📗 Libro en inglés THE NATURE OF POLITICS

This case study of Botswana focuses on the state building qualities of biodiversity conservation in southern Africa Drawing on extensive fieldwork Annette A LaRocco argues that discourses and practices related to biodiversity conservation are essential to state building in the postcolonial era These discourses and practices invoke the ways the state exerts authority over people places and resources enacts and remakes territorial control crafts notions of ideal citizenship and identity and structures economic relationships at the local national and global levels The book s key innovation is its conceptualization of the conservation estate a term most often used as an apolitical descriptor denoting land set aside for the purpose of conservation LaRocco argues that this description is inadequate and proposes a novel and much needed alternative definition that is tied to its political elements The components of conservation control over land policing of human behavior and structuring of the authority that allows or disallows certain subjectivities render conservation a political phenomenon that can be analyzed separately from considerations of nature or wildlife In doing so it addresses a gap in the scholarship of rural African politics which focu