Paper Short Abstract:

This paper looks at the regulation of fishing at Armenia’s Lake Sevan and explains the bottom-level state officials’ conflictual position between two forms of care with opposing effects by relating it to a deeper conflict over the legitimacy of the state to manage nature.

Paper Abstract:

Since 2020, the Armenian state has made its presence visible at Lake Sevan, a ‘national park’ with its own conservation law, through the introduction of a new regulatory system for the industrial fishing of whitefish. The regulation consists of the bureaucratization of the fishing economy and enhanced surveillance against ‘illegal’ fishing. The major official arguments attempting to rationalize the regulation are that the latter ensures the preservation of the fish stock for the fishers, for the future of their children, and that it protects the fish stock from the ‘fish thieves’, i.e. the same fishers, who drain the state’s and the citizenry’s resources. But this seemingly caring project of preservation is problematized by a grassroots questioning of the state’s rights over the ownership and distribution of natural resources. The counter-narrative articulated by fishers and some local state officials points to a coercive state that claims to distribute a resource it does not own in the first place: the fish.

Bottom-level bureaucrats and park rangers in charge of implementing the regulation oppose, through their practices, the official state’s coercion by disregarding violations and helping the fishers navigate the bureaucracy. But at the same time, they reproduce the state’s authority by adopting the care discourse about the future and the resources of the state and the citizenry. This paper explains the bottom-level state officials’ conflictual position between two forms of care with opposing effects by relating it to a deeper conflict over the legitimacy of the state to manage nature.