Markets of exceptionalism: peace parks in Southern Africa

Abstract

Abstract The vision of Southern African peace parks – transfrontier conservation areas – is one of ‘boundless’ natural landscapes transcendent of the brutality of the cartographic legacy of sovereign-statism. The parks are presented as vast biodiversity rich wildernesses inhabited by rare and precious fauna and flora and scattered communities of ‘traditional’ African peoples. As such, the region's frontiers symbolise exceptional spaces for ecosystem scale conservation, and the fostering of peace, community, and economic prosperity in a historically troubled region. However, the peace parks vision is emblematic of the commodification of life that pervades strategies for environmental governance and conservation in the current neoliberal era. Re-reading the vision through discourses of ‘the exception’ and securitisation demonstrates how its partiality and performativity act to discipline the region's borderzones in line with market priorities. In doing so, the vision (re)creates historically rooted patterns of inclusion and exclusion, security and insecurity in the life of the parks.