Moral and Discursive Geographies

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Political Geography 23 (2004) 813–837

Moral and discursive geographies in the warfor biodiversity in Africa

Roderick P. Neumann)

Department of International Relations, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA

Abstract

Since the 1980s, several African governments have responded to declining wildlife popula-tions by issuing shoot-on-sight orders for ‘‘poachers’’ found within national parks. War is nowa common model and metaphor for conceptualizing and planning biodiversity protection in

Africa. Consequently, there is a new moral geography wherein parks and protected areas havebecome spaces of deadly violence. This article seeks to understand the moral justification forshoot-on-sight protocols in African biodiversity protection and examine the ramifications forthe overall level of violence in national parks. It builds on and extends the political ecology

analysis of violence and justice through an engagement with the environmental ethicsliterature. It concludes that a moral justification for shoot on sight and wartime violencecannot be demonstrated within the various philosophical approaches to environmental ethics.

Yet wartime ethics and shoot on sight have become taken for granted in Africa. The articleposits that discursive analysis can elucidate why this is so. Through a careful analysis ofpopular media it shows how key identities are discursively constructed to radically reorder the

moral standing of African poachers and wild animals. These discursively constructed identitiesoperate to simultaneously humanize wild animals and denigrate poachers, including im-poverished peasants searching for small game or fish. As a consequence, it argues, human

rights abuses and deadly violence against humans in the defense of ‘‘biodiversity’’ havebecome normalized within African national parks.� 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Political ecology; Violence; Africa; Environmental ethics; Conservation

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814 R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813–837

‘‘In my book, it’s immoral to be shooting poachers. Somebody should doa profile of the guys who have been shot. He’s an average normal guy, a poorfarmer who is trying to feed his family’’.Garth Owen-Smith, former warden at Etosha National Park, Namibia, quotedin Bonner, 1992: 21

‘‘Personally, I don’t mind if they shoot a few people, there’s too many peopleanyway. It’s the elephants I’m worried about’’.Unidentified white conservation professional in Nairobi, Kenya, quoted inHilsum, 1988

The 1980s witnessed a steep drop in East Africa’s elephant population and a nearcomplete collapse of the continent’s black rhino population. African governmentsresponded to international and domestic pressure to slow the decline by furthermilitarizing the enforcement of wildlife and national park laws. A militarizedresponse was justified by the assertion that a highly organized and heavily armednetwork of ivory and rhino horn poachers was causing the fall in wildlifepopulations. Zimbabwe responded in 1985 with ‘‘Operation Stronghold’’, a para-military action commanded by white former Rhodesian Defense Forces officersdesigned to hunt down and kill black poachers. In Kenya, President Daniel ArapMoi issued a shoot-on-sight order in 1988 and sent thousands of police into thenational parks suffering the greatest elephant losses. In June 1989, Tanzanialaunched ‘‘Operation Uhai’’ in an effort to sweep protected areas and adjacentcommunities clean of ‘‘poachers’’ using a military strike force comprised of army,police, and Wildlife Division personnel. Military equipment, including automaticassault rifles, helicopters, and even sophisticated remote-controlled surveillanceaircraft flowed to wildlife agencies in these and several other countries in the region.

In the context of the increased militarization of African protected areas, war hasbecome a common metaphor for wildlife protection and a model for stateconservation practices. Shoot-on-sight orders for ‘‘poachers’’ and ‘‘bandits’’ caughtin protected areas were issued in Kenya and Zimbabwe (and subsequently inTanzania, Central African Republic, and Malawi). Entertainment media and newsjournalists made reference to ‘‘The Rhino War’’, the ‘‘ivory poaching war’’, and the‘‘war against the poachers’’.1 Richard Leakey, the former Director of the KenyaWildlife Service during the early years of the shoot-on-sight initiative titled his recentmemoir of the period, Wildlife Wars (Leakey & Morell, 2001). Following the 1992Rio Conference and the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the waron poaching has been reconceptualized as part of a general global war forbiodiversity protection, exemplified by World Bank President James Wolfensohn’srecent co-authored essay Winning the war on biodiversity conservation (Wolfensohn,Seligmann, & El-Ashry, 2000: 39).

1 Philip Cayford wrote and produced The Rhino War for a National Geographic television special in

1988. ‘‘Ivory poaching war’’ was part of a headline (The Daily Telegraph Staff, 1989) and the ‘‘war against

poachers’’ is from a British newspaper article (Page, 1989).

815R.P. Neumann / Political Geography 23 (2004) 813–837

A war on people in defense of wild animals demands a close examination of themoral justification. My interest in the ethical and moral issues of the war forbiodiversity in Africa began in 1988 when I arrived in East Africa for the first time toconduct preliminary research for a doctoral dissertation. I went to Nairobi, Kenya todiscuss my research interests with representatives of the World Conservation Union(IUCN), Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the Africa Wildlife Foundation(AWF) at their regional headquarters. My attempts to engage them in a discussionof Moi’s shoot-on-sight order, then just recently issued, fell flat. No one openlyexpressed the neo-Malthusian, vaguely racist sentiment of the white conservationprofessional quoted in the epigraph. Rather, my inquiries were met with a generaltaken-for-granted2 response that yes indeed there was an active shoot-on-sight orderin the national parks. It is the taken-for-grantedness expressed by white, expatriateconservation professionalsdand, as I will examine later, in the reportage in popularmedia in the global northdthat initially drew my attention and has intrigued mesince. One need only imagine, for example, a presidential shoot-on-sight order beingissued for poachers of endangered bison in Yellowstone National Park, or recall thatneither Kenya nor any other of the countries previously mentioned have institutedthe death penalty for poaching, to suggest that the ethics supporting such practices inAfrica need scrutiny.

This special issue on ethics in political ecology provides an opportunity to explorethe ethical dimensions of the rise of shoot-on-sight protocols and their effects on thelevels of violence in African protected areas. Questions of the ‘‘moral economy’’ ofsubaltern groups and ‘‘who gains and who loses’’ in resource allocation have longbeen important in political ecology (e.g. Watts, 1983; Blaikie, 1985; Neumann, 1998),but they have been defined and explored in largely socio-political rather than inexplicitly ethical terms. The ‘‘chain of explanation’’ approach (Blaikie & Brookfield,1987) that has been central to much political ecology writing carries an intimation ofnormative concerns in the sense that it challenges the fixation on proximatecausation as a blame-the-victim account of degradation. More recent politicalecology studies have begun to explicitly explore the relationships among violence,justice, ecological change, and environmental conservation (Zerner, 2000a; Peluso &Watts, 2001a). The studies in each of these collections, to varying degrees, areconcerned with social and geographic contextdhow specific environments and websof social relations influence the expression of violencedand with the role ofdiscursive constructions of nature and cultural identity in framing violence andjustice. In this article, I want to build on and extend the political ecology of violenceand justice through an engagement with the environmental ethics literature.

The goals of this analysis are to understand the moral justification for shoot-on-sight protocols in African biodiversity protection and examine the ramifications forthe overall level of violence in the practice of national park and wildlife conservation.My argument runs as follows. A moral justification for shoot-on-sight orders, and

2 This term has been employed in geography in a variety of ways since its introduction by Ley (1977).

Here I refer to the intersubjective meanings that shape the practice of everyday life.


the treatment of biodiversity conservation as the conduct of war more generally,cannot be demonstrated within the various philosophical approaches to environ-mental ethics. This determination then raises the question of how the ‘‘war onpoachers’’ has become normalized in African conservation practice and been left, forthe most part, publicly unexamined by conservation organizations and popularmedia centered in the global north. The answer, I argue, lies in the way that people,places, and things are discursively constructed as different or similar and the contextthis creates for determining moral worthiness and standing. Finally, I argue thatdiscourses are not simply a set of ideas. By defining categories and creating andlimiting possibilities a discourse has historical, material consequencesdin this casea ratcheting up of violence in wildlife conservation in Africa.

The article is organized around three questions that are raised by the declarationof war against African poachers in defense of biodiversity. First, how is theprotection of biodiversity by means of militarized defense of wild animals made themoral equivalent of war? Stated differently, how can what are essentially battleordersdblanket shoot-to-kill/shoot-on-sight ordersdbe morally justified for thecase of people found illegally inside protected areas? In answering this question, Ideliberate on the important philosophical and legal differences between intrinsicvalue and moral standing of nonhuman species. I will also explore the notion of‘‘moral community’’ to illuminate how the allocation of moral rights and obligationsare bound up with the establishment of metaphorical and spatial boundaries.Second, what role does discourse play in making the extra-judicial killing ofpoachers more morally acceptable? The analysis concentrates on the discursivepractices through which the boundaries of moral communities and the identities oftheir members are established, and how ideologies of race, gender, ethnicity, andfamily inform these discursive practices. A goal here is to show how biodiversityprotection operates within a discourse that identifies victims and villains andestablishes the relative moral positions of wild animals and human groups. Third, towhat extent does the war for biodiversity have the effect of generally ratcheting upthe level of violence in and around national parks? Here I explore the idea that in thecontext of standing shoot-to-kill/shoot-on-sight orders and the widespread de-ployment of the metaphor of war there has been a normalization of violence in theenforcement of conservation laws. I conduct this exploration by presenting threeillustrative cases from Tanzania, Malawi, and Botswana where domestic African andinternational human rights groups have accused African conservation officers ofmurder, rape, and torture of local residents caught inside protected area boundaries.

Moral questions in the war for global biodiversity

The broader context for the turn toward war metaphors and models in con-servation is the rise of ‘‘environmental security’’ (e.g. Homer-Dixon, 1999) thinkingin domestic policy circles and international affairs, much of which is ‘‘informed bya deep fear of the poor and their claims on resources’’ that is grounded in neo-Malthusian understandings of scarcity and conflict (Peluso & Watts, 2001b: 7–8).


That is, it is rooted in Malthusian ideas of the relationship between population andresources that project a future of misery resulting from unchecked geometric growthof human population. Scientists resurrected these ideas in the mid-twentieth centuryand by the end of the 1950s the ‘‘population problem’’ became key in scientificdiscussions about nature-society relations (Adams, 2001). In the 1960s and 1970s,neo-Malthusianism was prominent in environmentalist thinking on the ‘‘environ-mental crisis’’ in the Third World and figures prominently in the formulation of thesustainable development paradigm (Adams, 2001). The environmental securityliterature represents the most recent application of neo-Malthusianism ideas aboutresource scarcity, positing a simple (and simplistic) linear causal relationship amongpopulation growth, resource scarcity, and violence. Critiques of neo-Malthusianmodels of nature-society were prominent in early political ecology (Neumann, 1992)and remain central to its critiques of environmental security (Peluso & Watts,2001b).

Environmental security encompasses a range of ideologies and theoretical pers-pectives, but a prevalent theme is an emphasis on the militarization of environmentalconcerns accompanied by increased possibilities for authoritarian controls.Authoritarianism is a logical outcome of the extension of certain moral philosophicalstances to questions of environmental sustainability (Harvey, 1993; Adams, 2001).For example, Garrett Hardin’s (1974) articulation of ‘‘lifeboat ethics’’da neo-Malthusian ethic based on the reasoning that it is more ethical to let some people diein situations of scarcity rather than risk the destruction of the resource base thatsupports all of humanitydis arguably part of the intellectual lineage of con-temporary environmental security and the ‘‘war for biodiversity’’. Biodiversity in allits forms has been constructed as a scarce ‘‘resource’’, conceived of as ecologicallyand economical vital, limited in supply, and threatened by human activities, therebyappearing to force us into ‘‘painful choices’’ about ‘‘sacrificing some humans of thisgeneration for the benefit of future human generations or nonhuman species’’ (Byers,1994: 124). One of the aims of this article is to probe in biodiversity conservation theethics supporting the ‘‘painful choices’’ of deciding which people get pushed into thewater and which stay on the ‘‘lifeboat’’.

The analysis presented here explores the ‘‘moral geography’’ (Smith, 1997, 2000)of the war on biodiversity and highlights the importance of moral and spatialboundaries in structuring and justifying militarized interventions. Geography iscentral to establishing the moral rights of certain groups and the morality of violencein war for biodiversity. National park boundaries have long-served as the physicaland symbolic divide between nature and culture and as the geographic expression ofhumanity’s moral commitment to biodiversity protection. Certain ways of treatinganimals that are widely (but not universally) accepted as moral, such as hunting andtrapping, are illegal and morally unacceptable within the boundaries of nationalparks. The war for biodiversity has added a new dimension to the moral geographyof conservation. At the height of state crackdowns on poaching, many Africanprotected areas came to resemble the ‘‘free-fire zones’’ established by the U.S.military during the Vietnam War. Civiliansdincluding women and juvenilesdfoundwithin free-fire zones can be treated as potential combatants. Thus certain ways of


treating humans that are widely recognized as immoral, such as shooting them onsight and executing them without trial, become normalized and accepted within theboundaries of some national parks and justifiable in the name of biodiversityprotection.

In exploring the moral dimensions of the war for biodiversity I will make use ofthe concept of moral community. One notion of moral community was brought intopolitical ecology from the literature on the moral economy of peasantries (Watts,1983; Neumann, 1998). The sense conveyed in the moral economy version is that themoral community is constructed of a web of responsibilities, entitlements, obliga-tions, and reciprocities established through social ties that can extend across a rangeof spatial scales from the peasant household, to the nation-state, and beyond. This isnot the usage that I wish to employ here. Rather, the notion with which I wish toengage in this discussion is derived from feminist and environmental ethics literatureon the extension of rights (O’Neil, 1997; Smith, 2000; Whatmore, 2002). Forexample, Whatmoredemploying the term ‘‘ethical community’’ rather than moralcommunitydexplores the assignment of rights among various groups of humanindividuals and non-human entities, including efforts to grant the status of individualrights bearer to non-human creatures, a process she calls ‘‘moral extensionism’’(Whatmore, 2002: 156). Extending moral standing to encompass increasing numbersof categories of things and beings expands the ethical (moral) community. Thus, bymoral community I mean the assemblage of individuals, things, and collectivitiesthat are awarded moral standing within specific historical and geographical contexts.

Questions concerning the moral obligation of humans to defend and protect thenon-human world are fundamental to the modern conceptualization of wildlifeconservation and management. In one of his earliest essays, Aldo Leopold, widelyrecognized as the founder of scientific wildlife management, presented a history ofwestern civilization as a progressive extension of moral standing to greater and greaterproportions of humanity (Leopold, 1933). Adopting an evolutionary stance inexplaining the changing boundaries of ourmoral community, he reasoned thatmodernhumans had been and would continue to accord increasingly greaterethical consideration toward the non-human world. Through the application ofwildlifemanagement principles, ‘‘societymay some day paint a new and possibly betterpicture of itself’’ (Leopold, 1933: 642). Scientific wildlife management, he concluded,could be the basis for fulfilling our moral obligation to the non-human world.

Roderick Nash, with his book, The Rights of Nature (Nash, 1989), continued todevelop this conceptualization of the history of modernity being a story of expandingmoral consideration to include greater portions of humanity and nature. Hecharacterized the (North American) movement to promote the ethical treatment ofnon-human nature as ‘‘an evolution of ethics from natural rights of a limited groupof humans to the rights of parts or, in some theories, all of nature’’ (Nash, 1989: 4).A drawing that represents this conceptualization is reproduced in Fig. 1. Nashacknowledges this as a simplification, but posits that it is a generally faithfulrepresentation of the evolving understanding of right and wrong behavior that isreflected in law and social norms. I will return to Fig. 1 later in this section ina discussion of the idea of moral community.


The relatively recent ‘‘discovery’’ of global biodiversity has raised new questionsin the field of environmental ethics regarding the expansion of our moralcommunity. O’Neil (1997) has argued cogently that in these debates manyenvironmental ethicists commonly fail to distinguish between the intrinsic valueand moral standing of wild species. O’Neil reasoned that the obligation of humansociety to protect biodiversity is derived from a general obligation to protect thingsthat possess intrinsic value, such as ancient artifacts or works of art. Wild species, asa category of things possessing intrinsic value, can and should be protected byhumans. He points out, however, that environmental holists3 are in error when theyconclude from this that species have moral standing, which ‘‘refers to an entity’smembership in the moral community’’ and its ability to possess rights (O’Neil, 1997:47). Geographers have similarly conflated standing and intrinsic value, reasoning,‘‘[b]eings with intrinsic value are said to be within our ‘moral community’’’ (Lynn,1998: 286). Species, like works of art, may possess intrinsic value or a ‘‘good’’dsuchas beauty or gracedbut it is not necessarily a moral good. Biodiversity, as composedof a collection of species, does not belong to a moral community, but it does haveintrinsic value and we thus have a duty to protect it. The 1992 international

Self

Family

Tribe

Region

Nation

Race

Humans

Animals

Plants

Life

Ecosystems

Planet

Rocks

Universe

Future

Present

Pre-EthicalPast

EthicalPast

Fig. 1. The evolution of ethics (redrawn from Nash, 1989: 5).

3 Environmental holism refers to philosophical position that collective entities, such as species and

ecosystems, have moral standing.


Convention on Biological Diversity is explicitly based on this reasoning. Thepreamble to the Convention begins, ‘‘The contracting parties, conscious of theintrinsic value of biological diversity.’’ (Birnie & Boyle, 1995: 590). Nowhere inthe document is there a statement on the moral standing of species and the terms,‘‘moral’’, ‘‘moral community’’, or ‘‘moral good’’ are not used, reflecting the generalanthropocentric basis for the convention.

O’Neil’s argument specifically addressed the flaws in the reasoning of environ-mental holists regarding the rights of species. From an environmental individualistperspective, there is a new movement afoot among some conservationists and animalrights activists to extend full moral standing to individual members of certainprimate species. A recently formed organization called the Great Ape Project (GAP)seeks to ‘‘include the non-human great apes within the community of equals bygranting them the basic moral and legal protection that only human beings currentlyenjoy’’ (GAP, 2001). Taking the Anti-Slavery Society as its political model, GAPseeks to include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans with human beings in a‘‘moral community’’ where all members have equal rights to life and liberty. GreatApe Standing and Personhood (GRASP) is an even more recent spin-off of GAP.This organization’s goal is to ‘‘enable a non-human plaintiff to sue in a court of lawin her own name, with the assistance of a human guardian’’ (GRASP, 2001). Inessence, this would shift the legal standing of individuals of some primate speciesfrom that of ‘‘property’’ to that of ‘‘person’’.

I have provided this brief sketch of the moral debates surrounding wildlifeconservation and biodiversity protection to demonstrate that the war on poachershas largely ignored, obscured, and downplayed the ethical complexities. Likewise,mainstream environmental ethics, while advocating the extension of ethical treat-ment and moral obligation beyond humanity, has little to say about the moral limitsof our efforts to protect biodiversity. The attempts of GAP and GRASP to alter themoral and legal standing of individuals of certain species illustrate how much wewould need to expand the boundaries of our moral community in order to movebeyond merely recognizing the intrinsic value of wild species. From anenvironmental individualist standpoint, only if individuals of a non-human specieswere accorded the same fundamental rights and moral standing as humanindividuals would they be included in our moral community. From this perspective,therefore, until non-human species are granted full moral standing, the moraljustification for taking a human life in defense of the lives of individual wild animalsis weak. From a biocentric holist4 standpoint, we would need to fundamentallyrestructure membership in the moral community and ‘‘extend maximal protection towild nature while at the same time devaluing human cultural and individual moralworth’’ (King, 1997: 220). Even if, however, we privilege the rights of nature overindividual human rights in an effort to protect biodiversity, before the taking ofa human life could be morally justified, an entire species must be threatened to the

4 Biocentric holism refers to the philosophical position that combines biocentrismdthe notion that

human interests are not a priori superior to non-human interestsdand environmental holism.


point that the loss of any individual or group of individuals directly and immediatelylessens the chances that the species will survive.

Based on this brief exploration, the question of the moral basis for issuing shoot-on-sight orders as a means to defend biodiversity does not appear to be readily oreasily answerable. Part of the difficulty results from the existence of a multitude ofincompatible philosophical stances in environmental ethics, including holist versusindividualist, universalist versus relativist, and anthropocentric versus biocentric,that shape answers to moral questions. Even more fundamental than these oppo-sitions are the questions regarding the ontological nature of the categoriesdsuch asfamily, race, biodiversity, and ecosystemsdthat are used in discussing membershipin the moral community. Let me turn to Nash’s diagram in Fig. 1 to illustrate. Thediagram implies that the boundaries of social categories such as tribe, nation, race,are homogeneous, given, and fixed and easily recognizable through objectiveobservation, rather than highly contested social constructions. For example, didwestern (i.e. white, European) civilization evolve by progressively extending moralstanding to the ‘‘black race’’, thereby eliminating slavery, or was the very category,‘‘race’’, historically socially constructed so as to morally justify slavery and otherforms of exploitation and domination? Similar ontological questions arise withregard to other categories in the diagram, such as ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘tribe’’ which, oftenas not, have been constructed as categories of exclusion in a process of co-constituting identity and moral community. Further, are these categories as morallyhomogeneous as they appear, or are there ‘‘nested’’ hierarchies within categories inwhich we could rank moral standing? In the category ‘‘humans’’, for example, wherewould we place inside stock traders, pedophiles, and poachers in a moral hierarchy?If nested hierarchies are possible, can some members of one category ‘‘slip’’ and falloutside of the bounds of the moral community?

The critical points to be made here are that the categories are not homogeneous,fixed, or given but are discursive constructions reflecting prevailing ideologies ofspecific times and specific places and that the movement of the boundaries of ourmoral community is not a linear progression, but situational and contingent. Tosuggest that membership in the moral community is situational and contingent is notto argue for moral relativism as an alternative to universalism. Rather it is to‘‘recognize the spatial (and temporal) particularity’’ (Smith, 1997: 586) in the ap-plication of moral codes and examine how discursive practices make certain kinds ofviolence morally defensible in particular contexts. This approach points toward anacknowledgement of the heterogeneity of categories and a focus on processes andrelationships that determine the position of human and non-human individuals andgroups within a fluctuating and situational moral community (Harvey, 1993; King,1997). I turn now to examine how categories, identities, relationships, and rights inthe war on biodiversity are shaped through discursive practices.

The discursive boundaries of the moral community

Discourse theory, discourse analysis, and related poststructuralist approacheshave challenged existing theorizations of human-environment relations while


simultaneously opening new methodological and epistemological possibilities forpolitical ecology (Blaikie, 1996; Peet & Watts, 1996; Escobar, 1996, 1999). Dis-courses are formed by a body of textsdscholarly, popular, journalistic, orliterarydthat together produce not only an internally consistent knowledge field,but also the ‘‘very reality they appear to describe’’ (Said, 1978: 94). Variousdefinitions of discourses stress the way desires, imaginaries, ideologies, andmetaphors work to produce textual products that both reflect and shape relationsof power. ‘‘Discourses express human thought, fantasy, and desire. They are alsoinstitutionally based, materially constrained, experientially grounded manifestationsof social and power relations’’ (Harvey, 1996: 80). A discourse is a framework thatembraces ‘‘particular combinations of narratives, concepts, ideologies and signifyingpractices’’ (Barnes & Duncan, 1992: 8) and ‘‘emphasizes some concepts at theexpense of others’’ (Peet & Watts, 1996: 14). Peet & Watts theorize relations betweengeographical groups of people in terms of ‘‘regional discursive formations’’ wherein‘‘modes of thought, logics, themes, styles of expression, and typical metaphors runthrough the discursive history of a region, appearing in a variety of forms,disappearing occasionally, only to reappear with even greater intensity in newguises’’ (Peet & Watts, 1996: 16). For Africa, as for many regions of the south,regional discursive formations are inseparable from the historical experience ofcolonialism and the interregional relations of power that produced and sustained it.

With respect to relationships of power among various social groupings (e.g. race,class, and gender) and world regions and cultures, discourse plays an important rollin the mutual constitution of self and ‘‘otherness’’. In Orientalist discourse, forexample, the idea of non-Europeans as inferior Other is established through com-parisons with the idea of a European identity that is constructed as superior (Said,1978: 7). Measures of superiority are themselves not fixed or given but are generatedin a continuous process of discursively producing difference. Apropos of this article’sfocus, one key way that difference is constructed is by casting the Other as morallyand culturally inferior to self on the basis of comparative interactions withanimals. In late nineteenth century Sweden, for example, the cultural identity ofa newly formed urban middle class was constructed as superior to rural agriculturalclasses partly on the basis of their comparative treatment of domesticated animals(Frykman & Lofgren, 1987). Immigrant groups’ animal practices are often used inthe construction of racial difference, casting the culture of the immigrant Other ascruel or uncivilized on the basis of their interaction with domesticated animals(Elder, Wolch, & Emel, 1998). As elaborated later in this section, during the colonialperiod African peoples were categorized as morally inferior to Europeans partly onthe basis of what white hunter-conservationists labeled cruel and savage treatment ofwild animals.

In this section I analyze how discursive practices deployed in the war forbiodiversity recycle and engage established notions of African otherness to structuremorally appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and measures of worthiness formoral treatment. Through a discursive analysis I hope to show how a shoot-on-sightorder in the war for biodiversity ‘‘requires cultural processes of coding the ‘other’ asdemonic, savage, and the legitimate subject of violence’’ (Peluso &Watts, 2001b: 31).


As Smith observed, ‘‘Moral assumptions are bound up with the social constructionof different groups, who is included and excluded, and so on’’ (Smith, 1997: 587). Inthe case of Africa, various forms of popular media produced in the global north havetended to reinforce the preconceived notions of a continent occupied by a ‘‘black’’,‘‘brutal’’, and ‘‘backward’’ Other (Fair, 1993). ‘‘In reproducing the dominant or pre-vailing language and discourses, media organizations position individuals, objects,and relations in a way that naturalizes the boundaries of discussion as the only onespossible or the only ones that are ‘real’’’ (Fair, 1993: 13). I am not arguing thatglobal biodiversity conservation constitutes a discourse (although it may) or that thethreat of biodiversity loss is not ‘real’ but some sort of linguistic fabrication.5 Rather,I want to explore how the war for biodiversity in Africa encounters and incorporatesexisting ideologies, representations, and narratives, which collectively constitutea discourse of African otherness and which establish relative positions in a situationalmoral community. The point that I want to make through this analysis is that thediscursive construction of difference operates to position various human groups andwild animal species in moral relation to one another and that these positions andboundaries are naturalized and taken for granted in popular media.

To illustrate my arguments, I will rely on the highly original work of two an-thropologists who tracked the representation of non-Europeans in NationalGeographic magazine in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In a fascinatingstudy, Lutz & Collins (1993) analyze National Geographic as a cultural productwithdby virtue of its mass readership and its popular status as an outlet for scientificinformationda great deal of influence in shaping the identities of Euro-Americanself and non-European Other. Their method, in part, was to randomly selectphotographs of non-European peoples and closely examine the photos’ structure andcontent as a way to analyze the representation and production of difference. Theyexamine the photographs not from the perspective of how successful or not they arein depicting the ‘‘real’’ world, but ‘‘from the idea that identity formation draws onimages of the other’’ (Lutz & Collins, 1993: 2). Following Lutz & Collins (1993: 12–13 and 285), I focus on systematically analyzing the structure, content, andjuxtaposition of photographs, observing in particular, skin color, gender, dress,surroundings, and camera gaze. The photograph captions are also critical to theprocess of representing difference, first, because the majority of the magazine’sreaders read only captions and the staff therefore take great pains to use them toprovide ‘‘a fix on the article’’, and second, because captions in general serve torationalize our understanding of an image, ‘‘burdening it with a culture, a moral, animagination’’ (Roland Barthes, quoted in Lutz & Collins, 1993: 76).

Borrowing from the insights and methods of Lutz & Collins, I turn now to ananalysis of the photographic and textual content of a National Geographic magazinearticle published in 1991. The article, ‘‘Elephantsdout of time out of space’’

5 It is my position that biodiversity, in all its forms, has been historically diminished by human

activities, is presently increasingly threatened, and that this is economically, culturally, and ecologically

a negative outcome.


(Chadwick, 1991), was published in the aftermath of the declaration of theinternational ban on the ivory trade and the launching of the war on poachers.6 Itcovers both African and Asian elephants, but features the 1980s collapse of the EastAfrican population and the Kenya government’s shoot-on-sight response. Throughthe photographs, captions, and text, the article operates to relationally construct theidentities and moral status of the poacher/Other, hunter/European, and elephants.7

Emerging from these representations is a moral positioning, with the hunter/European secure in the center of the constructed moral community, the poacher/Other pushed toward the edge, and elephants brought closer to the center.

One of the key ways of establishing these relational positions in the moralcommunity is to depict the savagery of the poacher/Other in comparison to thesporting hunter/European. Describing the scene of one illegal elephant kill in Kenya,Chadwick wrote of ‘‘the stench of rotting flesh, elephants with their faces hacked offto allow the killers to get at the root of the tusks’’ (Chadwick, 1991: 25). The luriddetails and (self-acknowledged) angry tone of the prose reinforce the idea that theproduct of poachers’ activities is shameful slaughter. Elsewhere poachers arecharacterized as ‘‘gangs [of] tough, bushwise bandits. armed with AK-47 assaultrifles’’ (24). There are two photographs of poachers accompanying the text, the firstof which captures the moment of a poacher’s death as he is shot by wildlife officers in1982. The second shows a lone African man in a loincloth standing beside a decayedelephant carcass. The caption reads:

Shooting then stabbing an elephant to death, this Pygmy was just followingorders. Deep in the Congo, Pygmies are hired and exploited by ivory traders,many of whom come from foreign countries. Issued a gun and a few bullets, thePygmy must return with an elephant to receive his payment: meat rations,manioc, perhaps liquor and cigarettes (Chadwick, 1991: 32).

6 I have chosen this article for two reasons. First, because it is published in National Geographic

magazine, it allows me to build on the methods of the Lutz & Collins study. Second, this article most

clearly places the rise of the war for biodiversity protection in the geographical and historical context of

the ivory ban. There are other National Geographic magazine articles that also support discourses about

African peoples and environments, but I have chosen to do a singe, in-depth analysis rather than

a shallower, broader analysis. Likewise there are examples of texts from popular media that can be viewed

as reflecting and perpetuating the discourses I analyze here. Some of these are cited in this article. In the

interests of space, I cannot give these the depth of treatment that I have given to the 1991 National

Geographic magazine article. I wish to thank Gail Hollander for bringing this magazine issue to my

attention.7 There are multiple possibilities to examine other identities represented in popular media accounts of

the war on poaching, including African politicians and bureaucrats, national park guards, conservation

professionals, as well as many other wildlife species. I have chosen to focus on these three for two reasons.

One is to keep the analysis within the limits of an article-length manuscript. The second has to with the

centrality of these three representations in the discourse of biodiversity protection. Elephants are viewed as

‘‘emblematic of the wild and the struggle to preserve it’’ in Africa (Gup, 1989: 67). Hunters and poachers

represent two contrasting images of the legitimate and illegitimate killers of this emblem.


Several features of the photo and caption are important for establishing the socialidentity and moral position of the poacher/Other. First, there is the setting: theunpleasant condition of the elephant carcassdrotting, hacked into pieces, and withthe ivory missingdand its proximate association with an African poacher. Thepoacher is photographed alone ‘‘deep in the Congo’’ and dressed only in a loincloth,signaling his distance from the West and the moral constraints of civilized society, aswell as his low position on the scale of cultural evolution. His gaze is directed awayfrom the camera, up and to the right, and his expression is unsmiling and un-comfortable, perhaps fearful. Labeled only as ‘‘this Pygmy’’, the poacher has noindividual identity (non-African portrait subjects in the article are named inaccompanying captions) and the caption makes clear that the subject lacks agency.This, however, does not elicit our sympathy for his plight. Quite the contrary, as thecaption’s explanation of his actions as ‘‘just following orders’’, a morally vacuousdefense given that his sole motivation in killing is reported to be the acquisition ofa little food and self-gratification from the pleasures of alcohol and tobacco.

The full power and effect of this image of the poacher/Other can only be graspedin juxtaposition with the image of the hunter/European presented a few pagesfurther into the article. In this photo a white family hunting together in Zimbabwestands next to the carcass of a recently killed elephant. The accompanying captionreads:

‘‘I don’t want the animal to suffer,’’ says Jan Duncan, who bagged this bullwhile on safari in Zimbabwe with her husband, Dan, and son, Scott. ‘‘ButZimbabwe has too many elephants, and being shot is less painful than starvingto death’’ (Chadwick, 1991: 43).

This photo and caption present a distinct contrast to the previous illustration. Inthis case the elephant carcass is also in proximate location to the portrait subjects,but it is bloodless, lies corporeally intact, and appears almost in repose, as if it hadbeen ‘‘put to sleep’’. The Duncans, smiling directly into the camera, appear to be themodel of a white, close knit nuclear family, so conscientious about their appearancesthat even in the African bush their slacks are sharply creased. They are in Africa, butonly as visitors, and we might imagine them as neighbors on the vacation ofa lifetime. In distinction from the caption identifying the African poacher only as‘‘this Pygmy’’, Jan Duncan the hunter is allowed her individual identity as well asa voice to express her motivations in killing an elephant. She expresses no self-interest at all and only compassion for the beast, explaining that a bullet is ‘‘lesspainful than starving’’.

There are endless variations on this theme of the cruel and wanton slaughterperpetrated by black Africans juxtaposed against the sporting and compassionatehunting of white Europeans throughout the popular and scientific conservationliterature of the twentieth century (MacKenzie, 1988; Neumann, 1996, 1998). Earlyin the twentieth century, European hunters of African big game justified theirprivileged access to wildlife on grounds that their goals were morally superior toAfricans’. ‘‘Your true sportsman’’, wrote one influential British hunter-aristocrat, ‘‘isalways a real lover of nature. He kills, it is true, but only in sweet reasonableness and


moderation.’’ (Seton-Karr, 1908: 26). This is but one example of numerous textsproduced by European hunter-conservationists during the colonial period thatdiscursively constructed the moral superiority of Europeans (e.g. Selous, 1881 [1967];Roosevelt, 1910; Lyell, 1923), representing European hunting as sporting andrational and African hunting as wasteful, ‘‘indiscriminate slaughter’’ (Neumann,1996, 2002). The comparison of African poaching and European hunting presentedin National Geographic magazine can thus be seen as a reworking of long-establishednarratives in the discursive construction of European and African cultures.

A second way through which the article establishes relative positions in the moralcommunity is through an elaboration of the perceived human qualities of elephants.For example, the author quotes a well-known elephant researcher on the impact ofthe illegal ivory trade on elephant populations. ‘‘The whole society began to collapse.Now you see leaderless bands of sub-adults and orphans. The gathering of these lastgroups into big terrified herds of refugees.’’ (Ian Douglas-Hamilton quoted inChadwick, 1991: 24). Invoking a vision of a collapsed ‘‘society’’ of ‘‘refugees’’ and‘‘orphans’’ represents the decline in elephant population numbers as a situation thatmorally demands international intervention. Observing the behavior of elephantsaround carcasses of herd members, some researchers have become convinced that‘‘these giants can die outright of grief’’ (Chadwick, 1991: 26). The author was himselfaware of the temptations of anthropomorphizing in his own writing. After observingan elephant that he imagined could be ‘‘laughing to himself’’, he wrote: ‘‘It would beslightly less anthropomorphic to say they have an immense capacity for amusement’’(43). Without questioning whether non-human species may experience joy, it is hardto see this elaboration on elephants’ emotional tendencies as ‘‘less anthropomor-phic’’ and not part of the construction of a cultural identity for elephants that ishuman-like. There is an emphasis throughout the article on the sociability ofelephants and the importance of family relations within the herds, as in theobservation that ‘‘[r]elated families often spend time together, forming what arecalled bond groups’’ (43). The article closes with a silhouette photograph of twoelephants with their trunks entwined in a gesture the caption describes as ‘‘Earnest asa handshake and gentle as a caress’’ and a display ‘‘of ponderous affection’’ (48).

To summarize from this analysis, the essential identity of the poacher/Other ismale, black African, travels alone or in all-male gangs, and possesses cunning andsuperior arms.8 He stands in sharp contrast to the compassionate, sporting, andconservation-minded hunter/European. The photographs and captions selected forthe National Geographicmagazine article reflect and sustain this difference, operatingin relation to one another to construct contrasting identities of the European/hunterand poacher/Other. Together the photos associate, poor, uncivilized, male Africanswith wasteful destruction of a scarce resource (biodiversity, as embodied in thedecaying carcass) and affluent, white families with conservation-minded sustainablehunting. Wild animals, as victims of the poacher/Other, are portrayed in the popular

8 In this representation the African poacher is heir to a longstanding and durable symbolic

representation of the black male as a threat to white civilization and a challenge to white male dominance.


and scientific conservation literature as highly intelligent, possessing the best humanqualities of loyalty, dedication to family, and compassion and capable of ex-periencing a full range of human emotions from grief to joy. The analysis shows howideologies of race, gender, and family are active in the discursive construction of theidentities of the poacher/Other, the hunter/European, and wild animals. Thelanguage and imagery deployed in these discursive constructions elevate the moralstanding of wild animals that move in ‘‘bond groups’’ and care for their sick andaging, while diminishing that of the poacher/Other who travels in ‘‘gangs’’ and killsfor ‘‘liquor and cigarettes’’.

This discursive analysis is not meant to challenge the idea that animals, wild,captive, or domesticated, should be subject to more ethical treatment. Nor is itmeant to engage in debate over the intelligence and emotional capacity of animals.Rather, one purpose is to suggest that the discursive construction of elephants ashuman-like has important material consequences. One of the consequences is thatsentimental appeals to save elephants that play to and reinforce northerners’anthropomorphic visions are mobilized by international conservation organizationto raise donations. Africa-based critics within the conservation community suggest,‘‘Anthropomorphic interpretations of wildlife behavior and environmental impactsare emphasized [by northern-based conservation organizations] to promote publicinterest.to get money’’ (Crowe & Shryer, 1995: 27). The 1989 ivory ban wasa major fundraiser for conservation organizations like AWF, which urgedAmericans to ‘‘end the slaughter’’ of African elephants by donating (Bonner,1992). A second material consequence is the violence done to African populations,a subject that the conservation community is divided on, as indicated in theepigraphs to this article. As two Botswana conservation biologists point out, infundraising and media messages about wildlife conservation northern patrons ‘‘arenot told about the cost to Africans for protecting animals that donors love to love’’(Crowe & Shryer, 1995: 27).

A second purpose of the analysis returns us to the question of ethics in the war forbiodiversity in Africa. It illustrates that as we discursively construct certain wildanimals as near-human cousins, we draw them closer to and even inside theboundaries of our moral community. The National Geographic magazine articleoffers a somewhat restrained version of anthropomorphic construction of elephantscompared to other mass media outlets. Commenting on the portrayal of thepoaching war in British tabloids Bonner observed that they ‘‘ran tear-jerking storiesabout baby elephants orphaned when their mothers were killed by poachers’’(Bonner, 1992: 141). These sorts of representations in popular media make it easiernot only to declare war in their defense, but also to declare a just war. By framing themilitarization of biodiversity protection as the prosecution of a just war, wartimeviolence, such as the abrogation of basic human rights and extra-judicial executions,becomes normalized and even morally tolerable. As Elder et al. point out, depictinga particular treatment of animals as savagery ‘‘can be used to dehumanize those whoengage in it’’ (Elder et al., 1998: 83). I turn now to examine some cases thatdemonstrate how the war for biodiversity protection has normalized deadly violencein African protected areas.


Collateral damage in the war for biodiversity

Military metaphors and organizational styles are not particularly new in Africanwildlife conservation. The historical roots of wildlife conservation are very closelyassociated with European, especially British, military campaigns in the nineteenthcentury conquest of sub-Saharan Africadmany of the first game wardens in Eastand southern Africa were veterans of those campaigns (MacKenzie, 1988; Neumann,1998). In countries such as Zimbabwe and Kenya that suffered through armedinsurrections against European colonial control and guerilla wars of liberation, parkand wildlife personnel became involved in government suppression efforts. Forexample, following Kenya’s 1952 Mau Mau emergency, national park officialsutilized the training they received in bush warfare several years later in anti-poachingcampaigns (Steinhart, 1994). Moreover, the main recruiting grounds for park guardsand game scouts have been the army, police, and prisons where military-stylediscipline and tactics are common. Today, most of the national park and wildlifeagencies in the region reflect a paramilitary style of organization, particularly in theirresource law enforcement sectors (Neumann, 2001).

What is new in the contemporary situation in Africa are the notions thatbiodiversity protection is a war, that Africans found inside protected areas should beshot on sight, and that advanced military equipment and training are key to theconduct of wildlife conservation. These notions are, to varying degrees, supportedand encouraged by northern media, governments, animal rights groups, andinternational conservation NGOs. Mainstream news media have suggested to theirnorthern audiences, ‘‘Only a military solution may now save Africa’s endangeredspecies’’ (Ransdell, 1989: 61) and saving the African rhino from extinction ‘‘has infact become a war’’ (Baker, 1988: 2). Virtually all of the funds for military equipmentin anti-poaching came from the north. In 1989, the Kenyan Vice President askedBritain for an aid package that for the first time included requests for helicoptergunships, automatic weapons, and other equipment to supply an anti-poaching unit(Ransdell, 1989). At the height of the anti-poaching campaign of the 1980s and1990s, the British Parliament debated sending British troops to Kenya, Tanzania,and Mozambique to help those countries protect their elephant populations (TheDaily Telegraph Staff, 1989: 6). In 1991 and 1993, the U.S. Congress included in theDepartment of Defense budget millions of dollars through the ‘‘African BiodiversityProgram’’ for military equipment, support and training for several countries (Byers,1994). In sum, ‘‘just about every affected country, asked fordand receiveddmorerifles, bullets, helicopters, vehicles and equipment to conduct their war [onpoaching]’’ (Bonner, 1992: 19). Although official WWF policy around the time ofthe ivory ban was that it would not provide funds toward the purchase of guns andammunition, it did so in at least one case in Tanzania in 1987. It also funded thepurchase of helicopters for anti-poaching in Zambezi valley in Zimbabwe in the late1980s, with the knowledge that the government’s shoot-on-sight policy wouldprobably mean that it would be used as a gunship (Bonner, 1992).

The recent war on poachers and increased militarization of biodiversity protectionhas, at different times and places, transformed expansive tracts of national park


lands in sub-Saharan Africa into spaces of deadly violence. In one of the moreastounding cases, American Bruce Hayse, a co-founder of EarthFirst!, hiredmercenaries to shoot ‘‘poachers’’ in the Central African Republic (CAR). Hayse,who after river rafting for 4 weeks in the CAR and seeing little wildlife, concluded,‘‘If we were going to save this place, people would have to be killed’’ (Clynes, 2002:4), started the African Rainforest and River Conservation (ARRC) program. Helocated a South African mercenary who was training park rangers in Malawidwhothemselves have subsequently been accused of murdering and torturing localvillagers (discussed in this section)dand hired him to take over anti-poachingoperations for ARRC. President Ange-Felix Patasse gave ARRC and its mercenariesshoot-on-sight authority in a 60 000 square kilometer area of the CAR (Clynes,2002).

In the wake of shoot-on-sight orders in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, andZimbabwe, national park guards and other state enforcement agents have likelykilled hundreds of people that they encountered inside park boundaries (see Table 1).African park and wildlife agencies have identified those killed as dangerous, well-armed poachers while African domestic and international legal and human rightsorganizations have countered that many of those killed were poorly armed,impoverished rural residents in pursuit of subsistence (see the following discussion).According to their reports, violence against the rural poor, women, and ethnicminorities appears to be escalating and spreading throughout east and southernAfrica in the name of biodiversity protection. These reports indicate the occurrenceof collateral damage in an anti-poaching war purportedly aimed at a few well-armedbandits.

While an expanding body of literature by geographers, anthropologists, andhistorians has documented the violence of displacement in the creation of nationalparks and the coercive qualities of wildlife conservation in colonial and postcolonialAfrica (e.g. Marks, 1984; Anderson & Grove, 1987; Peluso, 1993; Neumann, 1998;Ranger, 1999; Giles-Vernick, 2002; Brockington, 2002), the cases presented herepoint to a systemic, qualitative shift in violence. While this shift is difficult to confirmconclusively, biodiversity protection strategies arguably have created a new contextfor violence that is unlike anything that historically preceded it. I have not

Table 1

Estimates of people killed inside protected areas in the war for biodiversity in Africa

Country No. of people

reported killed

Sources

Zimbabwe 57 Bonner, 1992

Zimbabwe 100C Kelso, 1993

Kenya 100C Chadwick, 1991

Malawi 300C Jamali, 2000

Tanzania 20–50

(Differing estimates for the same incidents)

LHRC, 2000; The Guardian

(Tanzania), 1998

Botswana 20–96

(Differing estimates for the same incidents)

Hitchcock, 1995


encountered any suggestion of a shoot-on-sight directive for wildlife conservation inany primary archival material or secondary literature for British colonial Africa.9

Shoot-on-sight protocols, documented in five countries over the past 17 years, havenow become relatively commonplace and taken for granted. During the colonial andthe early postcolonial periods, incidents in which park and wildlife agents did killpeople were relatively rare and justified as self-defense when poachers turned theirweapons. The reports reviewed in this section suggest that violence in recent yearsincludes extra-judicial executions, not just self-defense shootings, and not as rareoccurrences, but in many incidents in different countries and national parks. Toillustrate the ethical issues raised by the spread of violence in the war for biodiversityin Africa, I turn now to examine recent human rights reports from Malawi,Tanzania, and Botswana that document incidents of murder, rape, torture, andmaiming that conservation agents allegedly perpetrated against people caught in theparks and reserves there.

The first example, from Malawi, is based on a February 2000 human rights reportproduced by a local NGO, the National Initiative for Civic Education (NICE).According to the report, ‘‘Scout Justice’’, park and wildlife agentsdreportedlytrained by South African mercenariesdhave been killing, torturing, and raping localvillagers caught inside the country’s national parks, particularly Liwonde NationalPark (Jamali, 2000). The report’s author claimed that his investigation teamwitnessed or received testimony of torture administered to ‘‘poachers’’, who includedunarmed women (Tenthani, 2000). NICE officials claimed that park guards,following a government shoot-on-sight protocol, routinely kill people caught insidethe park boundaries and leave the corpses for scavengers to consume. The reportstated that national park rangers had killed over 300 people between 1998 and 2000and that another 325 people had disappeared (Jamali, 2000). Park officials havedismissed the report as one-sided, stating that rangers only fire in self-defense againstbetter armed poachers and that women were not raped but offered sex in order to bereleased from prosecution. Contra the claims of the government, investigation teammembers maintained that most of those killed were not well-armed bandits, but weretypically unarmed peasants, including women, from nearby villages. Some wereallegedly shot while merely illegally fishing. The report presented evidence that localvillage women caught in the park have been handcuffed and gang-raped by parkguards and estimated a total of 250 rape cases. One man was allegedly beaten untilhe bled to death and another was thrown into an electric fence where he died fromelectrocution.

In Tanzania, a front-page headline in the independent English languagenewspaper, The Guardian, brought to public attention an alleged incident in whichnational park rangers murdered 50 people from a nearby village. The paper reported

9 I base this observation on 14 years of research in numerous colonial archival collections in Africa and

England, covering all of the countries referred to here (excepting the CAR), and on the examination of

numerous first-hand accounts by persons actively involved in wildlife and park conservation and

secondary historical scholarship.


that a Member of Parliament from the Mara Region, which includes part ofSerengeti National Park, was raising the allegations for Parliamentary discussion.According to the MP, a group of villagers, suffering from a famine that had afflictedthe area, entered the park on September 24, 1997 armed with bows and arrows insearch of small game. They were allegedly discovered by park rangers and disarmed.Rather than turning the suspects over to the local magistrate, however, ‘‘gamerangers who arrested them lined up the suspects and shot them’’ the MP claimed(The Guardian (Tanzania), 1998: 1). According to the report, park guards allegedlycovered up the execution by disposing the bodies in a nearby river and park officialswere accused of transferring the guards involved to other duty stations to make aninvestigation more difficult. The MP placed responsibility for the murders witha former Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism, Juma Ngasonga, who hadissued a shoot-on-sight directive to rangers in 1996 for ‘‘bandits’’ found within thepark boundaries.

After appointing a commission of inquiry, the government determined that thecharges were not supported, though the commission’s report has never been madepublic. Consequently, the Tarime Development Association, an NGO based inTarime, Mara region, asked the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) toinvestigate the allegations. LHRC initiated an independent investigation fromOctober 1999 to May 2000, conducting interviews with survivors, relatives ofvictims, village leaders, and a single conservation official who agreed to be identified.The investigation team produced a 19-page report with photos and accompanyingvideotape (LHRC, 2000). In broad outline but not the specific detail, the LHCRteam confirmed the MP’s allegations. One park staff member, who declined to beidentified, confirmed that killings had occurred while the local project director forthe Frankfurt Zoological Society stated that the shoot-on-sight order had long beenin place and was followed as park policy. The team was able to document 20, not 50killings, which occurred in not one, but several incidents over a period of more than2 years. They reported general allegations by villagers living on the Serengetiboundary that park guards killed people in the park on a regular basis.

Among the most compelling evidence gathered were eyewitness statements fromsurvivors of the incidents. In the September 1997 incident, the single survivorclaimed to have witnessed park rangers systematically execute eight of his unarmedcompanions with a close range gunshot to the head. In another incident in 1998,a survivordwho at the time of the incident was 14 years old and claimed to behunting to earn money for schools fees from the sale of bushmeatdcharged thatpark rangers chased and shot at them as they ran into a river unarmed. Uponsurrendering, his companion was shot and wounded. Rangers took these two withfour other villagers who had been apprehended to a ranger post where they werehandcuffed and shot. Two survived to identify the rangers to the authorities, thoughat the time the report was issued they remained at large. Other evidence gatheredfrom relatives of victims of numerous incidents suggested that extra-judicialexecutions were normal in Serengeti National Park.

The final case comes from Botswana. The context for the war for biodiversityhere is not a blanket shoot-on-sight order but a pattern of longstanding ethnic


discrimination against various groups of hunter-gatherers, or so-called ‘‘Bushmen’’(see Gordon, 1992). In the northeastern Kalahari Desert region, Bushmen haveexperienced decades of displacement and violence conducted in the name of wildlifeconservation, including allegations of routine killings of rural people by governmentofficials (Hitchcock, 1995). According to Hitchcock (1995), coercive conservationpractices increased in the area in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the tortureand killing of suspected poachers, some of who were reportedly only gathering plantsor obtaining water. Botswana Defense Forces (BDF) and game scouts may havekilled as many as 96 people in anti-poaching operations during this period includingwomen and children (Hitchcock, 1995: 192–193). The nearby Central KalahariGame Reserve, originally established as a reserve to protect Bushmen and theirhunting and gathering practices, is now claimed by conservationists who want thearea evacuated (Colchester, 1994). In most cases in which Bushmen have beendisplaced in the name of conservation, there has been little if any compensation andresettlement plans have been vastly inadequate.

The most recent and internationally visible incident stems from the Botswanagovernment’s 3-year campaign to remove nearly 3000 resident Basarwa San‘‘Bushmen’’ from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. As reported by the humanrights organization, Survival International (2001), when San residents refused tomove, game reserve officials threatened to call in the BDF to forcibly remove them.Eventually about 1500 people’s homes were destroyed and they were relocated topoorly developed resettlement villages. Village leaders accused the BDF and wildlifeofficials of torturing residents and of confiscating their bows and arrows, which theylegally possessed and depended on for subsistence hunting. About 500 residentssteadfastly refused to leave the reserve and were increasingly harassed by wildlifeofficials and the BDF for ‘‘overhunting’’. In one case, about a dozen men were heldcaptive by wildlife officials for 6 days and ‘‘subjected to repeated interrogations,beatings, and torture. Some were tied to trees and threatened with fire; most hadtheir feet tied to vehicles, forcing them into a ‘press-up’ position, whilst being kickedand beaten’’ (Survival International, 2001). Women also complained of beingassaulted by wildlife officials. Amidst domestic and international human rightsorganizations’ growing accusations of racism and human rights violations, thegovernment reversed itself on the eve of the 2001 United Nations World ConferenceAgainst Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa and allowed residents to returnto the reserve. Despite the policy reversal, Survival International went forward witha public condemnation of the Botswana government wildlife conservation practicesat the WCAR.

Discussion

Through the analysis presented here I have sought to advance political ecology’sunderstanding of justice through an engagement with environmental ethics. Notionsof justice in biodiversity conservation tend to focus narrowly on distributivequestions at the expense of other considerations such as livelihood rights, respect for


cultural difference, and abuses of state power (Schroeder, 2000). An engagementwith environmental ethics helps clarify and articulate some of the moral considera-tions in biodiversity conservation and highlights why environmental interventionsmust move ‘‘beyond distributive justice’’ (Schroeder, 2000: 52). By combininga discursive analysis with environmental ethics, I sought to demonstrate the criticalrole that imagery and representations play in shaping the moral standing andworthiness for moral treatment of individuals and collectivities. The discursiveanalysis shows how the imagery of place, people, and nature operates to make themilitarization of biodiversity conservation a taken-for-granted practice in Africa. AsZerner observed, ‘‘the politics of environmental imagery and its social justiceimplications are just beginning to be explored’’ in political ecology (Zerner, 2000b:16). This study is intended to further the exploration.

The resort to war metaphors and the militarization of conservation in Africa, andin these cases in particular, bring questions regarding the moral calculus ofbiodiversity protection into stark relief. Specifically, what is the moral status ofhuman individuals in the war for biodiversity vis-a-vis wild animal species,individually and as a collective entity? The abrogation of basic rights and theextra-judicial killings in national parks appear to pose a difficult moral dilemma,forcing us to choose between two moral ‘‘goods’’dthe protection of biodiversity orhuman lives and livelihoods (see West, 1991: xix). The dilemma is ‘‘solved’’, I wouldargue, through discursive practices that construct difference in a way that establishesrelative positions in the moral community. Three powerful sets of images andrepresentations are at work here; the amoral and brutal poacher/Other, thecompassionate and conservation-minded hunter/European, and the intelligent andsocial wild animal. These images and representations are conveyed through culturalproducts, such as National Geographic magazine, which collectively ‘‘exert a potentimpact on the formation of ideologies of human-animal relations’’ (Emel & Wolch,1998: 18). Cultural products constitute and are constituted within a regionaldiscursive formation of Africa that recirculates narratives and images of thesavagery, amorality, and danger of the ‘‘dark continent’’ in new forms (Jaroz, 1992;Fair, 1993). It is not only that African poachers are represented as immoral or lesscivilized in their treatment of wild animals, but also that this difference makes themless worthy of full moral consideration. Thus discursive constructions haveimportant material consequences, making shoot on sight appear to be a rationaland ethical tool in biodiversity conservation in Africa.

That such imagery and regional discourses have real world consequences isdemonstrated by the words of a philanthropist who was approached to fundmercenaries in poaching wars. ‘‘I was a little shook up because of the possibility ofviolence. But people say that’s the way it’s done in Africa; there’s no law; there areno jails’’ (Kathe Henry of the Scott Opler Foundation, quoted in Clynes, 2002: 5). Ipresent this not to disparage a well-meaning philanthropist, but to illustrate howregional discursive constructions make violence in African conservation practiceseem normal. The discursive construction of the African poacher/Other and thenormalization of shoot-on-sight directives create a potent moral geography centeredon African national parks as ground zero in the war to protect global biodiversity.


The focus on parks highlights the importance of the spatial and temporal ‘‘con-textuality of morality and ethics’’ (Smith, 2000: 25). National parks are, bydefinition, bounded spaces where the rights of wild nature have priority over humaninterests. In creating free-fire zones in the parks, rural Africans from neighboringvillages are transformed into potential enemy combatants, thus loosening the moralrestraints on agents of the state involved in wildlife conservation.

The practice of biodiversity protection as war has indeed shifted boundaries ofour moral community, but not as a straightforward linear extension of moralstanding to non-humans. There is no philosophical position in environmental ethicsthat justifies the taking of human life in defense of non-human species. Only a radicalreordering of moral standing could justify shoot on sight. This is accomplished notthrough philosophical developments in environmental ethics, but through thediscursive construction of key identities. The analysis of discursive construction ofidentities shows how ideologies of gender, race, and family are strategically andselectively deployed to simultaneously humanize wild animals and denigratepoachers, including impoverished peasants searching for small game or fish. Thus,through these discursive constructions in combination with the designation of parksas war zones, deadly violence against humans, not in the self-defense of human life,but in the defense of ‘‘biodiversity’’, is normalized.

Acknowledgements

Several people offered encouragement and advice on the earlier drafts of thispaper. I am especially grateful to Rick Schroeder, Gail Hollander, Matt Turner,Lucy Jarosz, Raymond Bryant, and the participants in the Fall 2002 GraduateStudies Colloquium in the Department of International Relations at FIU. I am alsoindebted to the anonymous reviewers for Political Geography whose critical readingswere immensely helpful for revising the manuscript. The research for a portion ofthis paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation,Geography and Regional Science Program, award number SBR-9617798.

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Documents

Moral and Discursive Geographies