Blurred lines between wildlife conservation and security interventions in northern Kenya

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Sara van der Hoeven defended her doctoral thesis The martial politics of biodiversity protection: Wildlife conservation practices in northern Kenya on 1 September 2023 at the School of Global Studies. She argues that the emergence and growth of community conservancies in northern Kenya change existing power relations in the area amongst conservancy residents, regional elites, County governments and the state.

“I studied the conservation practices that cannot straightforwardly be classified as ‘biodiversity conservation’, but those that are more like policing work. There are several security issues these conservation projects try to intervene in, such as livestock thefts or ‘raids’, road banditry and inter-communal conflict. I also looked at the role that the availability and use of guns, such as AK-47, play in these,” says Sara van der Hoeven.

Many of the rangers working in these conservation areas – unfenced multiple-use parks – carry arms because they are enrolled as Police Reservists. Many also receive paramilitary training from private security companies. In her research, Sara van der Hoeven aimed to better understand the workings of such an actively interventive type of conservation. The thesis highlights three aspects: history, contemporary practices of rangers and their consequences.

“I demonstrated conservation’s historical interlinkage with military endeavours, for example, how British colonial counterinsurgency and anti-poaching operations have shaped each other. Moreover, I found that the historically uneven flow and availability of guns constructed social differences and hierarchies based on race and culture which, in turn, have fed into national governments' perception and treatment of herders in the north as a ‘security problem’, a problematic narrative that persists today and reduces a complex political problem to mere ‘backward culture'," says Sara van der Hoeven.

She argues that conservancies carve out political power by drawing on the language and the idea of the state, for example, by relying on their integration with government institutions such as the police, while also contrasting themselves as “community-based” institutions against the same national government, thus blurring the lines between private and public.  

Why is your research important?
“My findings are important to better understand militarised/armed conservation, a phenomenon that intensified across Africa in the last decade. Community-based approaches to conservation break with so-called ‘fortress’ conservation, which excludes humans from parks. Community-based approaches integrate economic development projects so that conservation is simultaneously a benefit to people and nature. My findings show that community-based projects can become a means to other ends, such as achieving security, and how community conservation can merge with militarised approaches, even though such approaches are often regarded as opposites,” says Sara van der Hoeven.