Green Militarization: Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of Kruger National Park

Abstract

Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use of military and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation efforts. I introduce this concept, first, as a call for more sustained scholarly investigation into the militarization of conservation practice. More modestly, the article offers its own contribution to this end by turning to South Africa's Kruger National Park, the world's most concentrated site of commercial rhino poaching. Focusing on the state's multilayered and increasingly lethal militarized response to what is itself a highly militarized practice, I illustrate how the spatial qualities of protected areas matter immensely for the convergence of conservation and militarization and the concrete forms this convergence takes. For Kruger, these include its status as a national park framed by a semiporous international border and its expansive, often dense terrain. Steering clear of spatial determinism, I equally show how spatial contours authorize militarization only once they articulate with particular assumptions and values; for Kruger these amount to political-ecological values regarding the nation-state, its sovereignty, and its natural heritage. The result is an intensifying interlocking of conservation and militarization that frequently produces unforeseen consequences.

The militarization of anti-poaching: undermining long term goals?

“…Poaching has been used as a financial underpinning for conflicts across Sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda in the 1970s and 1980s, Angola and Mozambique in the 1980s, the Great Lakes region since 1996, and the Central African Republic and its neighbours more recently (Ellis 1994;Humphreys & Smith 2011). Solutions to poaching must engage with issues of broader regional stability and the wider political context (Milburn 2012;Lunstrum 2014).…”

Accumulation by securitization: Commercial poaching, neoliberal conservation, and the creation of new wildlife frontiers

“…Following insights from security studies, the problems of poaching and threats to wildlife conservation thus become Òsecuritized, treated as security issues,Ó through speech-acts, policies, and practices (Williams, 2003, 513). Such speech acts also frame poachers as the enemy in the global war for biodiversity (Duffy, 2014;Neumann, 2004) and equally the enemy of the nation-state and its natural resources (Lunstrum, 2014). This reframing of conservation and poaching can lead to Òrepressive, coercive and violent practicesÓ (Duffy, 2014, 833) including the state-sanctioned killing of poachers (Humphreys and Smith, 2014;Lunstrum, 2014;Neumann, 2004).…”

“…Such speech acts also frame poachers as the enemy in the global war for biodiversity (Duffy, 2014;Neumann, 2004) and equally the enemy of the nation-state and its natural resources (Lunstrum, 2014). This reframing of conservation and poaching can lead to Òrepressive, coercive and violent practicesÓ (Duffy, 2014, 833) including the state-sanctioned killing of poachers (Humphreys and Smith, 2014;Lunstrum, 2014;Neumann, 2004). The militarization of conservation is further facilitated by the expansion of security actors within conservation practice, often including national armies and at times soldiers for hire (Cavanagh et al, 2015;Devine, 2014;Lombard, 2012;Lunstrum, 2014;Ybarra, 2012).…”

“…A young but growing body of critical conservation scholarship has begun to examine the securitization of conservation space and conservation practice itself (Cavanagh et al, 2015;Devine, 2014;Duffy, 2014;Duffy, this issue;Humphreys, 2012;Humphreys and Smith, 2014;Lombard, this issue;Lunstrum, 2014;Ojeda, 2012;Peluso and Vandergeest, 2011;Ybarra, 2012). Of particular concern is the militarization of conservation practice in response to commercial poaching.…”

“…This reframing of conservation and poaching can lead to Òrepressive, coercive and violent practicesÓ (Duffy, 2014, 833) including the state-sanctioned killing of poachers (Humphreys and Smith, 2014;Lunstrum, 2014;Neumann, 2004). The militarization of conservation is further facilitated by the expansion of security actors within conservation practice, often including national armies and at times soldiers for hire (Cavanagh et al, 2015;Devine, 2014;Lombard, 2012;Lunstrum, 2014;Ybarra, 2012). In fact, in post-conflict settings, militaries have at times reinvented themselves and their legitimacy by putting their skills to use as anti-poaching and broader conservation enforcers (Devine, 2014;Lunstrum, 2014;Ybarra, 2012).…”