Concerns about poaching and trafficking have led conservationists to seek urgent responses to tackle the impact on wildlife. One possible solution is the militarisation of conservation, which holds potentially far-reaching consequences. It is important to engage critically with the militarisation of conservation, including identifying and reflecting on the problems it produces for wildlife, for people living with wildlife and for those tasked with implementing militarised strategies. This Perspectives piece is a first step towards synthesising the main themes in emerging critiques of militarised conservation. We identify five major themes: first, the importance of understanding how poaching is defined; second, understanding the ways that local communities experience militarised conservation; third, the experiences of rangers; fourth, how the militarisation of conservation can contribute to violence where conservation operates in the context of armed conflict; and finally how it fits in with and reflects wider political economic dynamics. Ultimately, we suggest that failure to engage more critically with militarisation risks making things worse for the people involved and lead to poor conservation outcomes in the long run.

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Conservation organizations are increasingly using tourism and social media to raise funds and support for anti-poaching interventions. This article examines how these strategies represent poaching and the responses that are ostensibly needed to disrupt it. To do so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in the rhino poaching hotspot of the Mozambique-South Africa borderlands and analyze social media and tourism campaigns from organizations in the area. These campaigns emphasize violently decimated wildlife, threatened rangers, and the subsequent need for a securitized conservation. They obscure or neglect the social relations influencing poaching and related violence, other conservation priorities, and the implications of hardline enforcement measures and militarized anti-poaching practices. The strategic ways in which poaching is made legible and consumable to a broad audience and how this shapes conservation practice constitutes what I call anti-poaching's politics of (in)visibility. I emphasize how this politics and its simplistic representations of poaching and solutions may undermine the long-term sustainability of conservation efforts in two ways. First, antipoaching's politics of (in)visibility vitalizes a militarized response, leading to negative social implications that alienate people adjacent protected areas. Second, it jeopardizes the mundane ecological management activities vital to effective conservation. Understanding antipoaching's politics of (in)visibility thus contributes to a more robust political-ecology of antipoaching specifically, and of conservation in the current context of heightened commercial poaching and efforts to disrupt it more generally. The article ends with a discussion of how a politics of visibility might be harnessed for a more sustainable approach to the poaching problematic.

Overexploitation is a key driver of biodiversity loss but the relationship between the use and trade of species and conservation outcomes is not always straightforward. Accurately characterizing wildlife trade and understanding the impact it has on wildlife populations are therefore critical to evaluating the potential threat trade poses to species and informing local to international policy responses. However, a review of recent research that uses wildlife and trade-related databases to investigate these topics highlights three relatively widespread issues: (1) mischaracterization of the threat that trade poses to certain species or groups, (2) misinterpretation of wildlife trade data (and illegal trade data in particular), resulting in the mischaracterization of trade, and (3) misrepresentation of international policy processes and instruments. This is concerning because these studies may unwittingly misinform policymaking to the detriment of conservation, for example by undermining positive outcomes for species and people along wildlife supply chains. Moreover, these issues demonstrate flaws in the peer-review process. As wildlife trade articles published in peer-reviewed journals can be highly influential, we propose ways for authors, journal editors, database managers, and policymakers to identify, understand, and avoid these issues as we all work towards more sustainable futures.

In acknowledgement that the largely (para)militarized approach to anti-poaching has its limitations, alternative approaches to conservation law enforcement are being sought. One alternative focuses on including people from local communities in anti-poaching, what we call inclusive anti-poaching. Using a case study of a community scout programme from southern Mozambique, located adjacent South Africa’s Kruger National Park, we examine the potential of a community scout initiative to move towards a more inclusive and sustainable approach to anti-poaching and conservation. While highlighting its challenges and potential drawbacks, we argue that including local people into conservation law enforcement efforts can help address poaching and problematic aspects of current anti-poaching measures. However, to be a genuine and sustainable alternative, community ranger programmes must be part of a broader shift towards developing local wildlife economies that benefits local communities as opposed to supporting pre-existing anti-poaching interventions.

This article advances the analytic of topography to account for vertical and horizontal dimensions of space, power, and the ways in which they articulate with biophysical and political-ecological dynamics to (re)-shape socio-spatial and socio-natural relations. While commonly used to refer to the horizontal, vertical, and environmental features of a particular landscape, social scientists use the language of topography to understand the connections between spaces, processes, and power dynamics. I combine these literal and metaphorical understandings of topography to examine how multiple dimensions of space and power coalesce to protect certain bodies, police others, and secure the space within each move. In response to increases in commercial poaching, for example, conservation-security actors are increasingly going aerial to mobilise the vertical as a dimension of space and power to protect wildlife, neutralise those who threaten them, and ultimately secure conservation areas below. Verticality thus becomes important as both an empirical and analytical phenomenon that matters for understanding shifting power dynamics in contexts where actors seek to secure space and resources from perceived threats. But, the vertical does not exist on its own. It is in the interaction of the horizontal, vertical, and political-ecological dynamics of protected areas that conservation-related power-geometries are altered. A topographical analysis results in a nuanced understanding of how the workings of power and related security practices and technologies work to (re-)shape human environment and territorial relations.