Ecologies of capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans

Abstract

What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long‐standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly, those who work in the Sundarbans have reported a dramatic increase in banditry and kidnapping. This article proposes the concept of an “ecology of capture” to chart the articulations between such kidnappings and other attempts to control rents, resources, and territory. Seen through the lens of capture, the Sundarbans highlights how the global rush to secure climate hot spots against degradation and displacement produces new configurations of expropriation and exploitation. [climate change, piracy, capture, conservation, Sundarbans, Bangladesh]

Learning from perpetrator replacement to remove crime opportunities and prevent poaching of the Sundarbans tiger

“…Piracy in the Sundarbans began around the 1980s. Pirates, or dacoits , controlled all the region's resources, finances, and territory (Cons, 2021). In the 2000s, extortion and abduction rates increased, and consequently in 2016 the government of Bangladesh launched an antipirate campaign combined with a rehabilitation program on condition of surrender.…”

Managing, now becoming, refugees: Climate change and extractivism in the Republic of Nauru

“…Yet underneath popular media narratives, intersecting patterns of global inequality result in Nauru becoming a site of possible relocation in the future as much as a hub of refugee resettlement in the present. Other regions around the world are also experiencing the dynamics of environmental degradation and displacement and a simultaneous global rush to stopper migration through policy and policing regimes, technologies, and discursive representations (Cons 2021). Alongside this, the "climate refugee" framing has derived huge appeal, promoted by a spectrum of NGOs, government and UN agencies, academic researchers, and refugee-rights campaigns (Morris 2021b).…”

Capture‐recapture

“…Yet, while methods like capture‐recapture are framed as a better mousetrap for quantifying vulnerable populations, efforts to count, care for, and keep track of key populations in Malawi are mediated by relations of capture and elusion that far exceed the field implementation—the event—of a peculiar sampling method. Rather than manifesting as a singular moment of neocolonial drama, capture‐recapture cues us to less visible and “disparate forms of constraint, exploitation, and opportunity” (Cons 2021, 257), forms that emerge from dense and layered relations in global health's contact zones. Such relations are termed “ecologies of capture” by Cons (2021), writing on climate hot spots in Bangladesh.…”

“…Rather than manifesting as a singular moment of neocolonial drama, capture‐recapture cues us to less visible and “disparate forms of constraint, exploitation, and opportunity” (Cons 2021, 257), forms that emerge from dense and layered relations in global health's contact zones. Such relations are termed “ecologies of capture” by Cons (2021), writing on climate hot spots in Bangladesh. Hunting, capture (and recapture), and captivity are analytics that illuminate contemporary life across a variety of practices, geographic locations, and regimes of value production (Cons 2021; Doughty 2019; O'Neill 2017; O'Neill and Dua 2018).…”

“…Such relations are termed “ecologies of capture” by Cons (2021), writing on climate hot spots in Bangladesh. Hunting, capture (and recapture), and captivity are analytics that illuminate contemporary life across a variety of practices, geographic locations, and regimes of value production (Cons 2021; Doughty 2019; O'Neill 2017; O'Neill and Dua 2018). As scholars have noted, they reprise historical, if enduring, modes of governance and control (Mavhunga 2014; Traisnel 2020).…”