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.

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Conservation organizations are increasingly using tourism and social media to raise funds and support for anti-poaching interventions. This article examines how these strategies represent poaching and the responses that are ostensibly needed to disrupt it. To do so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in the rhino poaching hotspot of the Mozambique-South Africa borderlands and analyze social media and tourism campaigns from organizations in the area. These campaigns emphasize violently decimated wildlife, threatened rangers, and the subsequent need for a securitized conservation. They obscure or neglect the social relations influencing poaching and related violence, other conservation priorities, and the implications of hardline enforcement measures and militarized anti-poaching practices. The strategic ways in which poaching is made legible and consumable to a broad audience and how this shapes conservation practice constitutes what I call anti-poaching's politics of (in)visibility. I emphasize how this politics and its simplistic representations of poaching and solutions may undermine the long-term sustainability of conservation efforts in two ways. First, antipoaching's politics of (in)visibility vitalizes a militarized response, leading to negative social implications that alienate people adjacent protected areas. Second, it jeopardizes the mundane ecological management activities vital to effective conservation. Understanding antipoaching's politics of (in)visibility thus contributes to a more robust political-ecology of antipoaching specifically, and of conservation in the current context of heightened commercial poaching and efforts to disrupt it more generally. The article ends with a discussion of how a politics of visibility might be harnessed for a more sustainable approach to the poaching problematic.