Deploying difference: Security threat narratives and state displacement from protected areas

State actors have increasingly begun to treat protected areas as sites of security threats and resident communities as the source of this insecurity. This is translating into community eviction from protected areas that is authorized by security logics and hence not merely conservation concerns. We ground this claim by drawing on empirical work from Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park (LNP) and Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR). In both cases, these security-provoked evictions are authorized by the mobilization of interlocking axes of difference that articulate notions of territorial trespass with that of a racialized enemy. These axes, moreover, are rooted in prior histories. We also show how standing behind these evictions is the nation-state and its practices of protected area territorialization and equally how evictions become more difficult to contest once they are authorized by security considerations. The cases, however, differ in one key respect. While displacement from the LNP is an instance of conservation-induced displacement (CID), albeit one reworked by security considerations, eviction from the MBR is motivated more centrally by security concerns yet takes advantage of protected area legislation. The study hence offers insight into a growing literature on conservation–security encounters and into different articulations of conservation, security and displacement.