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Abstract
The vision of Southern African peace parks – transfrontier conservation areas – is one of ‘boundless’ natural landscapes transcendent of the brutality of the cartographic legacy of sovereign-statism. The parks are presented as vast biodiversity rich wildernesses inhabited by rare and precious fauna and flora and scattered communities of ‘traditional’ African peoples. As such, the region's frontiers symbolise exceptional spaces for ecosystem scale conservation, and the fostering of peace, community, and economic prosperity in a historically troubled region. However, the peace parks vision is emblematic of the commodification of life that pervades strategies for environmental governance and conservation in the current neoliberal era. Re-reading the vision through discourses of ‘the exception’ and securitisation demonstrates how its partiality and performativity act to discipline the region's borderzones in line with market priorities. In doing so, the vision (re)creates historically rooted patterns of inclusion and exclusion, security and insecurity in the life of the parks.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prof. Bram Büscher for his critical and helpful comments in the development of this paper, the research assistance of Sarah Bruchhausen and the insightful comments of the JCAS reviewers.
Notes
1. The ‘politics of exception’ refers to discourses of insecurity and extraordinary political measures adopted or curtailed because of the invocation of the ‘emergency’. Gorgio Agamben's (Citation1998) writing on the ‘state of exception’ has been the foundation for the theorising of the exception in poststructuralist security studies which have informed the interpretation of the concept in this paper. See, for example Aradau (Citation2004), Huysmans and Buonfino (Citation2008) and specifically on the role of borders and spaces of exclusion, Basaran (Citation2008) and Vaughan-Williams (Citation2008, Citation2009).
2. Benedict Anderson ([1983] Citation1991) provides a thought-provoking discussion on the socially constructed notion of a nation as a limited but sovereign form of community imagined by its members.
3. The term apartheid is associated specifically with South Africa, but similar experiences were experienced in other countries in the region, most notably Namibia and Zimbabwe.
4. See Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe (Citation2008) for an enlightening use of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle ([Citation1967] 1995) to explain how nature-as-spectacle is commodified. Igoe (Citation2010, 375) argues that the commodification of the spectacle alienates people from the ‘processes that produced them’ and that consumers are equally ignorant of these processes.
5. In a paper presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference in Seattle, 2011 the author argued that it is the economic imperative that is ultimately privileged over the conservation agenda precisely because of the powerful framing narrative of the market in the development of Southern African peace parks (Barrett Citation2011).
6. See also Perez et al. (Citation2007) and Jindal, Swallow, and Kerr (Citation2008).
7. Samir Amin (Citation2011) argues that maldevelopment is a more appropriate term than underdevelopment, implying that there was, and continues to be, a deliberate process of exploitation by the majority world states and institutions of the minority world and particularly former colonies.
8. For a critical discussion of this see van Amerom and Büscher (Citation2005).
9. Ali's (Citation2007) edited volume discusses the potential advantages of transboundary conservation initatives in greater detail.
10. Spierenburg and Wels (2010) explore the ‘social capital’ of the late Anton Rupert and the late Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in attracting funding and support for transfrontier conservation in Southern Africa and how influential they have been in framing conservation strategies. The PPF has continued to attract substantial funding from European state bodies and from the South African government. See PPF (Donors of Peace Parks Foundation Citationn.d.) for more information, as well as the organisation's annual reports and financial statements (Citation2006, Citation2009, Annual Reviews Citationn.d.).
11. The PPF also gained ‘NGO Observer Status’ at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun in December 2010 (PPF Climate Change Citationn.d.).
12. The term ‘majority world’ refers to the majority of humanity, primarily but not exclusively in former colonies, who are economically and politically marginalised. In contrast, the term ‘minority world’ refers to the economic and political elite of humanity primarily but not exclusively located in the more advanced industrial states of Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. Although not intended to obscure the many variances of experience covered by such labels, the term is arguably more useful and reflective of global inequalities and power relations than the more commonly used ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, or ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. These latter definitions reinforce the global structures of power and situate people and states in a hierarchy that has historically been ideologically and materially constructed by the minority world states of Europe and North America. See, for example, John Morgan (Citation2001, 10).
13. A comment which appears to contradict the fact that San communities have lived in the Kalahari for centuries.
14. Thabo Mbeki (Citation2004) first presented his idea of an African Renaissance in his now infamous ‘I am an African’ speech in which he sought to challenge regressive constructions of Africa and Africans by invoking visions of a culturally and intellectually rich pre-colonial continent and the potential within Africa to deliver its own development.
15. The BSA lyrics are particularly telling: Africa! Africa! Southern Africa! Oceans, mountains, deserts, and plains/Wherever we go/Boundless and free/Transfrontier, together we work/Tirelessly we keep and conserve/The wonder we have, for them to come/Boundless they roam, protected and free (BSA Boundless Song Citationn.d.). The Boundless song is reflective of the selective use of African oral traditions in the construction of a spectacle for a commercial end.
16. Kevin Dunn's (Citation2009) work is particularly insightful. He illustrates how state structuring/ structural effects are discursively produced through continual acts of performativity. His article not only interrogates these processes of performativity in the context of African national parks but argues that the continual need for them creates opportunities for resistence and contestation of state power and authority.
17. Poverty is widely critiqued as a major threat to environmental integrity. See Duraiappah (Citation1996) for a review of the debate.
18. This is an unfortunate acronym given that communities have been ‘relocated’ because of the parks.
19. Governmentality is employed here in the Foucauldian sense; as the different mentalities, rationalities and techniques used to govern people which can be understood as a collective process of disciplining.
20. In relation to the Makuleke, see: de Villiers (Citation1999) and Steenkamp and Uhr (Citation2000).
21. The author recently visited the Kruger National Park and entered the Makuleke conservancy area now leased to Wilderness Safaris. A sign near the Wilderness camp read ‘Makuleke Contractual Land; Heart of the Trasnsfrontier Park’.
22. This is not to suggest that all pro-poor initiatives are flawed although there are key examples from the region – such as CAMPFIRE – in Zimbabwe which was an early attempt to engage local communities in wildlife management for livelihood development but which, subsequently became the target of criticism for being unsuccessful (See, for example Alexander and McGregor Citation2000).
23. In a critical analysis of the ‘relocation’ of 26,000 Mozambican from the land designated for the Limpopo National Park, later incorporated into the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, Millgroom and Spierenburg (Citation2008) argue that the restrictions on livelihood strategies resulted in an induced acceptance of relocation. Thus, the expansion of wildlife dispersal areas, park regulations and management procedures proved effective at excluding local communities from these spaces. Moore (Citation2010, 19) also argues that environmental narratives are being used as ‘tools of persuasion’ to garner African people's compliance with international environmental agendas.
24. Curran et al. (Citation2009) have contended that in the last decade there has been no ‘forced’ relocation of peoples in the creation of national parks in Africa but the issue remains contentious and as Cernea (Citation2006) highlights, displacement may not mean the physical exclusion from the land but denial of access to resources or imposed regulations about land-use options which inhibit ‘traditional’ livelihoods and result in ‘relocation’.
25. Tosa (2009) discusses this idea of ‘voluntary’ subjugation in his analysis of the ‘global slum’.
26. See, for example, Patrick Harries’ (Citation2007) excellent analysis of the Swiss Missionary construction of the ‘African’ and ‘Africa’ and the relationship between European and African knowledge systems.
27. Koevoet was a group of primarily Zulu personnel set up by the apartheid security police as the main counter-insurgency unit in Namibia prior to its independence.
28. Although not discussed in detail here the parks’ amenities are intended to be ‘modern’ without losing their ‘traditional appeal’.
29. McAfee (Citation1999) argues that this is a common trend in the World Bank and was evident in the development of the Convention on Biodiversity Conservation. Spatial and social contexts are obscured because governance processes locate conservation ‘best- practice’ within international (consumer) markets.