The "White Gold of Jihad": violence, legitimisation and contestation in anti-poaching strategies

Natasha White

doi:10.2458/v21i1.21146

Abstract

Since 2011, elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade have been labelled a "serious threat to peace and security". Rigorous military training and weapons have been provided to rangers, national armies have been deployed in protected areas, and shoot-to-kill policies have been (re-)adopted. Within the framework of political ecology, the article critically approaches this "war" for Africa's elephants. Adopting the tools of discourse analysis, it explores how such violence has been legitimized by the "transnational conservation community" and, in turn, how this has been contested by other actors. It argues that the "war" has been legitimized by drawing on two broader threat discourses – the ivory-crime-terror linkage and the 'ChinaAfrica' threat. Through the discursive creation of a boundary object, poaching has 'become' a human concern that appeals to actors typically outside the conservation community. In the final Section, the case of the Lord's Resistance Army's poaching activities in Garamba National Park is explored, to show how the knowledge upon which judgements are made and decisions are taken is ahistorical, depoliticized and based on a series of untenable assumptions.Key words: Conservation, violence, discourse, ivory, political ecology

Highlights

In 2012, poachers killed an estimated 22,000 African elephants (IUCN, 2013), a figure comprising around 7.4% of the total population on the continent (Maisels et al, 2013)
There has been a handful of investigations conducted on the link between non-state armed groups and poaching, and another on the link between individual criminals comprising part of a larger network and ivory trafficking. Statements such as "heavily armed militia men" suggest this is an aggregation of data from a limited pool of information from different sources and locations: where it is militia men that are poaching, such as the Janjaweed or the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) poaching in Garamba and Central African Republic, they are rarely "heavily armed" as the groups do not have such resources (Bevan, 2004; HSBA, 2013)
This article has shifted the critical lens onto the transnational conservation community (TNCC) conceptualized, according to social networks theory, as a discursive coalition that 'comes to life' and is materially observable through certain nodes; in this case, elephant poaching

Summary

Introduction

In 2012, poachers killed an estimated 22,000 African elephants (IUCN, 2013), a figure comprising around 7.4% of the total population on the continent (Maisels et al, 2013). The following Section critically analyses the production and reproduction of the mainstream narrative through the interpellation of certain identities into subject positions of perpetrator, expert and (legitimate) saviour/intervener It argues that it is 1) through the discursive construction of a boundary object, that 2) the topic was elevated to such a level, 3) calls for militarisation have been amplified, and 4) policies implemented, as two distinct social worlds (Strauss, 1982) – that of the conservation and the security communities – historically opposed in their positions on the use of force (Avant, 2004), are united in the TNCC's discourse coalition. "We" is deemed suitable for use here, due to the author's identity as a British citizen and self-identified membership of ‘the West'

Assumptions and contestation

Findings

Conclusion