CFP AAG 2015, Chicago, April 21 – 25
Green Violence: Interrogating New Conflicts over Nature and Conservation
Organizers:
Bram Büscher, ISS / Wageningen University, buscher@iss.nl / bram.buscher@wur.nl
Libby Lunstrum, York University, lunstrum@yorku.ca
Maano Ramutsindela, University of Cape Town, maano.ramutsindela@uct.ac.za
Conservation has long had links to various forms of violence, from the forcible displacement of resident communities and related creation of “wilderness” to the deployment of environmental protection in the name of colonial state building. Over the last two decades, we have seen the pendulum swing away from ostensibly less exclusionary community-based conservation and back toward myriad forms of exclusionary and violent conservation tactics, leading to social conflict (Brashares et al., 2014). What is clear is that today we witness an intensification of the dovetailing of conservation—as both practice and body of thought—and violence, a phenomenon we here refer to as “green violence” (also see Büscher and Ramutsindela, Under Review) This emerges, for example, from responses to environmental crime such as commercial poaching (itself an increasingly violent economy), neoliberal conservation including the expansion of private conservation spaces and growing network of conservation actors, the consolidation of state sovereignty over conservation territories, and growing interest in conservation as a response to global climate change (see Beymer-Farris and Bassett, 2012; Büscher and Ramutsindela, Under Review; Duffy, 2014; Kelly, 2011; Lunstrum, 2014; Ojeda, 2012; Ybarra, 2012). This intensification is furthermore informed by new technologies of governance, information, and communication and immersed in complex global networks that traverse the legal and the illegal, the state and the extra-state.
This session seeks to (1) investigate the growing links between conservation and violence, (2) chart what is new with contemporary encounters and what is reminiscent of past forms of violence, and (3) enable the conceptualisation of these questions under the broad banner of “green violence.” We invite papers that offer detailed case-studies, theoretical perspectives, or a combination of the two. Possible topics include:
- the militarization/securitization of conservation;
- neoliberal conservation and dispossession;
- climate change mitigation (e.g., REDD+) and violence;
- environmental crime and varied responses;
- discursive constructions of conservation’s “enemies”;
- territorialization / the consolidation of sovereignty over green landscapes;
- conservation and border crossings/transgressions;
- criminalization of livelihood practices;
- new technologies of governance and violence (e.g., conservation drones);
- responses to green violence.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by October 15, 2014 to buscher@iss.nl, lunstrum@yorku.ca, and maano.ramutsindela@uct.ac.za.
We look forward to receiving your abstracts and seeing you in Chicago in April!
References
- Beymer-Farris, B.A., Bassett, T.J., 2012. The REDD menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania’s mangrove forests. Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions 22 (2), 332-341.
- Büscher, B., Ramutsindela, M., Under Review. Green Violence: Rhino Poaching and the War to Save Southern Africa’s Peace Parks. African Affairs.
- Duffy, R., 2014. Waging a war to save biodiversity: the rise of militarised conservation. International Affairs 819-34 (90), 4.
- Kelly, A.B., 2011. Conservation practice as primitive accumulation. The Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (4), 683-701.
- Lunstrum, E., 2014. Green militarization: Anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (4), 816-832.
- Ojeda, D., 2012. Green pretexts: Ecotourism, neoliberal conservation and land grabbing in Tayrona National Natural Park, Colombia. Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (2), 357-375.
- Ybarra, M., 2012. Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: Sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation. Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (2), 479-502.