Policing the wilderness: A descriptive study of wildlife conservation officers in South Africa

Warchol, Greg; Kapla, Dale

doi:10.1080/01924036.2012.669911

Cited by 37 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Although the enforcement of conservation laws spans many scales from the local to the international, this article focuses on formal spaces of conservation, commonly referred to as protected areas. These are the spaces where rangers and others enforce conservation law and act as the first line of protection for wildlife and conservation territory (also see Hilborn et al 2006;Warchol and Kapla 2012;Moreto and Matusiak 2017). Put another way, rangers police and defend the fortress of conservation and the resources within it.…”

Section: Researching Conservation Law Enforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conservation Law Enforcement: Policing Protected Areas

Massé

2019

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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This article examines how recent increases in commercial poaching of wildlife intensify the dictates that underpin conservation law and its enforcement; namely, the securing of space, punishing of transgressors, and protecting of nonhuman life. Drawing on ethnographic research with antipoaching personnel in Mozambique, I examine how rangers translate these legal and normative manifestations of conservation law enforcement on the ground and in their daily practices to police protected areas and the wildlife within them. This article makes two contributions. First, drawing on insights from the political geography and ecology of conservation with the political geography of policing, I demonstrate how territorial, sovereign, and biopolitical practices and logics coalesce to secure the spaces and the lives of the nonhuman from ostensible human threats. Second, it is rangers who are deployed as petty environmental sovereigns to achieve these objectives through often violent practices. Although many rangers might feel uncomfortable with the use of violence, their agency to commit or resist using violence is authorized, enabled, and constrained by the normative and legal structures of conservation law enforcement within which they operate. The social differentiation among rangers also means that some have more agency to navigate these structures than others. These insights help understand the actually existing operationalization of delegated and performative power over bodies, space, and the use of direct violence. I suggest that critiques of conservation violence, and the use of violence by those acting as petty sovereigns more broadly, should be primarily oriented at the broader structures within which they operate.

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Section: Researching Conservation Law Enforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conservation Law Enforcement: Policing Protected Areas

Massé

2019

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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“…In light of this, I develop the concept of green militarization to both highlight and incite sustained scholarly discussion of these processes. Building from insights in the literature, we know that those doing conservation work on the ground have long come with military backgrounds, and even today the Army and police are important vocations for recruiting rangers given that military-style discipline and skills are precisely those seen as necessary for effective wildlife policing (Ellis 1994;Carruthers 1995;Neumann 2004;Warchol and Kapla 2012). Military skills and militaries themselves have also been used to forcibly evict populations to create, maintain, or expand protected areas, reflecting one of the core ways conservation rests on the use of violence (Peluso 1993;Gibson 1999;Spence 1999;Neumann 2001;Ojeda 2012;Ybarra 2012).…”

Section: From Investigations Of Military Activity and The Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lunstrum

2014

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

359

250

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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.

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“…Wildlife conservationists and criminologists have conducted a substantial amount of research on the rhinopoaching crisis in South Africa and on the illegal wildlife trade (Ayling 2013;Haas and Ferreira 2015;Hill 2015;Mulero-Pázmány et al 2014;Warchol and Kapla 2012). Rhino poaching has surged in response to increases in black market prices for horn (Milliken et al 2009).…”

Section: Rhino Poaching In South Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding site selection of illegal border crossings into a fenced protected area: a rational choice approach

2018

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This study investigates illegal border crossings by rhino poachers into a fenced reserve in South Africa, comparing journeys to and after crime using a rational choice approach. Using various regression models, our analysis indicates poachers prefer to enter and exit the reserve near high rhino densities, while high road densities outside the reserve increase the odds of an illegal entry. The results also show that half of the incursions occurred at a single location, leading us to describe the special circumstances of this outlier. The study lays a foundation for understanding the location choices poachers make and presents a methodology that can be replicated in other reserves.

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Policing the wilderness: A descriptive study of wildlife conservation officers in South Africa

Cited by 37 publications

References 14 publications

Conservation Law Enforcement: Policing Protected Areas

Conservation Law Enforcement: Policing Protected Areas

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

Understanding site selection of illegal border crossings into a fenced protected area: a rational choice approach

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