Green Territoriality: Conservation as State Territorialization in a Resource Frontier (original) (raw)
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Conservation as counterinsurgency: A case of ceasefire in a rebel forest in southeast Myanmar
Political Geography, 2020
We demonstrate how international conservation practices in a rebel forest during ceasefire are shaped by and contribute to legacies of racialized political violence. Nature conservation has been shown in some cases to be implemented by armed forces and directly contribute to acts of "green violence" and the makings of "green war". Less explored in the critical conservation literature, and the focus of our study, are the ways in which conservation projects can also be implicated in the continuation of counterinsurgency through "softer" non-militarized means. Based on ethnographic field research, interviews, and document analysis conducted by both authors, we present a field case study from the lowland forests of Tanintharyi Region in southeast Myanmar. The proposed Lenya National Park falls within territory contested by an ethnic Karen rebel group, who have been under a tenuous ceasefire since 2012 but who have not yet reached a political settlement to end armed conflict. We find that the mapping of Lenya during ceasefire by foreign conservationists legitimizes past forced displacements of Karen civilians by the Myanmar military during decades of war, and impedes the potential return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their customary lands now zoned for the park. Conservationists working to establish the park invoke and build upon racialized discourses of Karen forest dwellers as criminals, first as dangerous rebel supporters, and now as forest destroyers. The ceasefire has also opened up political space for Karen leaders to challenge the making of state forests, who envision an alternative model of community-led conservation based on indigenous rights.
2020
Using the case of the Ecological Task Force (ETF) of the Indian Army as an entry point, this contribution nudges the existing conceptual and theoretical views on green militarization and violent environments in the context of reserve and protected forest areas. This is achieved by going beyond coercive physical violence and accounting for forms of symbolic and structural violence meted out to populations. I position this work within and also complement the broader literature on critical and militarized practices and apply it to the reserve forests in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in Assam, northeast India. Here, politics that surround conservation is immersed within a context of violent ethno-religious conflict. The BTAD has been a theatre of recurrent insurgencies between the autochthonous Bodo tribe and the Adivasi, Muslim groups over land and demographics. A key characteristic of the conflict is its occurrence in the reserve forests on Assam-Bhutan borderlands, which can be traced back to the colonial process of forest making that brought immigrants into Assam, threatening cultural and territorial loss for Bodos. During the Bodo movement for a separate state, starting in 1980s and continuing, the militants operated from within the forest, leading to the departure of the forest department. As a result, rebels and locals appropriated the forest through rampant resource extraction. In response, the ETF was constituted in 2007. Fieldwork suggests that ETF through its military tactic and discipline engages in 'soft' militarization while also trusting on the regular Army for protection during conservation operations. Further, drawing on regional environmental history, I analyze how ethno-religious conflict influences modes of conservation and is exemplified by continuing inter-institutional competition between the forest department and the ETF. In the ensuing conservation-counterinsurgency nexus, retribution towards insurgents prevail over forest protection. Moreover, despite ETF's efforts to buffer from local politics, incidents of a political nature seep into its operations, e.g. ambushed by militants during conservation activities.
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2014
This article traces the revenue category and legal concept of the Waste Land in Burma/Myanmar from its original application by the British colonial apparatus in the nineteenth century, to its later use in tandem with Burma Army counterinsurgent tactics starting in the 1960s, and finally to the 2012 land laws and current issues in international investment. This adaptation of colonial ideas about territorialization in the context of an ongoing civil war offers a new angle for understanding the relationship between military tactics and the political economy of conflict and counterinsurgent strategies which crucially depended on giving local militias—both government and nongovernment—high degrees of autonomy. The recent government changes, including the more civilian representation in parliament and its shift to engage with Western economies, raise questions regarding the future of the military, as well as local autonomy and the rural peasantry’s access to land. As increasing numbers of international investors are poised to enter the Myanmar market, this article will revisit notions of land use and appropriation, and finally the role of the army and its changing relationship with Waste Lands.
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Because of the role that peripheral forest landscapes played in postwar nation-building, the Lao military has long played a significant, even if often hard-to-see, role in the administration of the country’s protected areas. This role is becoming increasingly apparent as transnational market-based forest governance efforts begin to threaten military administration of protected areas. As a consequence, the multidimensional nature of security – both defensive in the classic military sense, but also increasingly economic and complex – is coming to light through uses of what we describe as the security exception: the invocation of national security, in this case by military actors, to manage the reach and efficacy of emerging forest governance efforts. Projects to reduce climate-related emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) have been especially prone to trigger the security exception due to their focus on forest measurement and change over time, and are examined here in two cases from protected areas in western and southern Laos. We suggest that even as conflicts over forest management may be interpreted through the lens of foreign domination and the loss of domestic sovereignty – indeed the security exception feeds on such interpretations – these conflicts are better understood as struggles within the Lao state and society over the how to manage and use forest resources in a context of economic uncertainty and persistent underdevelopment. In such a context, the role of conservation NGOs and Western donors as gatekeepers to ongoing transnational governance efforts is nonetheless highly significant.
Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory. Tracing the relationship of military–state formation, land control and securitization, and primitive accumulation in the Burma–China borderlands uncovers the forces of what I am calling ‘ceasefire capitalism’. This study examines these processes of Burmese military–state building over the past decade in resource-rich ethnic ceasefire zones along the Yunnan, China border. I will illustrate this contemporary and violent military–state formation process with two case studies focusing on northern Burma: logging and redirected timber trade flows, and Chinese rubber plantations as part of China’s opium substitution program.
'Why the Caged Bird Sings': Resource Capture and Resistance in the China-Myanmar Borderlands
Capital and Ecology Developmentalism, Subjectivity and the Alternative Life-Worlds, 2023
This chapter critically looks at the contestations that China's resource extraction projects are producing in Myanmar's borderlands, locating these at the intersection between China's domestic developmental drivers and Myanmar's state-building agenda of enclosing its multi-ethnic, resource-rich frontiers. These faultlines are flattening out socio-ecological landscapes, where groups have fought at multiple fronts-against the state, against 'outsiders' and frequently against one another. The chapter argues for rescaling the capital-ecology question by looking at how subnational actors in the China-Myanmar borderlands are reshaping the discourse on resources and rights from below in far-reaching ways. It maps this evolving heterogeneous subnational policy space of diverse actors and competing agendas in Myanmar, which is producing new forms of conflict while exacerbating old ones. This holds out the promise of forging new transnational advocacy networks while at the same time testing subnational solidarities in the process.
Ruptures that constitute exceptional events in national politics intersect in different ways with local politics, where more ongoing, continuous processes of both contestation and conservation around natural resource use may persist amidst a turbulent political landscape on other scales. Nepal, with its series of unfinished revolutions, civil war (1996–2006), and recurrently contested process of state (transformation n, is a case in point. Through a study of a contested forest in mid-western Nepal, this article analyses the entanglement of rupture and realignment of contentious claims to political authority across different scales, as well as the continuities of negotiations over claims to recognition of forest use and citizenship rights. The authors analyse some of the messy and complex practices through which authority to govern forests is claimed and legitimated, and citizenship rights are asserted and defined. They show that while political ruptures caused by the war and postwar dynamics unsettle and reshuffle the political terrain, claims to citizenship and property rights endure, even if the language and form of the claim are adapted. These claims are embedded within existing jurisdictions but, at the same time, actors lay claims to property and citizenship rights by working across scales and renegotiating their boundaries. 'Making territory', the authors conclude, is the effect of the entanglement of these different territorial politics and practices.
2018
Much research on nature conservation in war-torn regions focuses on the destructive impact of violent conflict on protected areas, and argues that transnational actors should step up their support for those areas to mitigate the risks that conflict poses to conservation efforts there. Overlooked are the effects transnational efforts have on wider conflict dynamics and structures of public authority in these regions. This article describes how transnational actors increasingly gained influence over the management of Virunga Na- tional Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and how these actors contributed to the militarization of conservation in Virunga. Most scholarly literature suggests that ‘green militarization’ contributes to the ex- tension of state authority over territory and population, yet this is not the case in Virunga. Instead, the militarization of Virunga translates into practices of extra-state territorialization, with the result that many in the local population perceive the park’s management as a project of personalized governance and/or a ‘state within a state’. This article thus argues that it is important to depart from an a priori notion of the ‘state’ when considering the nexus of conservation practices and territorialization, and to analyse this intersection through the lens of public authority instead.