Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Elephant translocation in Malaysia operates as a conservation infrastructure that redistributes risk and (in)security. As “government elephants,” translocated animals become living instruments of the state whose movements both stabilize boundaries and intensify exposure in borderland communities.

Paper long abstract

In Peninsular Malaysia, elephant translocation repurposes Cold War counterinsurgency-era infrastructures of mobility control and legibility for environmental governance, redistributing protection, exposure, risk, and (in)security across human and nonhuman populations. This paper examines how elephants deemed “rogue” in human-designated zones are tranquilized, trucked, GPS-collared, and relocated to protected habitat where they are said to “belong”—territories that Jahai communities in the Thai-Malaysian borderland, along with other Indigenous peoples, also call home.

In the aftermath of these translocations, Jahai interlocutors report being increasingly menaced by gajah kerajaan (“the government’s elephants”), which raid gardens and unsettle village life. These animals are distinguished from local herds with whom Jahai maintain long-standing interspecies protocols of avoidance and communication. Some Jahai speculate that 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 reveal how conservation infrastructures produce elephants as instruments of governance: living infrastructural elements through which authorities seek to render risk legible and stabilize boundaries between safety and threat, wildness and settlement.

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 that expose the limits of such risk-based ordering and intensify the insecurities they are meant to mitigate. In foregrounding elephants as sites where protection and danger converge, the paper shows how conservation infrastructures do not simply manage uncertainty but actively participate in producing polarized landscapes of (in)security.