![]() The project follows flows of rhino horn from the source in southern Africa to illegal markets in Southeast Asia. A theoretical approach grounded in the sociology of markets is applied to explain the structure and functioning of the illegal market. This dissertation asks why the illegal market in rhinoceros horn is so resilient in spite of the myriad measures employed to disrupt it. Despite these efforts, the poaching of rhinos and trafficking of rhino horn continue unabated. 2.0 applications are productive of cyber-violence beyond hate and fascist groups as they expand to include conservation activism.Ī multi-sectorial regime of protection including international treaties, conservation and security measures, demand reduction campaigns and quasi-military interventions has been established to protect rhinos. In particular, they authorize state militarized violence that results in the death of suspected poachers and in turn threatens long-term conservation efforts. And while the contributions of these actors may seem relegated to online worlds, they come to matter. The case highlights both the expanding roster of actors behind conservation violence, as it includes facets of the public, and the growing spaces through which such violence unfolds, as it enters cyberspace. In short, the violence turns on a dialectic of abandonment and belonging, of abandoning the human and embracing the non-human. These amount to an Agambian abandon-ment of poachers to a realm beyond human protection, which spins on a dehumanization of poachers and inverse invitation of rhinos into the national community. Analyzing user comments on South African National Parks Facebook rhino poaching updates, I illustrate how Web 2.0 applications have become powerful tools of imagining and promoting conservation-related violence. Namely, community members routinely advocate extreme violence against poachers, ranging from shoot-on-sight policies to outright torture. On closer look, a deeply concerning relation between conservation and violence emerges through these platforms. One of the most active of these communities has organized around concern for the rhino in the face of escalating commercial poaching. Web 2.0 applications like Facebook and Twitter have enabled the development of online communities that have exposed and decried violence against animals including wildlife. Key Words: conservation, militarization, sovereignty, violence, wildlife crime/poaching. The result is an intensifying interlocking of conservation and militarization that frequently produces unforeseen consequences. Steering clear of spatial determinism, I equally show how spatial contours authorize militarization only once they articulate with particular assumptions and values for Kruger these amount to political–ecological values regarding the nation-state, its sovereignty, and its natural heritage. For Kruger, these include its status as a national park framed by a semiporous international border and its expansive, often dense terrain. ![]() Focusing on the state’s multilayered and increasingly lethal militarized response to what is itself a highlymilitarized practice, I illustrate how the spatial qualities of protected areas matter immensely for the convergence of conservation and militarization and the concrete forms this convergence takes. More modestly, the article offers its own contribution to this end by turning to South Africa’s Kruger National Park, the world’s most concentrated site of commercial rhino poaching. I introduce this concept, first, as a call for more sustained scholarly investigation into the militarization of conservation practice. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use ofmilitary and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation efforts. Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization.
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