Presentation short abstract

This paper advances fire (im)mobilities to analyse Brazil's uneven fire governance. It shows how suppression regimes targeting local burning coexist with agribusiness appropriation of fire, revealing colonial power structures alongside practices of resistance and territorial care.

Presentation long abstract

Wildfire governance has long been shaped by Eurocentric paradigms that frame fire primarily as a disaster. While influential, this is not the only narrative. In Brazil, fire circulates through multiple, geographically differentiated yet contemporaneous regimes. In some regions, agribusiness actors selectively appropriate fire as a destructive technology for land clearing, pasture renewal and territorial expansion. Elsewhere, particularly in agribusiness-dominated areas of the Cerrado, fire is governed through suppression regimes that criminalise Indigenous, quilombola and rural burning practices, portraying local communities as irresponsible burners and threats to monoculture economies.

Although these narratives materialise unevenly across regions, they coexist and shape a fragmented but interconnected system of fire governance, where different uses of fire are alternately legitimised, prohibited or weaponised. These competing regimes obscure how fire becomes a contested medium of land governance.

This paper introduces the framework of fire (im)mobilities to offer a more complex understanding of the socio-ecological role of fire. The framework conceptualises fire as an agent that produces -and is produced by- multiple forms of (im)mobility involving humans and non-humans. It highlights how fire regimes intersect with land conflicts, agribusiness expansion, conservation agendas, but also with everyday practices and socio-ecological rhythms.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Cerrado-Amazon transition zone, the paper shows how colonial hierarchies unevenly structure fire governance, restricting some burning practices while enabling others. At the same time, fire sustains resistance, livelihoods and alternative forms of territorial stewardship. Fire (im)mobilities thus provide a new lens to analyse fire’s entanglements with land politics and epistemic resistance.