The Faint Footprint of Man: Representing Race, Place and Conservation on the Mozambique-South Africa Borderland

Rodgers, Graeme

doi:10.1093/jrs/fep028

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Much of this work looks critically at representations and narratives of 'nature' as wilderness and conservation as an apolitical practice meant to uphold this. These representations often obscure the socio-ecological, political, and historical complexities of conservation and people-biodiversity relations (Adams, 1992;Brooks, 2005;Neumann, 1995), including in the Mozambique-South Africa borderlands (Rodgers, 2009;Witter, 2013). Green cultural criminology complements these insights with a specific focus on the representations of environmental crimes, criminals, and responses (Brisman & South, 2014).…”

Section: [Map 1 Location and Regional Context Of The Glc And The Grementioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-poaching’s politics of (in)visibility: Representing nature and conservation amidst a poaching crisis

Massé

2019

Geoforum

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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.

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Section: [Map 1 Location and Regional Context Of The Glc And The Grementioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-poaching’s politics of (in)visibility: Representing nature and conservation amidst a poaching crisis

Massé

2019

Geoforum

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“…Nugent's emphasis on borderlands is not only appropriate but timely. The importance of borderlands has increasingly drawn attention from scholars of Africa; to take one example, a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies (JEAS, volume 6, number 1) was explicitly devoted to the borderlands of Uganda, while other recent books and articles on the subject include Falola and Usman () and Rodgers () as well as scholarship cited by Nugent previously. This academic focus on borders is certainly due in part to the tendency for African civil wars to originate in border areas or at least spill across them, including the northern Ugandan case discussed across several articles in JEAS but also in Angola, the DRC, Liberia, Mali, Rwanda and Sudan, among many others.…”

Section: Commentarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreams and Nightmares of Nationhood: The Obi Igwara Special Memorial Event to mark 50 Years of Decolonization in Africa, 1960–2010

Leoussi¹,

Spence

Nugent

et al. 2013

Nations and Nationalism

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“…During the colonial period the PNL area was reserved as a hunting district. During this time there was no centralised fire management other than the regular use of fire by resident communities (Rodgers, 2009). A Portuguese farming station was established near Pafuri during colonial times.…”

Section: Fire Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire history and fire ecology of Northern Kruger (KNP) and Limpopo National Park (PNL), southern Africa

Ekblom

Gillson

2010

The Holocene

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This paper explores the general correlations between fire and grass/tree relationships, as represented by fossil charcoal and pollen, from different vegetation types in the savanna ecosystems of the neighbouring Kruger (KNP) and Limpopo (PNL) national parks. Our analysis suggests that the basic presumption that fire is a main driver of vegetation dynamics in the savanna ecosystem by suppressing tree seedlings and encouraging grasses needs to be re-examined. An improved approach is to understand how fire may act both as a negative and positive feedback in different vegetational phases and both as a driver and responder in transitions between phases. The correlation between arboreal pollen (AP) percentages and charcoal influx suggests that in the grassland phase (< 5% AP), fire acts as a driver of woody recruitment and as a positive feedback, i.e. potentially driving the system to shift into a savanna phase. In the savanna phase (5—10% AP) fire limits woody recruitment and acts as a negative feedback in maintaining the savanna. Thus, in the savanna phase other factors than fire alone drive the transition from savanna to woodland-forest. In the riparian phase, where evidence of farming is present particularly from AD 1600 onwards, fire appears to facilitate tree recruitment where AP ranges between c. 10 and 20% AP. Though a decline in AP abundance can be seen contemporaneously with charcoal peaks, our analysis suggests that overall, human-induced fires do not seem to have a negative impact on woody cover. Our results have implications for fire management as riparian-dominated phases and savannas with a sufficient woody cover are less sensitive to changes in fire policies than open grasslands that may, with a change in fire frequency, change into another state.

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The Faint Footprint of Man: Representing Race, Place and Conservation on the Mozambique-South Africa Borderland

Cited by 11 publications

References 10 publications

Anti-poaching’s politics of (in)visibility: Representing nature and conservation amidst a poaching crisis

Anti-poaching’s politics of (in)visibility: Representing nature and conservation amidst a poaching crisis

Dreams and Nightmares of Nationhood: The Obi Igwara Special Memorial Event to mark 50 Years of Decolonization in Africa, 1960–2010

Fire history and fire ecology of Northern Kruger (KNP) and Limpopo National Park (PNL), southern Africa

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