Format/Structure

This is a panel proposal with 4-5 papers; we encourage researchers from global South to create a panel that is gender, racially and ethnically diverse

Long Abstract

The political forest is a foundational concept that has shaped critical scholarship on forest histories, knowledges, discourses, technologies, actors and institutions that govern arboreal landscapes in postcolonial societies. Privileging the political over the pristine, early work highlighted state territorialisation, formalisation of customary rights, violence, access and tenure (Peluso & Vandergeest, 2020). The second wave focused on non-state actors, market rationalities and the rise of new agendas like conservation and ecotourism (Devine & Baca, 2020). Grounded in fieldwork and the comparative method, recent work has illustrated the link between conceptions of property and processes of territorialisation (Kabra et al., 2023). This panel seeks to further advance the concept of political forests through comparative, empirically driven and place-based submissions. Some of the questions to engage with:

(1) How have territorial regimes in political forests evolved historically in different geographical and ecological contexts?

(2) How does the political forest make us rethink foundational political concepts of state, law, property and (social) identity?

(3) How do we unpack the political in political forest to shed light on the nature of contestation, power and hegemony in postcolonial societies?

(4) How does ecology exceed, surprise, consolidate or contest the political in political forests? For instance, how do non-humans speak back to power in conservation, afforestation, reintroduction, rewilding and restoration projects?

(5) How do new markets, commodities and technologies reassemble the political forest and configure power relations between species, citizens and bureaucracies?

Devine, J. A., & Baca, J. A. (2020). The Political Forest in the Era of Green Neoliberalism. Antipode, 52(4), 911–927.

Kabra, A., Das, B., & Bathla, C. (2023). Indigenous tree tenure in the times of charismatic carnivore conservation: Territoriality and property in the forests of central India. Political Geography, 101, 102841.

Peluso, N. L., & Vandergeest, P. (2020). Writing Political Forests. Antipode, 52(4), Article 4.

This Panel has 7 pending paper proposals.
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