Rhino poaching and the “slow violence” of conservation-related resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park

Abstract

Over the past decade, South Africa’s Kruger National Park has become embroiled in a rhino poaching crisis. In response, state authorities are applying military logics, personnel, training, and equipment to protect endangered black and threatened white rhinos. Many suspected poachers are Mozambicans, including those who are resident in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park (LNP). Based on a sequence of fieldwork conducted in the LNP between 2003 and 2016, we examine the relationship between this extremely tense and armed clash and the thousands of already socially and economically marginalized LNP residents targeted for resettlement as part of conserving rhino habitat. As they await relocation, the basic human security of residents has become deeply undermined by decreased access to services and environmental resources and the criminalization of their livelihoods. While much of the critical scholarship on anti-poaching focuses on the spectacular forms of violence that characterize rhino poaching, beneath this a more structural and “slower” form of violence persists. Seeking to develop an understanding of violence that extends beyond the spectacular, we argue that the cumulative losses and instability that have followed conservation created the conditions under which rhino poaching unfolded in the LNP. Communities found guilty of rhino poaching by mere association bear tremendous costs while the reduction of resettlement to an urgent need to control aberrant human behavior masks tremendous opportunity costs forgone. Better understandings of these costs and their links to violence need be taken seriously in any discussion of poaching response and poaching motivation.