Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Institutionen för globala studier
https://hdl.handle.net/2077/9824
2024-03-19T09:35:42ZThe martial politics of biodiversity protection: Wildlife conservation practices in northern Kenya
https://hdl.handle.net/2077/76527
The martial politics of biodiversity protection: Wildlife conservation practices in northern Kenya
van der Hoeven, Sara
Wildlife conservation is entangled with broader conflict dynamics in pastoral and semi-arid northern Kenya and tackles livestock theft, road banditry and inter-communal conflict. The thesis aims to better understand this ‘war by conservation’, in which conservation and military-like practices address and tie into wider security issues. What is the role of ‘the military’ here, and how are such practices different from dynamics thus far explored in green militarisation literature? This dissertation further develops the concept of martial politics as a process of ordering through war-like relations, technologies and knowledge. It challenges the liberal myth that conservation is a ‘civilian’ space that is temporarily ‘militarised’ to solve the extinction crisis and argues that there is no peaceful domestic order to return to. The thesis draws on 64 interviews and analyses policy documents, legislation and National Assembly debates.
The three empirical chapters on community conservation, rangers and guns, first, demonstrate conservation’s historical interlinkage with military endeavours. Colonial counterinsurgency and anti-poaching operations shaped each other, and the historic uneven flow of guns constructed social differences and hierarchies which fed into national governments perceiving and treating pastoralists as a ‘security problem’. Second, the chapters analyse various contemporary war-by-conservation practices, such as anti-livestock theft. Rangers occupy ambiguous positions in-between social categories like ‘civilian’-‘military’ and ‘public’-‘private’, and are integrated into the state security sector as Police Reservists, while conservancies also herald rangers as community-based (civil) conservation actors in the (threat of the) use of force. Additionally, Western donors draw on a conservation-security nexus to finance conservation and open possibilities to sponsor conservation through security, rather than environmental funds.
Third, the thesis examines how the above practices order society and nature. Conservancies carve out political power by drawing on the language and the idea of the state, whereby war-by-conservation practices reorder power relations amongst conservancy residents, regional elites, County governments and the state. The thesis demonstrates the usefulness of martial politics as the contingent ordering of politics, in which dichotomies and social categories are filled with meanings that help establish social order.
2023-06-08T00:00:00ZBuilding futures through Refugee Education: Aspirations, Navigation, and (Non- )citizenship
https://hdl.handle.net/2077/76356
Building futures through Refugee Education: Aspirations, Navigation, and (Non- )citizenship
Aden, Hassan
This study explores how Somali secondary school and graduate-level youth in
Kenya’s Dadaab camps attempt to build their futures through education, despite
challenges posed by their non-citizen status. Using ethnographic data, the study
specifically analyses the educational journeys, aspirations, and experiences of
these refugee youth, shedding light on the everyday practices and dynamic
strategies they employ to pursue their goals and manage obstacles. The study
demonstrates how secondary school youth actively pursue educational
aspirations, which they believe can enable them to exit the camps and
potentially overcome their non-citizen status – through routes such as the
resettlement-based scholarships for post-secondary education in Canada.
Anchoring in their hopes in education, these students leverage various social
resources, networks, and strategies to cope with challenges facing their education
and aspirations, while simultaneously reflecting on various pathways to navigate
post-graduation crossroads.
Graduate-level youth, faced with limited opportunities, often adjust their
aspirations to align with the available options to move forward, such as
scholarships or incentive- (as opposed to wage-) paying jobs in the camps. More
and more graduate youth opt to return to Somalia in seek of better employment
opportunities, despite the potential security risks. The study also underscores the
intergenerational solidarity and support system that emerge as academically
successful refugee youth establish and manage nationally accredited schools,
significantly contributing to students’ performance in national exams and the
quality of education overall. By examining refugee youths’ enterprise of future-building through education within the context of long-term camps –characterised by perpetual precarity and uncertainty due to inhabitants’ exclusion
from citizenship rights, freedoms, and advantages – this study provides
theoretical insights into the complex and dynamic interplay among aspirations,
navigational strategies, and non-citizenship status.
2023-05-23T00:00:00ZWorking towards Modernity. Migration and Skills Development at the Frontiers of Racial Capitalism in Tunisia
https://hdl.handle.net/2077/75874
Working towards Modernity. Migration and Skills Development at the Frontiers of Racial Capitalism in Tunisia
Jung, Alexander
In the wake of the political salience of migration, projects that target employability and/or
entrepreneurial thinking have become important components of European development interventions
that address ‘irregular’ migration in Tunisia and elsewhere in recent years. Working towards
Modernity investigates the rationales behind and consequences of such skills development projects.
To this end, this dissertation draws on interviews with donors and implementing organisations as well
as documents to analyse the implementation of fifteen skills development projects funded by
European donors in Tunisia. In doing so, this dissertation reveals that these projects do not simply aim
to prevent Tunisian migration. Instead, being aware of the limitations of using development to reduce
migration, stakeholders promote an individualised idea of development in Tunisia and hold out the
prospect of selective mobilities to Europe. More specifically, these projects circulate ideologies of
(soft) skills and work ethic as signifiers of modernity. These allow for striking a balance between
demands to prevent migration, which have shaped European political and public debates, and the
interests of private companies in their search for labour and new markets.
In unpacking the material and ideological interests underpinning these projects, this dissertation
argues that migration and development interventions reproduce structures of racial capitalism. This
involves an articulation of race that drives calls to exclude racialised subjects as well as capitalism’s
reliance on the reproduction of racialised hierarchies. Yet, given that Europe needs to uphold a liberal
self-image, (soft) skills and work ethic ideologies become important signifiers of modernity that
exclude subjects on the grounds of seemingly apolitical market logics. Ultimately, these projects
reproduce Europe as a self-proclaimed container of modernity that is committed to liberal values and
maintain a racialised liberal order which extends rights to a few selected subjects, while denying them
to most others.
2023-05-02T00:00:00ZRegional citizenship regimes: Comparing ECOWAS and ASEAN
https://hdl.handle.net/2077/75242
Regional citizenship regimes: Comparing ECOWAS and ASEAN
Weinrich, Amalie Ravn
This thesis investigates the relationship between citizenship and regional organisations in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Specifically, it studies variation in regional citizenship regimes, how regional actors interpret the notion of regional citizenship, and what these variations and interpretations mean for our understanding of regional citizenship regimes. The thesis takes a qualitative, comparative case study approach and draws on empirical data from official documents and 49 semi-structured interviews conducted with ASEAN and ECOWAS officials and staff from non-governmental organisations. The study is guided by a four-tired concept of citizenship regime that provides the analytical framework for the analysis and comparison of a legal citizenship regime (ECOWAS) and a non-legal citizenship regime (ASEAN). The study is motivated by the increasing development and regulation of citizenship by regional organisations which create a new, ‘added-on’ membership status beyond national citizenship. As intra-regional movement is vast within many regions, these new citizenship statuses impact the lives of millions of people. In spite of their increasing importance, there is little research on regional citizenship regimes outside of the European Union (EU). The EU-dominance results in limited attention to informal and legally non-binding forms of regional citizenship and, thus, a limited understanding of the ways in which these forms of regional membership shape the formation of regional citizenship regimes. The study presents three important findings: first, a high degree of legalisation is not a necessity for regional citizenship regimes. Second, even in cases where regional citizenship regimes can be characterised as having a higher degree of legalisation, other aspects, notably those that touching on identity and belonging, are considered equally important by those designing the regimes. Third, the level of socio-economic development in a region has a direct impact on how regional citizenship regimes are constructed. Consequently, this thesis makes a series of contributions which advance our understanding of regional citizenship regimes by illustrating the need for revising the criteria for what we consider a citizenship regime. It also provides a rare, in-depth comparative account of the assumptions upon which regional organisations base their citizenship regimes. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the ways in which political realities shape institutional design and citizenship policies in West Africa and Southeast Asia.
2023-03-28T00:00:00Z