In contemporary Sudan, environmental issues overlap with a number of drivers of conflict in which local, national, and international actors are involved. These are multilayered dynamics related to the marginalisation of community arrangements governing access to natural resources, the delegitimisation of local authorities, and the impact of national and international policies that have exacerbated the expropriation and dispossession of populations. A biased understanding has depoliticised competition over key resources by equating environmental issues with “tribal” or “ethnic” conflicts, thereby failing to acknowledge the local history of natural resource management and access. Darfur is an emblematic case of the political dynamics behind environmental conflicts. The media discourse on Darfur’s environmental crisis has concealed the fact that ecological dynamics such as the degradation of grazing areas are closely related to the marginalisation of customary land rights as part of the Islamist regime’s economic policies, and the expropriation of resources that are crucial to local agro-pastoral economies.