GDI Lecture series: Elizabeth Lunstrum – Capitalism and Conservation in the Age of Security
| Dates: | 9 November 2016 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | Global Development Institute |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Current University students, General public |
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The Global Development Lecture Series brings together scholars involved in cutting edge research on international development. It aims to facilitate dialogue and discussion, providing a space for leading development thinkers to share their latest research ideas.
Professor Elizabeth Lunstrum from York Univeristy in Canada will discuss the role of state power in Mozambique.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.
Military actors, practices, logics, and technologies have increasingly spread from the battlefield and into everyday life, a core feature of our age of security. One perhaps surprising arena where we witness this is conservation. Nowhere is this stitching together of conservation and militarization – or green militarization – more pronounced than in the fight against commercial rhino poaching unfolding in Southern Africa. In this talk, I examine how profit-seeking corporations and private wealth, in the form of South African defense corporations and the elite tourism sector in Botswana, are increasingly enabling green militarization. Disrupting assumptions in the neoliberal natures literature about capitalism and the changing role of the state, I show how capitalism and wealth in these forms vitalizes state power. More explicitly, it enables conservation authorities to more efficiently unleash their (complex) monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The result is the state-sanctioned killing of suspected poachers coupled with the related alienation of communities from conservation, which ultimately harms wildlife.
Travel and Contact Information
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Theatre B
Roscoe Building
Manchester
