Demilitarizing conservation

Abstract

Many national parks and other protected areas (PAs) are experiencing an intensification of military actors, logics, and partnerships across the globe. This amounts to one of the most consequential conservation trends of this century, one that violates human rights and threatens conservation’s long-term viability. These dynamics have been chronicled in the burgeoning literature on green militarization. Set against dire predictions of biodiversity loss and the importance of both PAs and local communities in slowing this decline, this intervention makes the argument for demilitarizing conservation and sets out an initial framework for what this entails conceptually and in practice. We show how demilitarizing conservation must be based on an ethics and politics of care and nonviolence. Although PAs are already landscapes of care for nonhuman nature, we argue for a more robustly care-full conservation that, perhaps uncomfortably, requires care to be extended to those who harm wildlife and nature more broadly. We illustrate how demilitarization requires infusing care into conservation at two related moments: the actual encounter between conservation’s transgressors and law enforcement and the larger structures that produce the encounter and military buildup as a response. The latter includes how green militarization is driven by economic logics, global patterns of economic inequality, and colonial structures that continue to shape conservation. This intervention also opens space for considering how the need for demilitarization allies with other movements like Indigenous-led and convivial conservation working to radically reshape conservation theory and practice and makes a case for explicitly including demilitarization within these efforts.