The Conservation of Violence discusses the governance of protected forests in Zimbabwe to spotlight the structural and operational ways in which violent tactics are produced, employed and sustained to promote nature conservation. Grounded in political ecology, geography and environmental politics, it discusses the central role of the state in conserving violence. The book uses contemporary cases of violence in conservation and introduces the conservation of violence as an alternative discourse for understanding the tenacity of violence in conservation areas across Africa. It examines the constitutionalisation of environmental rights and how this has been utilised to enable and preserve conservation violence, as well as how militarisation produces and circulates violence, offering new ways of investigating violence in conservation. Furthermore, it explores the complexities of dislodging nodes of violence within existing systems, providing insights on the theoretical and practical obstacles involved in transforming conservation ideologies. The book explores a multitude of themes including coloniality, nature-culture dichotomies, resource governance, extraction, capitalism, sustainability, policy and conservation law, regulation and policing, environmental rights, and environmental justice. It will be an important addition to the literature in political ecology, geography, development, environmental justice and the broader environmental humanities.

Tafadzwa Mushonga is a Research Fellow and co-leader of the Environmental Humanities project at the Centre for the Advancement of scholarship, University of Pretoria. She is interested in the political ecology of conservation, particularly people-state relations in the governance of protected forests. She is the co-editor of two volumes: The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives, with Maano Ramutsindela and Frank Matose, and the Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation, with James Ogude.