Abstract
Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will happen in the years to come? In this article, we ask how pre- and post-colonial landscape gridding perpetuate a slow violence across the landscape through processes of de-/fencing. Fencing, we argue, is embedded in a landscape logic that favours exclusive rights and conditioned access. In two case studies from grazing lands in Kenya, we explore how people engage with the tension of an imposed landscape logic of fencing by either asserting or challenging its very physicality. We propose that de-/fencing are ways of anticipating long-standing land tenure uncertainties. Moreover, we use our cases to explore different points of reference along the mattering of land tenure boundaries as well as the sort of horizons to which fencing leads. We also use this knowledge to improve our understanding of parallel prehistoric cases of large-scale landscape enclosure. By unfolding the intertwined socio-political and material nature of gridded landscapes, we seek to bring the study of fencing out of conservation literature and into its wider culture-historical context.
Highlights
There have never been as many fences across the globe as there are today
Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics
In two case studies from grazing lands in Kenya, we explore how people engage with the tension of an imposed landscape logic of fencing by either asserting or challenging its very physicality
Summary
The widescale enclosure of rangelands, croplands, conservation land, parks and urban areas is becoming increasingly common [1] These fences are raised to protect soils, crops, plants, people and animals, and often represent deeply complex underlying histories of enclosure, as well as symbolic and communicative executions of power. This is the case whether one looks at the (pre-)historical land enclosures of the Americas, Australia and Northern Europe (Section 4.1), or the major state projects of making walls in the West Bank, Jericho or at the Mexican border. A slow violence that is expressed through material processes of de-/fencing as well as through state legislation, conservation efforts, and even through research enquiries and intellectual property rights [6]
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