Wounded landscapes: Understanding and restoring nature-society relations in violent contexts

Conservationists venturing into areas affected by armed conflict to halt the destruction of biodiversity increasingly follow a ‘landscape conservation’ approach: extending conservation territories beyond Protected Areas by creating wildlife corridors or buffer zones, for example. The Veni – NWO funded project of Dr. Marijnen analyses whether this specific form of crisis conservation is based on a thorough understanding of the integrated socio-ecological characteristics of the landscapes it intervenes in. Existing scholarly research on the relationship between armed conflict and landscapes often assumes that people in times of conflict only have a destructive relationship with nature. This, however, is not always the case. By not taking into account the multi-faceted relationships people have with nature, conservationists may exacerbate violence in their aim to conserve threatened biodiversity.

This project studies these relationships, and how they become part of landscapes. Besides studying armed conflict, the project innovates by also focusing on ‘slow violence’ linked to environmental degradation; and by tracing colonial legacies, explaining how and why (past) forms of injustice and violence play a role in the social relations of a landscape. It is the first study combining these three aspects through the conceptual lens of wounded landscapes. Investigating these integrated elements of violent conservation contexts, the project also explores how and when wounded landscapes can become restored landscapes, where biodiversity is protected, and (past) forms of injustices and violence accounted for.

The empirical focus is on Central Africa: a critical region characterized by many overlapping ‘hotspots’ of biodiversity and armed conflict, where conservationists increasingly promote landscape conservation to protect nature and contribute to peace simultaneously. Following a methodologically innovative approach based on multi- sited ethnographic research my project focusses on three conservation landscapes, which will provide much-needed empirically grounded knowledge to understand how nature-society relations have been influenced by different forms of violence and their lingering effects.

People involved

dr. Esther Marijnen
Wageningen University & Research

Prof. Dr. David Mwambari
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Agnes Lotukei
Kapei Foundation

> Together with Prof. Dr. David Mwambari (KULeuven) Esther is conducting research and writes on wounded landscapes from a political ecology of memory approach - in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

> Together with Agnes Lotukei, director Kapei Foundation, Esther is working in the Karamoja region of north eastern Uganda – analysing the impact of landscape conservation projects upon human-elephants relations, and how this intersects the regions violent (colonial) past and present.