
Elizabeth LunstrumYork University · Department of Geography
Elizabeth Lunstrum
PhD
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33
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Publications (33)
This intervention invites more substantial scholarly attention to human displacement in and of the Anthropocene—this current epoch in which humans have become the primary drivers of global environmental change—and sets out an initial framework for its study. The framework is organized around three interrelated contributions. First is the recognitio...
The ways in which poaching economies and militarized responses to shut them down intersect with local gender norms and dynamics remain underexamined. We address this by developing a feminist political ecology of wildlife crime by drawing on feminist political ecology and complementing it with insights from feminist criminology. This framework centr...
The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the most acute global conservation challenges. This paper examines what is driving young men to enter the rhino horn trade while advancing theory on environmental conflict. We show how the illicit rhino horn economy is a telling instance of environmental conflict—largely between ground-level hunters and in...
Transnational environmental crime has become the largest financial driver of social conflict, with severe implications for peace and security. Sustainable-development frameworks need to overtly recognize and mitigate the risks posed by transnational environmental crime to environmental security.
Hegemonic narratives and practices around environmental change, even when coming from concerned and seemingly progressive fronts, often contribute to a larger project of population control. The Malthusian specter of overpopulation looms large in pervasive images of imminent ecological disaster in ways that are profoundly depoliticizing and that ser...
Concerns about poaching and trafficking have led conservationists to seek urgent responses to tackle the impact on wildlife. One possible solution is the militarisation of conservation, which holds potentially far-reaching consequences. It is important to engage critically with the militarisation of conservation, including identifying and reflectin...
This article illustrates how for-profit actors and private wealth vitalize state power, here in the form of advancing the state's project of militarized conservation. My contribution complements, first, the neoliberal natures and conservation literature, which largely sees state power as diminished by neoliberal processes or else reinvented as a ha...
State actors are increasingly treating protected areas as sites of security threats and policing resident communities as though they are the cause of this insecurity. This is translating into community eviction from protected areas that is authorised by security concerns and logics and hence not merely conservation concerns. We ground this claim by...
The precipitous increase in commercial poaching across parts of Africa has been met by progressively more militarized responses. Amounting to green militarization, we now see national armies, increasingly paramilitarized rangers, military tactics, and even sophisticated military technology used to address the problem. Scholarly investigations on th...
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. One of the most active of these communities has organized around concern for the rhino in the face of escalating commercial poaching. On closer look, a deeply concerning relatio...
Doing Whole Earth justice: a reply to Cafaro et al. - Bram Büscher, Robert Fletcher, Dan Brockington, Chris Sandbrook, Bill Adams, Lisa Campbell, Catherine Corson, Wolfram Dressler, Rosaleen Duffy, Noella Gray, George Holmes, Alice Kelly, Elizabeth Lunstrum, Maano Ramutsindela, Kartik Shanker
We question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a...
We question whether the increasingly popular, radical idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is either feasible or just. We argue that this Half-Earth plan would have widespread negative consequences for human populations and would not meet its conservation objectives. It offers no agenda for managing biodiversity within a...
Drawing on environmental history and political ecology, this paper contributes to growing debates concerning military-environment encounters and conservation militarisation/securitisation by investigating the complex histories and legacies of these relations. Grounding my insights in South Africa's iconic Kruger National Park, I chart how encounter...
In this introduction to a special section on environmental displacement, we introduce the concept and ground it in seemingly distinct processes of climate change, extraction, and conservation. We understand environmental displacement as a process by which communities find the land they occupy irrevocably altered in ways that foreclose or otherwise...
Part of a broader interest in the escalating securitization of conservation practice, scholars are beginning to take note of an emerging relationship between conservation–securitization, capital accumulation, and dispossession. We develop the concept of accumulation by securitization to better grasp this trend, positioning it in the critical litera...
The Mozambican state is currently working to relocate 7000 people from the interior of the Limpopo National Park (LNP), itself part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP). As the process began in 2003, this stands out as one of the region's most protracted contemporary conservation-related evictions. I draw from this case to shed light on t...
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. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend...
Disappearing coastlines, fields and homes flooded by rising waters, lands left cracked and barren by desertification, a snowpack shrinking in circumpolar regions year by year—these are only a few of the iconic images of climate change that have evoked discussion, debate, and consternation within communities both global and local. Equally alarming h...
Since its inception in 2001 and subsequent integration into the tri-national Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) has been progressively transformed into a functioning wildlife park. Standing behind this transformation has been a profound expansion of Mozambican state power over and through the park. Whi...
article available at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/refuge/article/viewFile/38163/34559
The latest type of megaproject reshaping sub-Saharan African landscapes is transfrontier parks (TFPs); these are parks that span or meet one another at (mostly) unfenced international borders, providing large expanses for wildlife and tourist consumption. TFPs, however, have not been approached or analyzed as megaprojects in either the conservation...
The recent creation of Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) and its integration into the larger Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) promise to effect profound political, social, and ecological changes. These range from removing sections of the international border fence and restocking wildlife in the LNP to the planned relocation of several...
During the Mozambican “civil” war, residents across large areas of the countryside were terrorized out of their villages by the South African-backed Mozambican rebel organization Renamo. Drawing on the deterritorialization debates and investigations into the relation between territory and terror—literatures that have rarely engaged with one another...
Central to its transformation from a state-centered to a neoliberal, free-market economy, in 1997 the Mozambican state passed a radical new land law that guarantees the rights of individuals and communities to occupy land and transfer land-use titles, a move seen as necessary for attracting private investment. By comparing how the land law has been...