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collection no. 003 • Infrastructure on/off Earth Roadsides Recent years have seen an acceleration and proliferation of space science initiatives across the African continent. Ghana and Kenya established official space programs in 2012 and in 2016 Ethiopia and the African Union adopted a Space Policy (Asabere et al. 2015). These add to existing initiatives in South Africa and Nigeria, inscribing them in both continental and international networks (Camilo 2018;Pović et al. 2018). Notable among these big space science projects is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), based in South Africa and extending across the continent. Comparable to the human genome project in its scale (Benoit 2018), the network of telescopes exceeds the sensitivity and size of large particle-accelerating machines (Hoeppe 2014). In 2017 Ghana became the second African country to participate in this network, anchoring the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN). As the station most distant from the SKA core site in South Africa, the Ghana facility -because it is close to the equator -is able to cover both the northern sky and underexplored southern sky. Operating alongside the SKA, although at different frequencies, the AVN will train radio astronomers to sense and make sense of hyperobjects as vast as the center of the Milky Way galaxy. collection no. 003 • Infrastructure on/off Earth Roadsides

In this paper, we argue that the relationship between nature conservation and warfare was and continues to be actualized through socio-technical relationships and shared infrastructures. We historicize “green militari zation”—defined as the use of military techniques, technologies and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation (Lunstrum 2014)—showing that the partnership between military and nature conservation in Southern Africa has a long and violent history. Our paper accounts for the entanglements of war and nature through a shared technological infrastructure used in north-eastern Namibia during the Namibian War of Liberation (1966–1989). In particular, we focus on the Mirage IIIR2Z, an aerial reconnaissance and ground-attack supersonic jet which provided both the South African Defence Force and the civil administration’s nature conservationists with aerial photography and remote sensing data. The spatial information produced jointly by the military and the civil nature conservation department was used to produce strategic maps, but also to fight invasive plants and protect wildlife. Our reading of green militarization against this background sheds light on the long-lasting connections between warfare, conservation and ecology along Southern African border regions and contributes to a novel understanding of the contemporary “war on poachers” through a study of the techno-scientific networks that made it possible. Since there is nothing inevitable about the way technologies emerge or change over time (Bijker and Law 1992), this paper develops an empirically grounded and sustained analysis of technological change in the domain of green militarization through three interlinked concepts: “multiple” (Law 2002), “shifting down” (Latour 1994; 1999), and “firming up” (Bijker and Law 1992).

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