Greening Africa's Borderlands: The Symbiotic Politics of Land and Borders in Peace Parks
Publisher: Political Geography
Author(s): Maano Ramutsindela
Date: 2017
Topics: Cooperation, Governance, Land
This paper probes borderlands as an entry point into an inquiry into the convergence between the politics of land and the politics of borders. Such politics is ascribed to real and imagined attributes of borderlands, including their ethnographies in Africa. I argue that borderlands enable a form of environmentalism that thrives on power relations embedded in, and also enacted through dichotomies of land tenure regimes. Such environmentalism frames the border as a political and economic tool. It relies on, but also realigns the politics of land and the politics of borders in order to validate the creation of peace parks in borderlands. I use the phenomenon of peace parks as a new form of environmentally-inspired micro-regionalism that not only relies on attributes of borderlands, but that also configures them to achieve environmental, economic and political goals (Ramutsindela, 2007). To understand this transfrontier regionalism and its politics, I first analyse borderlands with the view to broaden conceptualizations of African borderlands. A broader understanding of these borderlands is necessary for an inquiry into the ways in which land and borders constitute the politics of borderlands. Thereafter I demonstrate that the initiative of peace parks deploys narratives of African borders that yield a new hegemony of space and meaning. Such hegemony emerges through the denationalization of nature and the insertion of green capitalism. In this context, the border is infused with new meanings, even as it embodies capitalist ideas whose realisation is dependent on certain notions of the border that the state is required to endorse. Such requirements are depoliticized through greening of borderlands as a national and regional imperative (Ramutsindela, 2007).