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This dissertation is based on research conducted at a small state-managed conservancy called the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve (ESNR) situated in the low-lying flatlands of the Cape Town metropolis. By tracing some of the complex and varied ways in which different ways of knowing and valuing urban " natures " and practices of conservation co-consti...
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In a time of biodiversity loss, conservation management literature in Cape Town focuses on biodiversity preservation and top-down management responses. Contributing a more nuanced and politicised understanding of conservation management, this paper examines the challenges of everyday nature conservation and collaboration that occurs nearby Cape Town’s persistently racially-segregated and historically neglected townships. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with on-ground nature conservators and participant observations in collaborative conservation arrangements with local township residents. Examining the literature on Cape Town’s colonial and apartheid conservation histories, I also consider how manifest through the identified everyday challenges are persistent colonial legacies—including deeply racialised relations, exclusionary conservation practices, and a focus on biodiversity conservation to the neglect of community needs. However, on-ground relations and everyday practices also reveal significant contestations to and transformations away from colonising legacies. The analysis contributes towards a discussion of what it means to be a ‘postcolonial’ nature conservator in Cape Town.
Abstract The co-emergence of life and value, bodies and the body politic is a major aspect of world politics today. This chapter, first, frames key debates in IR on anarchy, order and postcolonial understandings of the ‘corporeal’ and the ‘international’
with a focus on debates of biocapital and biovalue in STS. Second, I grapple with how biological sciences are simultaneously contesting and facilitating global biotechnology ventures, and how the ‘international’ and ‘corporeality’ co-emerge. I argue that what counts as corporeal and what counts as international must be critically examined in order to break away from the delirious and omnipresent reinscriptions of imperialism and its dominant presumptions of anarchy and order that come with the imaginary, the thinking, and praxis of bio-value. In the attempt to craft a distinctive geopolitical niche, states and markets bio-innovate the making and (un)making of living beings and their distribution as symptomatic of practices, discourses, and strategies that define, zone, and make possible the appropriation and
governing of life. The emergence of infrastructures of biotechnology and ‘lively capital’ debates in India and the play Harvest orient us at what is at the forefront of claiming and constituting ‘global’ power. Reading these debates in India, I want to argue, opens up the space for articulating analytics grounded in the empirical-as-‘material-semiotic configurations’ and ‘orientations’ that offer lessons and methods
for IR and STS by challenging strategies of zonings (i.e., the ‘international’ and the ‘corporeal,’ theory and practice, bioeconomy and capital) upon which a geopolitically spatiotemporal order of modernity depends. I conclude with some insights into the ethical imperative to read ontologies and epistemologies that transgress and alter the hierarchies and disciplinary formations that come with anarchy and order.
