The Commercial Poaching-Green Militarisation Nexus as Unsustainable Environmental Conflict

This chapter outlines key connections between environmental conflict, the illegal wildlife trade (IWT), and poverty/inequality. We demonstrate how political ecology approaches to environmental conflict provide a useful lens to understand key features of IWT. Drawing from empirical work on the commercial poaching of rhinos and the militarised response in Southern Africa, this chapter illustrates how the poaching-green militarisation nexus provokes violent environmental conflict between conservation actors and ground-level hunters who are often organised by global syndicates. This chapter argues that this is a conflict rooted in long-standing and deepening economic inequalities in the South Africa–Mozambican borderlands. This conflict directly threatens rhino populations through unsustainable illegal hunting, or what is commonly referred to as poaching. The militarised response, equally, may violate human rights, leads to further dispossession of already marginalised rural communities and, subsequently, threatens the long-term viability of conservation by alienating the very people whose support is needed for conservation’s success. The environmental conflict at the heart of the poaching-green militarisation nexus is thus unsustainable both ecologically and socially. These dynamics, and an environmental conflict approach, ultimately demand a policy response that rejects militarised interventions to commercial poaching in favour of addressing underlying inequalities.