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- Convenors:
-
Agata Konczal
(Wageningen University)
Jodie Asselin (University of Lethbridge, Canada)
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- Formats:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
We introduce the concept of Green Frontiers as a lens for studying new forest dynamics in Europe. We call for Forest Anthropology to investigate how societies perceive, use, and integrate forests into their daily lives; a tool in identifying forest-related transformations within communities.
Paper long abstract
This paper introduces the concept of Green Frontiers as a lens to explore patterns and consequences of new forest dynamic in Europe (and broader – in Global North) and calls for Forest Anthropology understood as a tool for investigating how societies and communities perceive, use, and integrate forests into their daily lives. We present the Forest Anthropology as a systematic approach for identifying forest-related transformations within communities that affect both people and ecosystems and may reproduce patterns of inequality, polarization and harm. We revisit Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso's (1995) concept of the political forest, which is based on the fundamental premise that forests are never entirely natural but are continually shaped through ecological, political, and cultural processes, meaning they are co-produced by nature and society. Focusing on the political nature of forests, we bring into focus a current context in which forests become easy fixes for ongoing crises – social, ecological, political, just to name a few. It has been observed that new social, economic, and political forest expectations and obligations are emerging globally. We understand this shift as a “green turn” - a moment of intense forest interest, and we are particularly interested in the uneven geographies through which it manifests in and around Europe. We do it by concentrating on single case studies that are lived locally but connected to broader currents.
Paper short abstract
In an Irish context, this talk outlines the ways that the rural countryside are (re)made through forest policies, mapping land use change as a means of understanding the shifting form of rural populations, and the role of afforestation as an active agent in place-making and state territorialization.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the political forest in Irish context, outlining some of the ways that rural countryside and communities are (re)made through forest policies over time. Drawing from fieldwork undertaken in 2025, this paper delves into a current moment of social and ecological uncertainty, mapping land use change as a means of engaging with and representing the shifting form of rural populations, and the role of afforestation as an active agent in place-making and state territorialization. What does it mean for a change-makers to suggest that a country build a forest-culture? What are the implications of creating legislatively permanent forests in areas known only as open farmland? In asking what changes when landscapes shift and mapping historical meanings and memories, this paper suggests that we look forward to future possibilities in ways that make the most ecological and social sense, and that anthropological tools can support this effort.
Paper short abstract
I examine the planning and planting of forests as security measures within the context of Israel’s continued efforts of Judaization of the Negev/Al Naqab through a security discourse that is informed by orientalist imaginaries and motivated by the creation of productive (Jewish) landscapes.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I examine the planning and planting of forests as security measures within the context of Israel’s continued efforts of Judaization of the Negev/Al Naqab desert. Zionism, Israel’s foundational ideology, is known for attaching powerful symbolism to tree planting (Braverman, 2009a; Long, 2005), representing the rootedness of the Jewish people in the ‘Promised Land.’ Both the Israeli state and right-wing settler movements, I argue, instrumentalise this symbolism through their involvement in forest-related political actions framed as necessary for security reasons. These afforestation activities are ultimately used to gain control over land that is often owned and inhabited by Bedouin people. Here, I will scrutinise the planning and planting of forests as part of a security discourse that is informed by orientalist imaginaries and motivated by the creation of productive (Jewish) landscapes.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the transformation of parts of Aydos Forest into a "Nation Garden" in the context of "pernicious" polarization. Patchwork forest governance that enables such transformations reinforces political and social divisions, boosts electoral gains, and puts common futures at risk.
Paper long abstract
Aydos Forest is located on Istanbul’s Asian side, spanning 105 ha of pine–oak woodland and lake. In 2022, 21 ha were leased to the local municipality for a “Nation Garden” (Millet Bahçesi) makeover, sparking the grassroots defenders’ campaign. Drawing on ethnography of green spaces and plants within the Istanbul metropolitan area, this paper explores the transformation of parts of forests into Nation Gardens: recreational areas charged with social and political significance. As a flagship project of the Turkish state, Nation Gardens embody lifestyles and values compatible with the ruling party's imaginaries, reinforcing state ideas of preferred citizenship and simultaneously advancing the ruling party's political messaging. In the context of pernicious (McCoy & Somer, 2019) political and social polarization, lifestyles, future imaginaries, and environmental sensitivities and aesthetics both inform politics and become political targets. Urban politics must navigate mutual antipathies, diametrically opposed visions of the future and values, growing mistrust, and information chambers. Right‑wing environmental populism, promising green futures aligned with its electorate’s values and desires, deepens divisions and puts common futures at risk. The paper describes what I call “patchwork governance,” the type of governance that enables allocating parts of forests to various individuals, municipalities, and companies for a range of profit-driven activities, encompassing populist initiatives as well as economic and political ventures. The Aydos case shows how rapid, politicized “greening” can produce apparent public benefits while degrading forest functions, erasing local practices and knowledge, consolidating authoritarian power, and deepening political and social polarization.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how the Skouries forest in northern Greece became political space as mining extraction reshaped human–forest relations, generating practices of commoning, embodied ethics of care, and "protesting with the trees" against Eldorado Gold.
Paper long abstract
How do forests become political? This paper examines the Skouries forest in Halkidiki, northern Greece, as it was transformed from an everyday landscape of livelihood into contested political terrain through struggles against the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold since 2012. It traces how human–forest relations were reconfigured as extraction threatened both ecological systems and collective life.
The paper focuses on three interconnected dimensions of forest defense. First, it explores the forest’s “social life”: its embedding in beekeeping, foraging, logging, and intergenerational memory, functioning as commons that sustained communities through war, civil war, and economic crisis. Second, it analyzes mining infrastructure as a political border that fragmented the forest horizontally through roads, fences, and surveillance, and vertically by restricting access to water, subterranean knowledge, and archaeology, while polarizing communities along pro- and anti-mining lines. Third, it traces how resistance took the form of commoning: collective practices that reassembled the forest’s fractured worlds through memory work, grassroots governance, counter-information networks, and sustained bodily presence.
Central to this analysis is “protesting for and with the trees.” When villagers carried cut branches through Thessaloniki as banners or described 200-year-old trunks as “dead friends,” they enacted response-ability, recognizing human and nonhuman fates as inseparable. These practices generated new political subjectivities grounded in embodied ethics of care, transforming lawful citizens into state-designated “criminals” for defending what they lived as commons.
The Skouries case contributes to anthropological debates on commons, political ecology, and politics, showing how forests emerge not as passive backdrops but as participants shaping resistance.
Paper short abstract
The concept of resilience has witnessed a marked rise in forest policy and management discourses. Drawing on an ethnography of the Dutch State Forestry Agency, this contribution analyzes the political and more-than-human dimensions of efforts to promote forest resilience.
Paper long abstract
European forests have become focal points of intensifying hopes, economic speculation, and green ambitions (Konczal and Asselin 2025), even as they suffer the compound effects of human encroachment, pollution, and accelerating global warming. In response, national and supranational actors, including the EU in its Forest Strategy for 2030, position forest resilience as a key policy imperative, calling for sustained investment in forests’ capacity to recover from or adapt to stressors while continuing to deliver multiple ‘ecosystem functions’.
Yet resilience is a fraught horizon. As an essentially contested concept (Grove 2018), it generates persistent management and governance challenges (Nikinmaa et al. 2023) and foregrounds deeply political questions about how forests should be valued, managed, and related to. This contribution intervenes in these debates by critically examining what resilience does and how it is mobilized within a forestry organization operating at the intersection of competing interests and sharply divergent conceptions of forest value.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among foresters employed by the Dutch State Forestry Agency, this article traces how resilience became adopted as a guiding principle while also analyzing its enactment in highly situated management practices, including planting and felling. I argue that resilience operates as a multispecies project that both depends on neoliberal imaginaries of management and care and requires ongoing tinkering with more-than-human relations. As resilience is emerging as a promissory horizon across diverse forest worlds, this analysis foregrounds more-than-human valuations as central to contemporary resilience imaginaries and pushes scholarship on the state–forest nexus in new analytical directions.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Sarıkeçili pastoralists and the Turkish state produce divergent grazing maps of the same forested landscape, foregrounding forests as equivocal, political, and socio-ecological assemblages constituted through competing practices of legibility.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines forests as political and equivocal socio-ecological assemblages through an ethnographic study of Sarıkeçili nomadic pastoralists in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey. The Sarıkeçili’s grazing pathways follow oak forests, river valleys, and foothill ecologies stretching between the Mediterranean coast and the Central Anatolian plateau, bringing them into sustained interaction with forest ecosystems, state forestry institutions, and sedentary farming communities.
Drawing on participatory action research, the paper focuses on a series of participatory mapping workshops in which Sarıkeçili pastoralists produced their own grazing maps using everyday materials such as stones, branches, pine cones, onions, and potatoes to narrate routes, water sources, plant knowledge, and interspecies relations embedded in their movements. These maps are juxtaposed with official forestry maps and grazing permits produced by the Turkish state, as well as cartographic representations generated by the research team.
I analyze the equivocations that emerge when these different mappings claim to represent the “same” forested geography. Rather than treating divergence as error or misunderstanding, I argue that these cartographic disjunctions reveal forests as more-than-human collectivities constituted through competing practices of legibility, care, control, and exclusion. Engaging debates in forest anthropology, state territoriality, and political ecology, the paper shows how forests are simultaneously constructed and deconstructed through everyday grazing practices and bureaucratic planning. Situated at the margins of Europe and the Global North, the Turkish case offers a critical perspective on polarized forest politics and the limits of state-centered environmental governance.
Paper short abstract
The focus of this presentation are the continuities between the initial stage of political forest's evolution in the village of Drežnica, Croatia in the 17th century and contemporary management practices, with special reference to how they reflect in the community’s living with/beside the forest.
Paper long abstract
This presentation is based on long-term ethnographic research in the village of Drežnica (Croatia). Situated in a densely forested region, the village is and was throughout its history deeply reliant on the forest. The turning point in the genealogy of the political forest (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001) in the region, which was part of the Habsburg military frontier, was the appropriation of the forests by the Habsburg court in the 17th century. In order to better use the forest resources, they had to be mapped and described, the space had to be abstracted, as the fundamental undertaking of nature commodification in capitalism (Mrozowski 1999: 154). Forest legislation devised during Habsburg rule marks the consolidation of thinking about forests as resource that is the basis of present management policies, as most forested surface in Croatia (76 %) is owned by the state and managed by the state-owned company, Hrvatske šume d.o.o. (Croatian forests limited company). One of the company’s mottoes is “Green Forever! In the service of sustainable management”, which signifies the predominant official framework of imagining the forest - a resource to be managed exclusively using the tools of scientific forestry.
This presentation continues my previous research on work and the political forest in Drežnica (Grgurinović 2024). Here I want to focus on the continuities between the initial stage of the evolution of the political forest in the 17th century and the contemporary management practices, with special reference to how these processes reverberate in the community’s living with/beside the forest.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents findings from a PhD project examining human–forest relationships in inland areas of Italy, focusing on how different migratory trajectories reshape ecological practices, local knowledge, and regimes of belonging.
Paper long abstract
In inland areas of Italy forest landscapes and populations have co-evolved for centuries through management practices intertwined with the social and economic structure of the communities that used the forest. Although the depopulation processes of the last century drastically interrupted this relationship, in recent decades new migratory flows have repopulated these territories and returned to manage their resources. Forestry is experiencing renewed interest both for economic and energy needs and thanks to new ecological sensibilities. The case study concerns a global countryside (Woods 2011) in the Tuscan hinterland. These villages historically developed around forest-based economic activities and currently exhibit a stratified composition resulting from successive migratory flows. In fact, this area has attracted both economic migrants, who have found work as woodcutters, and “amenity migrants”, who, driven by a “rural nostalgia” (Meloni 2023), interact with the forest in a more conservative way. In this sense, the forest itself becomes a polarised space of potential conflict, encounters and hierarchies where it is difficult to reconcile multiple senses of belonging and individual interests within shared management practices. The main objective of this research is to understand how perceptions and usage practices regarding the forest diverge between different groups in a context of capitalist economy and increasing heritagization processes (Smith 2006). Drawing on political ecology (Moore 2016), the paper argues that these relationships between humans and forests have fundamental implications not only for ecological balances, but also for issues of social and environmental justice within rural communities undergoing demographic and socio-economic transformation.
Paper short abstract
Various actors rationalise their practices in the forest as forms of care. We explore local forest conflicts through the lens of care practices and argue that both the power dynamics involved and the role of care in constituting the self are at the root of conflicts.
Paper long abstract
This presentation explores local forest conflicts and the broader human-forest relationships they reflect through the lens of care practices. Our research takes a practical approach by facilitating mediated round table discussions to both analyse these conflicts and foster their transformation. Through participant observation and individual go-alongs, we examine how different human actors engage with and actively shape the forest as a social-ecological system.
Drawing on empirical insights from a case study in a low mountain range in Germany, we highlight how different forest-related actors rationalise their practices as forms of care: a forester cares for young oak trees in need of protection, a hiking trail warden cares for self-made benches and shelters, an environmentalist cares for countless lichen species, and a conservation officer cares for the rarities of the forest. We argue that the roots of certain conflicts lie precisely in these care practices.
Adopting a critical care perspective that understands care as non-innocent and deeply ambivalent, we highlight power dynamics by addressing the role of formal hierarchies and institutions, the exclusions these care practices evoke, and the ways in which the actors’ interventions shape the forest. Moreover, we show how these care relationships shape the identities of the human actors. These dynamics, we argue, intensify the conflicts.
At the same time, our empirical material suggests that a care perspective also holds the potential to bridge divides and facilitate dialogue by shedding light on emotions, commitment and commonalities, particularly in conflict settings.
Paper short abstract
The presentation introduces The Lack of Forest, an art project developed in the post-hurricane Tuchola Forest examining forests as political and socio-ecological assemblages. Through a communal eco-commemorative land art installation, it explores loss, memory, and ways of living within forest ruin.
Paper long abstract
Lack of Forest is a land-based artistic and research project situated in the post-hurricane landscape of the Bory Tucholskie forests in northern Poland—an area shaped by ecological destruction, historical violence, and state-led forest governance. Drawing on perspectives from forest anthropology, the project approaches the forest as a socio-ecological and political assemblage co-produced by human, more-than-human, and institutional actors.
At the centre of the project is the Mound, a commemorative land art installation constructed from approximately 120 uprooted trees and roots left behind by the storm. Rather than restoring order or productivity, the Mound functions as an autonomous site of encounter, where local memories, ecological processes, and power relations embedded in forest management intersect. It stimulates practices that challenges dominant narratives of recovery, legibility, and control of land that emerge in the aftermath of environmental disasters.
Through long-term observation and participation in processes of decay, regrowth, and abandonment, Lack of Forest foregrounds the forest as a liminal and polarised space—simultaneously present and absent, living and managed. The project explores how local communities experience loss, precarity, and responsibility while navigating imposed frameworks of forest renewal and territorialisation.
Situated within post-war and post-socialist Eastern European contexts, Lack of Forest draws parallels between ecological regeneration and intergenerational trauma. By attending to relational practices of care, memory, and belonging, the project proposes an ontological reworlding that contributes to broader discussions on how forests are politically produced, culturally inhabited, and contested as sites where a “complex we” emerges across human and more-than-human relations.
Paper short abstract
The work shows human and non-human intertwining of life in Białowieża Forest after the conflict over the logging escalation. It follows post-socialist strategies for socio-ecological reproduction and multispecies alliances as a response for disruption and change in the times of multi-crises.
Paper long abstract
I propose a presentation on bottom-up strategies for human and nonhuman survival in the Białowieża Forest on the Polish-Belarusian border, in the context of meta-crisis. The paper draws on years (2017-2023) of ethnographic research conducted after the escalation of the conflict over the expansion of Białowieża National Park and severe logging in 2017, and subsequently during the emergence of a new migration route in the area. Using embodied methodologies, feminist and posthumanist theories, I follow multispecies assemblages that enable alliances for eco-social regeneration.
My work explores entanglements of life in the Forest, focusing on anti-capitalist strategies of practising common life, everyday resistance and socio-ecological reproduction in times of multiple crises. I examine how discourses and practices of different ‘ecologies’ materialise in the forest: the local ‘peasant’ ecology of people living in the forest, forestry ecology, and the ecology of biologists and activists and show how ideologies of nature and care might operate as colonial practices or extend post-transformation state strategies that undermine reproduction.
One of the key points becomes collective mourning as a situated strategy for living through social change and ecological transformation. I suggest practices of grief not only as responses to loss, but as ways of making sense of ruptures and projecting futures, carrying a potential for building alliances across polarized communities and species. I also propose the figure of wykrot (uprooted tree) as crucial for understanding multilayered identities and fears of uprooting: both the material, ecological dynamics of disturbance and regeneration, and the social memory of displacement.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines forest conflict in Poland as a site of friction (Tsing 2004). Drawing on engaged ethnographic research, it focuses on the emerging category of the “social forest” and explores how it is negotiated across scales, producing tensions beyond polarised positions.
Paper long abstract
Simple stories are simple. Activists love the forest, foresters exploit it. Foresters speak in the language of numbers, activists – of emotions. I caught myself in the same thinking.
This paper grows out of an attempt to move beyond such simplified narratives in the context of forest conflict in Poland. Based on ongoing, engaged ethnographic research, I examine this conflict not as binary confrontation but as a dynamic process shaped by friction — understood, following Anna Tsing (2004), as the awkward, unstable, and creative qualities of connection across difference.
Shifting my attention towards frictions, I’m asking, what can emerge from the conflict over forests in Poland? Is there a chance to look at forests in terms of cooperation?
An example of friction that I will discuss is the concept of the “social forest,” which is a new category in Polish forest politics. I argue that the social forest is a category that brings together ideas from different levels of politics. While embedded in local struggles, it is also shaped by broader global frameworks, e.g. notions of sustainable development. At the same time, the category produces new divisions: by separating “social” from “natural” functions, it risks reproducing a conceptual split between humans and nature.
By following the meaning of the social forest, the paper explores whether this concept can act as a site of friction rather than further polarisation. Given that the fieldwork is still in progress, I will focus on the processes through which this category is negotiated and contested.
Paper short abstract
Based on a scientific review of forestry literature, we argue that the knowledge and beliefs of its authors reinforce the dominant forest management paradigm centered on the bioeconomy and reinforce the path dependence of current policies as alternative options lack sufficient discursive resources.
Paper long abstract
Climate change is considered the primary disturbance factor affecting forest resilience in Europe. Management and policy responses will be guided by scientific research on the impact of climate change on forests and the recommended mitigation and adaptation strategies. Therefore, it is crucial to assess and understand the scientific evidence and the available management options to ensure effective planned interventions. At the same time, scientific policy recommendations may be influenced by the beliefs and values of their authors, who may belong to different epistemic communities of like-minded researchers. Because evidence reflects different beliefs and values regarding forests, some policy options may be more likely to be adopted than others. To verify this, we conducted a systematic review of the literature on the impact of climate change on Polish forests and their management strategies. We identified 64 relevant papers and analyzed them concerning climate-related stresses, disturbances, and proposed responses. We also categorized these responses by the type of proposed change and their alignment with two competing forest management paradigms: the dominant one focused on sustainable yield, and the alternative one emphasizing closer-to-nature forestry and biodiversity conservation. Each paradigm is represented by a different advocacy coalition aiming to translate their beliefs and values into policy. The findings indicate that climate change adaptation in forestry largely follows the traditional sustainable yield approach and resists broad policy changes. We conclude that this disparity reinforces the path dependence of existing policies, as alternative options lack sufficient discursive resources to effectively promote policy change.