In this panel we launch our book on The Violence of Conservation in Africa. We conceptualize violence in conservation spaces as encompassing the adverse material and non-material consequences of the ideas of nature and conservation practices whose contestation on the ground necessitates the use of overt and covert power by the state and other actors to enforce, manage, and police prescribed relations between people and the environment. We emphasize two main dimensions of the violence of conservation: the institutionalized idea of conservation that makes conservation inherently violent, and the racial hierarchies and demographic character of violent conservation. We identify four conditions that make such violence a permanent feature of conservation in Africa. The first relates to the hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans and the enduring stereotypes and perceptions of black people and indigenous groups. The second condition is the introduction of global environmental agendas on the continent which African states pursue to the detriment of their own citizens. The third relates to the inability of the African state to regain resource sovereignty and to resolve the colonial architecture of resource regimes for their nations. The fourth condition is the neoliberalization of conservation, which enables extractivism. We draw on theories of non-violence to (a) reject the violence/non-violence duality as a conceptual frame, and (b) to propose non-violence as a set of conditions that not only prevent the use of force and the consequent harm but that also render its use an irrational approach to human interactions and relations.

TITLE: Protected Forests as Violent Forests
ABSTRACT
State goals to protect forest areas are often marked by violence in different forms that lead to violent territories. As a counterview of “protected forests”, this presentation introduces the concept of violent forests. The concept examines forest areas under state purview, whose anticipated benefits, as laid out by the legal framework, are achieved using state-sanctioned bureaucratic and institutionalized violent practices. Underpinning “violent forests”, therefore, is that the use of violent tactics to protect forests obscures and often engulfs the noble intentions of their conservation – producing the more violent than protected forests. In this presentation we first discuss literature on the militarization of conservation and locates this in the broader history of state violence and use of military tactics in Zimbabwe. Next, we trace the characteristics of Sikumi forests in relation to state violence. Using qualitative material evidence, local people’s experiences are presented before discussing emerging forms of state violence against the stated policy of promoting national development and social equity through sustainable forest management. We draw on these experiences to show that (a) people’s needs are violated rather than protected, (b) resources in themselves are not necessarily protected by conservation practices instituted but are instead (ab)used by extractive institutions, and (c) conservation practices instituted around Sikumi Forest suggest that roles assumed by state institutions in conservation are entirely for the existential benefit of such organs rather than for national or global biodiversity. Such existential threats are maintained by violent means, as necessary.
Keywords: violent forests, Sikumi, state institutions