773 research outputs found
Nature on the Move: The Value and Circulation of Liquid Nature and the Emergence of Fictitious Conservation
No full textNature on the Move: The Value and Circulation of Liquid Nature and the Emergence of Fictitious Conservation
No full textConceptualising lived experiences within the political economy of the Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus
No full textConceptualising lived experiences within the political economy of the Ecotourism-Extraction Nexus
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From Biopower to Ontopower? Violent Responses to Wildlife Crime and the New Geographies of Conservation
No full textIntensifying global dynamics of wildlife crime are rapidly reshaping conservation politics, practices and geographies. Most pronounced are the manifold violent responses to wildlife crime, including direct lethal action and increasing anticipatory action to prevent these crimes from happening in the first place. This paper reflects on these dynamics in relation to recent literature that employs Foucault's concept of biopower to understand the governance of increasingly precarious human and non-human life. Building on Brian Massumi's exposition of ontopower – an 'environmental power' that “alters the life environment's conditions of emergence” – I explore whether we are seeing a move from bio- to ontopower where the imperative is less the construction of systemic forms of governmentality to ensure life's ‘optimisation’ than on processually pre-empting incipient tendencies towards unknown but certain future threats to life. Phrased differently, ontopower focuses on how to prevent nature's destruction in the future through pre-emptive measures in the present. Drawing on empirical research on violent responses to rhino poaching in South Africa, the paper argues that we are seeing the uneven emergence of new geographies of conservation based on ontopower. It concludes by speculating whether conservation's insecurity is turning into its pre-emptive other by making (green) war necessary for non-human life's survival
Book Review: Die Bram Fischer Wals
No full textBook Title: Die Bram Fischer WalsBook Author: Harry Kalmer Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016. 67pp. ISBN 978-1-77614-005-3
Seeking Telos in the ‘Transfrontier’: Neoliberalism and the Transcending of Community Conservation in Southern Africa
No full textIn Southern Africa the last ten years have seen a rather dramatic shift in donor and state interest and funding from 'community conservation' to 'transfrontier conservation'. The new trend broadens the aim of conservation - development interventions to also include interstate cooperation. The article critically analyzes this development within a wider shift in neoliberal politics. It is argued that this broader shift helped create the right 'enabling environment' for the transfrontier conservation discourse to be presented as an all-embracing and unifying ideological 'model of meaning'. Moreover, underlying neoliberalism's contemporary political conduct is a strong reassertion and the actual neoliberalisation of the state. It is this move that has truly enabled the 'transfrontier' to revive the telos of conservation in Southern Africa
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