prof.dr. BE (Bram) Buscher

Bram Büscher is Professor and Chair of the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University and Visiting Professor at the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies of the University of Johannesburg. In 2021, he was fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in Stellenbosch, and in 2017 he held a Van Zyl Slabbert visiting professorship at the University of Cape Town. From 2008-2015, Bram lectured at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Netherlands. He received his PhD (cum laude) from VU University Amsterdam in 2009.

His research and writing revolve around the political economy of environment and development with specific interests in biodiversity, conservation, new media and digitalization, violence and extraction. His broader theoretical project seeks to bring biodiversity, human-nonhuman relations and conservation deeper into our understanding of the historical and contemporary trajectories of global capitalism. His research has been supported by various funders, including through prestigious NWO (Dutch Research Foundation) Veni and Vidi excellence grants, a Belmont Forum/Norface grant and, most recently, by the Oak Foundation.

Bram has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and is the author of Transforming the Frontier. Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa (Duke University Press, 2013). Together with Robert Fletcher, he authored The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond The Anthropocene, which was published in 2020 by Verso and is slated for translation into Spanish, German and French. His most recent book, The Truth About Nature. Environmentalism in the Era of Post-Truth Politics and Platform Capitalism was published by the University of California Press in 2021. Bram is one of the senior editors of the open-access journal Conservation & Society (www.conservationandsociety.org).

For more information, and access to publications, see: www.brambuscher.com.