Concerns about poaching and trafficking have led conservationists to seek urgent responses to tackle the impact on wildlife. One possible solution is the militarisation of conservation, which holds potentially far-reaching consequences. It is important to engage critically with the militarisation of conservation, including identifying and reflecting on the problems it produces for wildlife, for people living with wildlife and for those tasked with implementing militarised strategies. This Perspectives piece is a first step towards synthesising the main themes in emerging critiques of militarised conservation. We identify five major themes: first, the importance of understanding how poaching is defined; second, understanding the ways that local communities experience militarised conservation; third, the experiences of rangers; fourth, how the militarisation of conservation can contribute to violence where conservation operates in the context of armed conflict; and finally how it fits in with and reflects wider political economic dynamics. Ultimately, we suggest that failure to engage more critically with militarisation risks making things worse for the people involved and lead to poor conservation outcomes in the long run.

No abstract

No abstract

The growing militarisation of nature conservation has refocused attention on the relations between counterinsurgency and conservation. This contribution analyses how these two phenomena entwine in Virunga National Park, located in the war-ridden east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It examines how this entwinement relates to dynamics of conflict and violence, and how these dynamics shape and are shaped by the livelihood and resistance practices of local inhabitants. As it shows, a particularly important form of resistance is 'guerrilla livelihood' activities, or cultivation, (prohibited) fishing and logging within the boundaries of the park, which often take place under the protection of armed groups. By studying the interplay among such unauthorised exploitation of natural resources, different types of conflict, and insurgent mobilisation, it is demonstrated that strict law enforcement and joint operations of the Congolese army and park guards fuel, rather than mitigate, the dynamics feeding into armed mobilisation.

To 'save' the Virunga National Park, located in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the European Commission (EC) allocates development aid to the paramilitary training of the park guards, their salaries, and mixed patrols of the guards together with the Congolese army. Moreover, the 'development' projects the EC supports around the park have militarising effects as they are based on a soft counter-insurgency approach to conservation and to address dynamics of violent conflict. This amounts to the 'green militarisation' of development aid. This article describes how a personalised network of policymakers within the EC renders militarised conservation-related violence and controversy around the Virunga park invisible, by framing contestations and violence in and around the park as solely caused by economic factors and motivations. Moreover, by 'hiding' the fact that the EC aid is used to fund armed conservation practices, policymakers circumvent political debate about the use of development funds for (para)military expenditures. While the existing literature focuses on the importance of securitised discourses to explain the militarisation of conservation, this article indicates that in addition, it is important to focus on these more mundane practices of securitisation within international organisations that ultimately fund the militarisation of conservation.