This long-term project examines how conservation practice in the South Africa-Mozambique borderlands, along with the larger political-ecological context in which it is embedded, has changed over the last several decades. This investigation begins with the height of apartheid in the 1960s and moves on through the more recent creation of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), a flagship transboundary park that unites South Africa’s Kruger, Mozambique’s Limpopo, and Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Parks. I have been examining how the GLTP is provoking the displacement of resident communities, how the park is rewriting sovereignty (through ever-more-sophisticated country-to-country-to-NGO relations), and the contradictions of cross-border movement, whereby tourists and wildlife move more freely across a border that is increasingly closed-off to members of local communities. I am also currently investigating how the contemporary rhino poaching crisis is provoking an escalation of the militarization of the international border and of conservation practice itself, the impact of this on the GLTP, and links between the current and apartheid-era militarization of Kruger. These latter interests have prompted me to investigate larger questions of green militarization, green violence, and related human rights violations, from displacement to the state-sanctioned killing of suspected poachers.

Publications:

Lunstrum, E. Forthcoming. Conservation meets militarization in Kruger National Park: Historical encounters and complex legacies. Conservation and Society.

Massé, F. and E. Lunstrum. Forthcoming. Accumulation by securitization: Commercial poaching, neoliberal conservation, and the creation of new wildlife frontiers. Geoforum.

Lunstrum, E. Forthcoming. Green grabs, land grabs, and the spatiality of displacement: Eviction from Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park. Area.

Lunstrum, E. 2014. Green militarization: Anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (4): 816-832.

Lunstrum, E. 2013. Articulated sovereignty: Extending Mozambican state power through the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Political Geography, 36: 1-11.

Lunstrum, E. 2011. An uncomfortable fit? Transfrontier parks as mega-projects. Engineering earth: the impacts of mega-engineering projects, edited by S. Brunn. New York: Springer Press, 1223-1242.

Lunstrum, E. 2011. State rationality, development, and the making of sovereign territory: from colonial extraction to postcolonial conservation in Mozambique’s Massingir District. Cultivating the colonies: colonial states and their environmental legacies, edited by C.F. Ax, C. Brimnes, N.T. Jensen & K. Oslund. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 239-274.

Lunstrum, E. 2010. Reconstructing history, grounding claims to space: History, memory, and displacement in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. South African Geographical Journal 92 (2): 129-143.

Lunstrum, E. 2009. Terror, territory, and deterritorialization: Landscapes of terror and the unmaking of state power in the Mozambican ‘Civil’ War. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (5): 884-892.

Lunstrum, E. 2008. Investing in development: Mozambique’s 1997 Land Law and the Limpopo National Park. The Geographical Review 98 (3): 339-355.

Workshop:

With Clara Bocchino (AHEAD-GLTFCA & North-West University) and Teresa Connor (University of Fort Hare), I organized the 2013 workshop The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA) a Decade after Inception held at the Southern African Wildlife College. The workshop brought together scholars, park managers, conservation practitioners, and NGO representatives to reflect upon the many socio‐ecological changes that have unfolded within the GLTFCA, their impacts on a range of stake holders, and to chart future research trajectories.