Short Abstract

The panel brings the perspective of forest anthropology, which critically analyses human-forest relations, incorporating local cultures and historical power dynamics to tackle the notion of political and polarised forests in Europe and the Global North.

Long Abstract

This panel examines forests as pivotal locations within today's global dialogues concerning climate change, environmental crises, biodiversity decline, and associated debates over equality, responsibility, power, and resources. It approaches forests as holistic socio-ecological systems that are constantly evolving affordances as subjects of economic activities, ecological changes, social interpretations, cultural valorisation and spiritual negotiations. Forests as socio-ecological systems with their blurred boundaries are related to the spaces where “complex we” emerges. This “complex we” is not a substantive subject or subjectivity, but refers to a “shared condition (or space) from which “self” and “other” emerge relationally as intra-acted assertions of divergence” (de La Cadena, 2019: 478). Forests are never natural or neutral, but co-produced and inherently political (Murray Li, 2007; Peluso and Vandergeest, 2020). By focusing on how forests are constructed and deconstructed (both discursively and physically) in Europe and the Global North, this panel contributes to the exploration of how people and societies inhabit and make sense of our current moment, and how states and international actors (re)shape forests through acts of territoriality. These political moments call for special attention from anthropologists, as what is transformed are not only trees, but wider assemblages of relations involving both humans and more-than-human nature. The panel brings the perspective of forest anthropology, which critically analyses human-forest relations, incorporating local cultures and historical power dynamics (Konczal and Asselin, 2025). Focusing on forests as political and polarised spaces, and by applying forest anthropology lenses, this panel delves into Scott's (1998) statecraft mechanisms, specifically how a legible, manageable landscape is created and how these methods are experienced locally in todays’ Europe and more broadly, the Global North.

Propose paper