Drug trafficking, cattle ranching and Land use and Land cover change in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve

Devine, Jennifer A.; Currit, Nathan; Langarica, Yunuen Reygadas; Liller, Louise I.; Allen, Gabrielle

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104578

Cited by 35 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…One of this paper's key objectives is to demonstrate the power of integrating qualitative and NTL data to understand inaccessible and complicated geopolitical spaces. In pursuit of this aim, we adopted a critical remote sensing approach [71], contributing to an emerging subfield that interrogates the political economy of satellite data [81] and employs remote sensing alongside ethnographic methods [66,[82][83][84][85]. Such approaches are useful in data-scarce environments such as Myanmar and across the Lower Mekong Region, where a lack of geospatial infrastructure and accessible, standardized datasets inhibits mapping efforts and geospatial analysis [86].…”

Section: Critical Remote Sensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uneven Frontiers: Exposing the Geopolitics of Myanmar’s Borderlands with Critical Remote Sensing

Bennett

Faxon

2021

Remote Sensing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A critical remote sensing approach illuminates the geopolitics of development within Myanmar and across its ethnic minority borderlands. By integrating nighttime light (NTL) data from 1992–2020, long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and a review of scholarly and gray literature, we analyzed how Myanmar’s economic geography defies official policy, attesting to persistent inequality and the complex relationships between state-sponsored and militia-led violence, resource extraction, and trade. While analysis of DMSP-OLS data (1992–2013) and VIIRS data (2013–2020) reveals that Myanmar brightened overall, especially since the 2010s in line with its now-halting liberalization, growth in lights was unequally distributed. Although ethnic minority states brightened more rapidly than urbanized ethnic majority lowland regions, in 2020, the latter still emitted 5.6-fold more radiance per km2. Moreover, between 2013 and 2020, Myanmar’s borderlands were on average just 13% as bright as those of its five neighboring countries. Hot spot analysis of radiance within a 50 km-wide area spanning both sides of the border confirmed that most significant clusters of light lay outside Myanmar. Among the few hot spots on Myanmar’s side, many were associated with official border crossings such as Muse, the formal hub for trade with China, and Tachileik and Myawaddy next to Thailand. Yet some of the most significant increases in illumination between 2013 and 2020 occurred in areas controlled by the Wa United State Party and its army, which are pursuing infrastructure development and mining along the Chinese border from Panghsang to the illicit trade hub of Mongla. Substantial brightening related to the “world’s largest refugee camp” was also detected in Bangladesh, where displaced Rohingya Muslims fled after Myanmar’s military launched a violent crackdown. However, no radiance nor change in radiance were discernible in areas within Myanmar where ethnic cleansing operations occurred, pointing to the limitations of NTL. The diverse drivers and implications of changes in light observed from space emphasize the need for political and economically situated remote sensing.

show abstract

Section: Critical Remote Sensingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uneven Frontiers: Exposing the Geopolitics of Myanmar’s Borderlands with Critical Remote Sensing

Bennett

Faxon

2021

Remote Sensing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As bulk cocaine is first delivered from South America into Central America's coastal and rural transit siteshowever brieflythe trade articulates with those already-marginalised economies in ways that can have long-term effects. DTOs need to control trafficking routes, and their propensity to launder their cash profits in land purchase and clearing, for example, has led to rural dispossession (Devine et al, 2020) and forest loss (McSweeney et al, 2017;Sesnie et al, 2017).…”

Section: Cocainementioning

confidence: 99%

“…in land and resource use and governance in the spaces in which they are produced, trafficked, and consumed (e.g., Duffy, 2005;Steinberg et al, 2004;Tamariz, 2020;Wrathall et al, 2020). While the global trade in these commodities easily reaches into the hundreds of billions annually (UNODC, 2016a(UNODC, , 2016b, the spatially differentiated enforcement of that trade, and the variable capture of profits from it, creates new trajectories of rural change (Devine et al, 2020;Tellman et al, 2020a). This work tends to be highly empirical and notable for its attention to the ways in which (militarised) forms of regulatory enforcement intensify many of the social and ecological harms associated with illegal economies (e.g., Dest, 2021;Massé & Marguiles, 2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatialising illicit commodity chains: Comparing coffee and cocaine

Dávila¹,

Magliocca

McSweeney

et al. 2021

Area

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Among geographers, recent focus on the illicit and illegal has tended to fall into two camps. Economic geographers focus on regimes of illicitness and corresponding production of specific forms of economic space; political ecologists and land change scholars, on the other hand, scrutinised how illicit commodity flows shape land and resource use, especially in the global South. This paper offers an initial integration of these two relatively separate subfields, specifically in terms of their complementary attention to uneven development. We use the concept of "global commodity chains" to explore the ways in which the regulation of agricultural commodities shapes how they are trafficked and embed in space, with particular attention to sites of international transshipment. When a commodity is illegal, spaces of transit take on significant analytical importance. As a heuristic, we present a comparative mapping of two agricultural commodity chains linking Colombia and the USA: coffee and cocaine. Their comparison highlights how "illicitness" fundamentally transforms cocaine's spatiality, requiring risk evasion that results in characteristically enlarged transit spaces and huge differentials between producer and consumer price. We show how rents circulate in those transit spaces, socially and ecologically embedding in diffuse, fluid networks with severe consequences for people and environments. We conclude with implications for work on illicit commodities and the collateral social and environmental harms they produce.

show abstract

“…Alternatively, partnerships between governments and indigenous peoples have emerged resulting in the effective protection of critical ecosystems worldwide, but especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In territories that lack the resources of prestigious national parks (e.g., UNESCO World Heritage sites), community agroforestry programs have shown to be more resilient than restricted access models to competing pressures such as narcotrafficking and land grabbing [90]. Despite the social challenges and important knowledge gaps regarding occupation, use rates, and social effects of different conservation models, the international goals of setting aside large portions of the world's wild lands and oceans has resulted in the global conservation of 20 million square kilometers of land (15% of world land surface) and 25 million square kilometers of marine areas (6.96% of ocean surface) [91].…”

Section: Urbanization To Support Global Biodiversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological City-States in an Era of Environmental Disaster: Security, Climate Change and Biodiversity

Fernández

Angel

2020

Sustainability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recently, there has been increasing evidence of the emergence of systemic strains that threaten international cooperative efforts on global issues, especially climate change, biodiversity loss and security. Non-state actors have responded by declaring their commitment to work together alongside nations as climate agreements struggle to deliver the necessary global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, conservation goals are not met, and security issues diversify. A principal constituent of the world’s non-state actors are cities. With many cities now home to more than 10 million individuals and several cities of more than 20 million, the urban world has come to dominate the global economy as well as the resource needs and environmental burdens imposed upon the planet by our species. Urban economies are responsible for more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions and substantially affect the world’s biodiversity by driving the extraction of resources and the degradation of global natural capital. Cities have become concentrators of diverse risk that complicate and broaden global security priorities. Cities are also crucibles of innovation in technology, business and governance and strong alliances between the world’s cities have formed to address the challenges of climate change, biodiversity and more. This paper asserts the unique potential for cities to assume a greater role in global priorities, including climate change, biodiversity loss and a realignment of security priorities. The transformative changes required in these three domains calls for a renewal of the city as a semi-autonomous neo-state, an ecological city-state.

show abstract

Drug trafficking, cattle ranching and Land use and Land cover change in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve

Cited by 35 publications

References 12 publications

Uneven Frontiers: Exposing the Geopolitics of Myanmar’s Borderlands with Critical Remote Sensing

Uneven Frontiers: Exposing the Geopolitics of Myanmar’s Borderlands with Critical Remote Sensing

Spatialising illicit commodity chains: Comparing coffee and cocaine

Ecological City-States in an Era of Environmental Disaster: Security, Climate Change and Biodiversity

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About