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Paper short abstract

Elephant translocation in Malaysia is a conservation infrastructure that polarizes landscapes of risk and belonging. Translocated “government elephants” become rogue infrastructural elements: living extensions of the apparatus whose movements both enact and unsettle partitions that contain wildness.

Paper long abstract

Conservation infrastructures are often framed as neutral solutions to environmental conflict, yet they routinely generate polarization by redistributing risk and belonging. This paper examines elephant translocation in Peninsular Malaysia as one such conservation infrastructure, staging polarizations through forced displacement of elephants, classificatory sorting, and territorial zoning. Elephants deemed “rogue” in human-designated zones are tranquilized, trucked, GPS-collared, and relocated to protected habitat where they ostensibly “belong”—territories also home to Jahai Indigenous communities of the Thai-Malaysian borderland. In the wake of these translocations, Jahai report being increasingly menaced by gajah kerajaan—“the government’s elephants”—which raid gardens and unsettle village life. Some speculate these elephants come from zoos, noting their strange ease around humans, unlike familiar local herds that can be spoken to and warded off. Such distinctions show how conservation infrastructure produces translocated elephants as infrastructural elements of the state: living instruments through which conservation attempts to stabilize the boundary between wildness and settlement, drawing on inherited infrastructures of mobility control and legibility forged through counterinsurgency.

Yet elephants continually transgress the routes and partitions meant to contain them. Through their unpredictable mobility, the government’s elephants become “rogue infrastructures” (Kim 2016): animate extensions of the conservation apparatus whose movements and effects both enact and exceed design, exposing the limits of infrastructural ordering. Wildness thus emerges not as a condition to be enclosed, but as a volatile effect of the infrastructures built to govern it.