This project brings together the substantial but surprisingly disconnected scholarly literatures on international borders and political ecology. I build from here to examine how border practices impact the environment, how ecological factors shape border spaces and practices, and more abstractly how borders and ecologies are co-productive. I am interested in how the meeting of bordering and ecological practices and processes can incite violence, from dispossession to state-sanctioned killings, on the one hand, and generate visions and models of more inclusive and socially just conservation, on the other. My current research focuses on the militarization/securitization of “green” borders, the political significance of cross-border animal movement, and cross-border relations forged by communities living near and expelled from conservation areas. I am currently engaged in a detailed review of the literature as a means of charting broader trends and conducting field-based research in Southern Africa’s Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park and North America’s Waterton Glacier International Peace Park.

Publications:

Lunstrum, E. Forthcoming. Conservation meets militarization in Kruger National Park: Historical encounters and complex legacies. Conservation and Society.

Massé, F. and E. Lunstrum. Forthcoming. Accumulation by securitization: Commercial poaching, neoliberal conservation, and the creation of new wildlife frontiers. Geoforum.

Lunstrum, E. Forthcoming. Green grabs, land grabs, and the spatiality of displacement: Eviction from Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park. Area.

Lunstrum, E. 2014. Green militarization: Anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (4): 816-832.

Lunstrum, E. 2013. Articulated sovereignty: Extending Mozambican state power through the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Political Geography, 36: 1-11.

You may also be interested in my related work on Conservation Politics in the South Africa-Mozambique Borderlands