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In September 2016, 14 months after the illegal killing of Cecil the lion raised an international furore over trophy hunting, 58 individuals gathered at Oxford University for the Cecil Summit, a meeting of experts designed to vision the future of lion conservation in honor of Cecil. This paper explores the Cecil Summit through an analytic of government as a means to provide new insights into securitized and neoliberal conservation governance in action. On this basis, we show how the actors emboldened by the Cecil Moment claimed the authority to vision the Cecil Movement. Using video and document review, and semi-structured interviews, our discourse analysis highlights three components of intervention into African lionscapes emerging from the summit—securing space, mobilizing capital, and producing subjects—that are founded upon claims to scientific and economic rationality as well as specific representations of lions and rural Africans. Our analysis of the vision contributes to recent discussions in political ecology about the dovetailing of conservation, security, the economy—and we add—subjectivity. We conclude by pointing to the way in which militarized conservation appears to be inching closer to the lion and offering a critique of the vision for lion conservation put forward at the Cecil Summit.

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Bringing the animals back outAnimal geographies reflect an innovative and thriving subdiscipline. Animal geographers 'investigate how humans think about, place, and engage with animals, how animals shape human identities and social dynamics, as well as how broader social cultural, political economic, and ecological processes influence animal distributions, circumstances, behaviours, experiences, and well-being' (Hovorka, 2020: 127). Animals feature as both objects and subjects of geographical study, rather than being backgrounded as 'nature' in humanenvironment explorations. Animal geographies have challenged entrenched humanist ontologies and epistemologies and advanced multispecies theoretical and empirical understandings in geography. Animal geographies at their core explore human-animal relations through attention to animality, animal spaces, and beastly places as grounded in eclectic and integrative methodological approaches and ethical commitments to improving more-than-human lives (Hovorka, 2020). Animal geographies have also 'firmly joined the ranks of broader animal studies scholarship by infusing debates with context specific, place-based, and spatial frames that extend understanding and explanation of the ways in which humans and animals interact' (Hovorka, 2020: 131). Key texts trace this history and tout the contributions of animal geographies scholarship and engagement (see, e.g.