simultaneously, conflict becomes almost inevitable, not because of any inherent hostility between lifestyles, but because one group’s needs are being systematically ignored in favor of the other’s.