Political Ecology of African Peace Parks

Peace parks are imagined landscapes and seascapes created through narratives and science. This book uses a political ecology framework to explore the colonial and uneven geography of peace parks in post-independence Africa. It illuminates the regional milieus impacting these parks and the consequent socioecological and political dynamics.

This book curates a space for multiple voices and knowledges of peace parks and highlights the limits to truth claims. It presents peace parks as a milieu that enables the assemblage of underexamined concepts in political ecology. The book advances four arguments. The first is that critical scholarship on the peace parks initiative in Africa and elsewhere has been crowded out by a dominant and well-sponsored narrative of these parks. Second, the ideology of peace parks capitalises on societal aspirations and challenges to wage the ’war of the mind’. Third, peace parks are a geographical expression of coloniality. The fourth argument is that the regional dynamics account for the uneven geography of peace parks in Africa. These dynamics reveal the symbiotic relations between politics and ecology. The founding of peace parks animates resource politics but also depoliticises the resource question.

Situated in the ongoing debates on protecting the planet in an unequal world and the pathways for a just society, this book will be of interest to researchers of African studies, political ecology, human geography, sociology, environmental studies, and political science.

Maano Ramutsindela is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town and Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria. He is the University of Pretoria-University of Cape Town Future Africa Research Chair in Sustainability Transformations. He has researched peace parks in Africa for more than two decades.