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ABSTRACT
The precipitous increase in commercial poaching across parts of Africa has been met by progressively more militarized responses. Amounting to green militarization, we now see national armies, increasingly paramilitarized rangers, military tactics, and even sophisticated military technology used to address the problem. Scholarly investigations on the topic have largely been approached from a political ecology perspective and hence have not made connections with the equally relevant field of critical military studies (CMS). We see this as a missed opportunity. This paper is thus an early attempt to begin forging these connections. At the most general level, we introduce green militarization – as a practice and realm of scholarly debate – into CMS. By bringing in environmental conservation and non-human nature, this offers a broader view into the vast areas of nominally civilian life that are increasingly militarized, a defining interest of CMS. Second, we draw from core CMS insights – especially regarding the link between development and security – to grasp changing practices and trends in green militarization. In particular, we illustrate how the recent shift towards softer militarized approaches amounts to poaching-related soft counter-insurgency, which we capture in the concept of the conservation–security–development nexus. Here, communities become the object of development interventions to ‘win hearts and minds’ and prevent their involvement in poaching, thereby neutralizing the security threats poaching might pose. We close by suggesting future areas of intersection between CMS and the political-ecological work on green militarization in hopes of inciting a deeper engagement.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Emily Gilbert and Killian McCormack for organizing this special issue and for their comments on previous versions of this paper. A sincere thank you to Harriet Gray and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback that greatly helped strengthen the article. Thank you to SSHRC, OGS, and York University FGS for funding, to UEM in Maputo, and to all participants who made this research possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The observations and interviews we draw on come from fieldwork conducted by two of the authors in South Africa and Mozambique from 2012 to 2016, including over 6 months of ethnographic research with anti-poaching units and conservation-security personnel in the Mozambican borderlands.
2. The number of poachers killed has been disputed by South Africa National Parks (SANParks), but the organisation will not release their official numbers.
3. Reflecting a core insight of political ecology, ‘nature’ is not a separate realm from society or culture but rather is co-constituted by engagements between humans, non-human animals, and biophysical processes, and shaped more broadly by power-laden structures and discourses.
4. In Latin America, however, such military buildup is often based less on ecological than on economic and more strictly security rationales.
5. This is despite the lack of evidence rhino horn has curative properties given that it is made from keratin, the same material as hair and fingernails.
6. The huge range is explained by the fact the economy is illicit and hence difficult to measure.
7. These numbers are estimates that are commonly cited, but the number may vary from year to year and depending on the source.
8. All of these firms are run and partially staffed by former military and special forces personnel from Apartheid South Africa and the Israeli Defence Forces, among others.
9. ‘Neutralization’ is SANParks’ term for arresting or killing poachers.
10. In a sense, there is little new with these initiatives. Conservation has long been mobilized as a development intervention in and of itself and as a way to strengthen park–people relations, which is beneficial to conservation outcomes (Child Citation2013; McShane and Wells Citation2004). Recent work has even highlighted how conservation and development interventions not only intertwine but are often conflated, even becoming one and the same (Corson Citation2016).
11. Others have examined in depth the moral imperatives or ‘just war’ rationale for militarized conservation based on the vulnerability of wildlife (Eckersley Citation2007; Duffy Citation2014, Citation2016; Cochrane and Cooke Citation2016).
12. We heed Shaw and Rademeyer’s (Citation2016) cautioning to not over-determine poaching as a national security issue. However, we still see the rhetoric of war and national security, even if problematically limited to a less-than-representative segment of the population, as effective in mobilizing resources and military/security actors in South Africa and elsewhere.