Rosewood democracy in the political forests of Madagascar

Abstract

Rosewood in Madagascar is both a lucrative timber commodity and a group of threatened and endangered tree species primarily limited to the country's last remaining northeastern forests. Since 2000, trade in rosewood has been on the rise due to escalating demand in China. Despite international conservation efforts to curtail the trade, the collapse of the Malagasy government via a military-backed coup d’état in 2009 triggered an outbreak of illegal logging in the country's northeastern protected areas. Since the coup, thousands of shipping containers of rosewood have been exported overseas, making multi-millionaires of an elite few in the northeast and profoundly reconfiguring the country's geographies of power. Using an ethnographic approach to analyze political economic transformations, this article takes readers from the hundreds of logging camps scattered throughout the protected areas of northeastern Madagascar to the upper echelons of a rosewood political economy that spans the highest powers in the capital city. In the article, I argue that revenues generated during Madagascar's rosewood logging outbreak, combined with the country's return to electoral politics at the end of 2013, have together facilitated the political ascendancy of an elite group of rosewood traders from northeastern Madagascar. Through a process that I refer to as “rosewood democracy,” these rosewood traders have been voted into central offices in Madagascar's Fourth Republic, ultimately demonstrating how democratic institutions that are supposed to foster equality are captured to sustain long-standing patterns of inequality.