‘Rhino poaching is out of control!’ Violence, race and the politics of hysteria in online conservation

Abstract

The rhino-poaching crisis in South Africa, according to many concerned citizens, conservation organisations and governments, is 'out of control'. With over 1000 rhinos poached in each of 2013, 2014 and 2015, the crisis has triggered a massive response, much of which heavily depends on online tools to raise funds and awareness. The paper analyses emotive discourses and imaginaries as part of dominant online responses to the rhino-poaching crisis and found that these are predominantly espoused by whites and show a worrying penchant towards (extreme) violence. Building on a theorisation of the links between race, nature, affect and control, the paper hypothesises that these responses reflect a 'politics of hysteria'. This politics captures the employment of affective and emotive expressions as a way to demand control over a situation 'out of control' in the context of historical and contemporary South African political economies of racial inequality. And as these expressions often tend towards exaggerated or extreme violence, they become potent forms of political mobilisation and intervention. New media are a crucial ingredient of this potency, and the paper concludes that this opens up important new questions about the relations between race, nature and violence.

Anthropocentrism: More than Just a Misunderstood Problem

“…On the other hand, those deeply rooted in Marxism and Leftist development studies (e.g. Brockington 2002;Chapin 2004;Holmes 2013;Büscher 2015;Fletcher and Büscher 2016) see conservation as a barrier to eliminating poverty and class divisions. The former group of neoliberal eco-modernists with anthropocentric social justice priorities, and the latter with Leftist social justice priorities are both essentially anthropocentric.…”

Selling green militarization: The discursive (re)production of militarized conservation in the Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo

“…While securitization and racialized moral boundary-drawing have accompanied green militarization in Sub-Saharan Africa from the colonial past onwards, what is relatively 'new' is the ways these narratives are spread and link up with other discursive techniques such as marketization and spectacularization, as driven by the growing prominence of market-based income generation and multimedia marketing strategies in conservation practice (Büscher, 2016a(Büscher, , 2016bLunstrum, 2016). These features are a hallmark of what is referred to as 'neoliberal conservation' (Igoe and Brockington, 2007), relating to the changing nature of conservation practice over the last two decades or so, marked by a convergence of philanthropic, NGO, aid donor, corporate and media interests (Brockington et al, 2008).…”

Nobody Likes Dichotomies (But Sometimes You Need Them)

“…These 'dominant discourses about wildlife, poaching, and the extinction crisis' (Holmes 2013, 74) resulted in a 'politics of hysteria in conservation' by Western environmentalists (Büscher 2015). West and Brockington (2012, 2) further state:…”

“…This entails the self-proclaimed right to undermine another species' very existence and the evolutionary unfolding in the noble quest for social justice (Kopnina 2012a(Kopnina , 2012b(Kopnina , 2014aCafaro and Primack 2014), in effect condoning 'nonhuman genocide' (Crist 2012, 140). Accusations that conservationists are 'out of control' to save the near-extinct species (Büscher 2015) testifies to a robust anthropocentric bias, and a refusal to acknowledge the legal repercussions of ecocide (Higgins 2010).…”