Wildlife Conservation & Human Studies by Laur Kiik
Conservation Biology, 2022
When deciding how to conserve biodiversity, practitioners navigate diverse missions, sometimes co... more When deciding how to conserve biodiversity, practitioners navigate diverse missions, sometimes conflicting approaches, and uncertain trade-offs. These choices are based not only on evidence, funders’ priorities, stakeholders’ interests, and policies, but also on practitioners’ personal experiences, backgrounds, and values. Calls for greater reflexivity—an individual or group's ability to examine themselves in relation to their actions and interactions with others—have appeared in the conservation science literature. But what role does reflexivity play in conservation practice? We explored how self-reflection can shape how individuals and groups conserve nature. To provide examples of reflexivity in conservation practice, we conducted a year-long series of workshop discussions and online exchanges. During these, we examined cases from the peer-reviewed and gray literature, our own experiences, and conversations with 10 experts. Reflexivity among practitioners spanned individual and collective levels and informal and formal settings. Reflexivity also encompassed diverse themes, including practitioners’ values, emotional struggles, social identities, training, cultural backgrounds, and experiences of success and failure. Reflexive processes also have limitations, dangers, and costs. Informal and institutionalized reflexivity requires allocation of limited time and resources, can be hard to put into practice, and alone cannot solve conservation challenges. Yet, when intentionally undertaken, reflexive processes might be integrated into adaptive management cycles at multiple points, helping conservation practitioners better reach their goals. Reflexivity could also play a more transformative role in conservation by motivating practitioners to reevaluate their goals and methods entirely. Reflexivity might help the conservation movement imagine and thus work toward a better world for wildlife, people, and the conservation sector itself. [HTML Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14022]
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Area, 2022
In a time of deepening social and ecological crises, the question of research ethics is more pert... more In a time of deepening social and ecological crises, the question of research ethics is more pertinent than ever. Our intervention grapples with the specific personal, ethical, and methodological challenges that arise at the interface of conservation and social science. We expose these challenges through the figure of Chris, a fictional anonymised composite of our fraught diverse fieldwork experiences in Australia, Burma, Indonesian Borneo, Namibia, and Vanuatu. Fundamentally, we explore fieldwork as a series of contested loyalties: loyalties to our different human and non-human research participants, to our commitments to academic rigour, and to the project of wildlife conservation itself, while reckoning with conservation's spotted (neo)colonial past. Our struggles and reflections illustrate, first, that practical research ethics do not predetermine forms of reciprocity. Second, while we need to choose our concealments carefully and follow the principle of not doing harm, we also have the responsibility to reveal social and environmental injustices. Third, we must acknowledge that as researchers we are complicit in the practices of human and non-human violence and exclusion that suffuse conservation. Finally, given how these responsibilities move the researcher beyond a position of innocence or neutrality, academic institutions should adjust their ethics support. This intervention highlights the need for greater openness about research challenges emerging from conflicting personal, ethical, and disciplinary loyalties, in order to facilitate greater cross-disciplinary understanding. Active engagement with these ethical questions through collaborative dialogue-based fora, both before and after fieldwork, would enable learning and consequently transform research practices. [HTML Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12839].
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Anthropological Forum, 2018
When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one
may wonder: where has nature gon... more When reading ethnographic literature on nature conservation, one
may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have
written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental
projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter,
dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people
across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little
about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global
nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis.
Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on
conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many
self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter
conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’
of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials
from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity
conservation. The review is structured through three questions:
How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent
nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other
nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural
science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis?
Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through
the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of worldmaking encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better
connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems
both for anthropology and conservation science.
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Critique of Anthropology, 2019
When reading anthropological writings on global nature conservation, one may wonder: Where are th... more When reading anthropological writings on global nature conservation, one may wonder: Where are the conservationists? Anthropologists have written nuanced ethnographies of how native people encounter and are dispossessed by transnational environmental NGOs and conservation policies. Yet, anthropologists have neglected the other side of those worldwide encounters: the conservation practitioners. Instead, conservationists are sometimes misrepresented as homogenous, impersonal and voice-less. This is surprising, considering anthropologists' increasing interest in cultures of expertise, including that of professionals in international development. This paper contributes to building the anthropology of professionals in global biodiversity conservation. It locates and reviews disparate material on conservationists from across the ethnographic literature. It argues for attending to the perspectives and diversity of conservation professionals and institutions, their transnational social worlds, naturalist worldviews and emotional lives. A section discusses the key contradictory positionality of the Global South's local-national professionals. Lastly, the paper reflects on practical challenges to fieldwork in 'Conservationland'.
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China's Myitsone Dam Mega-Project in Kachin/Burma by Laur Kiik
Journal of Burma Studies, 2020
How do movements against resource extraction projects handle ethnic conflict? In 2011, Burma/Myan... more How do movements against resource extraction projects handle ethnic conflict? In 2011, Burma/Myanmar created a diplomatic scandal when it one-sidedly halted the construction of the Myitsone Dam, derailing China’s then largest-ever hydropower project abroad. Leading up to its suspension, this project faced resistance by Burma’s ethnic majority Bamars as well as by minority ethnic Kachins, even while Kachin–Bamar tensions were rising as a decades-long civil war resumed. Drawing from ethnographic interviews, discourse analysis, and more than two years of fieldwork between 2010 and 2019, this paper traces the multi-ethnic history of resistance to Myitsone Dam, as told through various activists’ own voices. More than from Burma’s democratic transition, environmentalism, or geopolitics, anti-dam resistance emerged from two separate civilian nationalist movements – Kachin and Bamar – that mirrored Burma’s Bamar nationalist domination and ethnic conflict. Yet, resistance partly emerged from difficult inter-ethnic encounters – or, “confluences amidst conflict.” Kachin fears of losing their homeland resembled Bamar fears of Chinese takeover. A rare story amid decades of war and resource grabbing, Myitsone is a struggle over homeland and nature that did not unite, but did link Burma’s clashing nations.
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摘要克钦人担心缅族人有意挤压族群空间,缅甸民族主义者担心中国 “接管” 缅甸,中国人担心 “西方势力阴谋破坏”。几个水电站,怎么变成这个样子?
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Geopolitics, 2020
In 2011, Burma/Myanmar one-sidedly halted the billions-worth construction of Myitsone Dam, derail... more In 2011, Burma/Myanmar one-sidedly halted the billions-worth construction of Myitsone Dam, derailing China’s then-largest-ever hydroelectric project abroad and creating a lasting controversy in China–Burma relations. This decision followed an unprecedented public outcry in Burma and a decade of inter-ethnic resistance against this mega-project. This article explores how, throughout the Myitsone Dam controversy, actors at different scales and in three national societies speculated about hidden hostile inter-national plots behind the project or the resistance. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in 2010–2019, interviews, and media analysis, this article takes seriously many Chinese, Burmese, and Kachin voices – from ambassadors and journalists, to activists and village elders – who claim or dispute various hidden hostile inter-national strategies. The Myitsone case shows how deeply inter-national speculating shapes Burma, often in ways that erase ethnic-minority actors, popular movements, or dispossession. More broadly, it shows how nationalist thinking and competing nationalisms can shape ideas about a frontier of resource extraction. Finally, ethnographic research has often revealed how marginalised people’s conspiratorial narratives can reflect realities, but this study suggests using ethnography to let people challenge dominant conspiracy theories about themselves. Researchers across ethnographic disciplines, International Relations, and critical geopolitics face the analytical and ethical challenge of both contextualising and evaluating any people’s claim that someone plots against them.
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Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2016
In 2011, the Burmese military-backed government stunned global audiences by unilaterally suspendi... more In 2011, the Burmese military-backed government stunned global audiences by unilaterally suspending the construction of the Myitsone Dam, the cornerstone of China’s largest hydropower project abroad. This prominent failure of China’s “Going Out” investment strategy reverberated globally. Both Western and Chinese accounts frame the event as a pivotal moment in Myanmar’s celebrated reform process, the cooling of China–Myanmar relations, and US–China geopolitical rivalry in the Asia-Pacific. However, my ethnographic field and media research from 2010 to 2015 reveals that the mega-project’s failure does not originally stem from inter-state geopolitics or contested economics and ecology. Through chronological narration, I show how the Myitsone Dam is primarily the casualty of a distinctly ethno-political causality, whereby three nationalisms clashed and the replication of China’s “anti-ethno-political” model of development failed. Though no monolithic Chinese state directs “Chinese Development” overseas, individual Chinese entrepreneurs nonetheless draw from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) anti-political and state-centric paradigm when facing foreign social worlds. In the particular case of Myitsone, Chinese proponents drew from PRC’s state-nationalist heuristics of “national minorities and state-led development” and “Western anti-China conspiracy,” when facing Myanmar’s ethnic Kachin and Burman nationalisms. State ideological subjectivities of these developers seemed to blind them to the weakness in their own anti-ethno-political strategies, even when those collapsed publicly. I conclude that the Myitsone Dam’s construction will likely not be restarted, despite the hydropower company’s efforts. The Myitsone case also exemplifies how China’s previous historical entanglements in its neighboring regions uniquely disrupt the progress of “Going-Out” in Asia.
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Hydropower development in capacity-constrained countries can unfold through unsound policy argume... more Hydropower development in capacity-constrained countries can unfold through unsound policy arguments, narrow institutional and implementing arrangements, and ad hoc decision making processes. To derive insights for more legitimate policy making, we provide the first holistic account of Myanmar's legitimation struggles over large hydropower, focusing on Myitsone, the country's most controversial dam, during the period 2003–2011. Our analysis takes a policy regime perspective (specifically, a " political economic regime of provisioning " framework). Among our findings: (1) frequent use of non-rationally persuasive argument among contending actors; (2) a spiral of declining policy legitimacy, which is amplified by civil society mobilization, and halted by a 2011 decision to suspend Myitsone; (3) rejection of Myitsone but conditional acceptance of large hydropower among some elements of civil society. Opportunity and capability for more technically informed, inclusive discussion exists in Myanmar, but given hydropower's complexities, urgently deserves to be augmented. Although Myitsone in Myanmar is an exceptional case, we offer three propositions to assess and improve policy legitimacy of hydropower.
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Nature & Nationalism in War: Kachin, Burma, China by Laur Kiik
Ethnomusicology Forum, 2024
As the planet’s ecological crisis deepens, what can music reveal about the shapes that environmen... more As the planet’s ecological crisis deepens, what can music reveal about the shapes that environmentalism is taking across the world? This article shows that music is a sensory pathway into notions of nature and of saving nature in repressed and marginalised places. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork since 2010 in the war-torn Burma–China–India borderlands, I explore a dissident rock band’s pioneering environmentalist song. The song’s Kachin Jinghpaw language lyrics talk of ecological destruction through a worldwide trope—‘nature is crying’—but express more specifically a nationalist and religious environmentalism. The song calls on Christian Kachin people to rescue a God-given national homeland, amid the broader album’s call for ethnonational resistance against a ‘colonising’ military regime in Burma (Myanmar). I explore the song’s lyrics and karaoke music video—line-by-line and scene-by-scene—as a way to sense both the logic and feeling of environmentalism emerging amid war.
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War and Peace in the Borderlands of Myanmar: The Kachin Ceasefire, 1994-2011, 2016
This chapter draws from periods of ethnographic field research in the Kachin region from 2010 to ... more This chapter draws from periods of ethnographic field research in the Kachin region from 2010 to 2015, covering the lead up to the breakdown of the ceasefire and the discourses that emerged in relation to it subsequently. It therefore discusses in critical terms how large parts of Kachin society understand the ceasefire era and the reasons for its collapse in 2011. It focuses particularly on popular understandings of the large-scale resource grabs that defined much of that era. The chapter lays out a dominant Kachin nationalist-theoretical framework by discussing three core terms: Wunpawng Mungdan (territory/ ‘Kachin country’), Wunpawng myusha (people/ ‘Kachin nation’), and Karai Kasang (divinity/ Christian ‘God’). The chapter then tackles how Kachin nationalists deploy these terms in specific ways to understand their 1994-2011 ceasefire experiences; in doing so, they express ideas of ethno-national emergency, divine predestination, and ethnocidal conspiracy. These understandings guide many people in Kachin society to commit to resistance and the ethno-patriotic project of co-building a ‘land yet-to-be’, instead of engaging in a ceasefire based on compromise. Amid the current battles, anger and humanitarian crisis, the question of whether one wants ‘our Kachin nation’ to pursue full state independence or merely federal autonomy within Myanmar has become a sensitive and barely voiced debate inside Kachin society. While exploring these theories and popular analyses, this chapter steps into an open critical dialogue with Kachin nationalists themselves, suggesting ways in which these understandings are contradicted or complicated by other social realities. This is to draw a fuller, fairer, and more balanced picture of the complex social dynamics in this region. Simultaneously, the chapter cautions against the tendency to make homogenising claims about Burma’s minority ethnic nations, as if these were simple, monolithic entities rather than the internally diverse, class-stratified and complex societies that in fact they are.
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Wildlife Conservation & Human Studies by Laur Kiik
may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have
written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental
projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter,
dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people
across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little
about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global
nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis.
Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on
conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many
self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter
conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’
of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials
from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity
conservation. The review is structured through three questions:
How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent
nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other
nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural
science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis?
Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through
the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of worldmaking encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better
connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems
both for anthropology and conservation science.
China's Myitsone Dam Mega-Project in Kachin/Burma by Laur Kiik
Nature & Nationalism in War: Kachin, Burma, China by Laur Kiik
*
See more at: http://kachinceasefire.weebly.com/laur-kiik.html
*
Other by Laur Kiik
may wonder: where has nature gone? Social anthropologists have
written nuanced ethnographies of how the environmental
projects of governments and transnational NGOs encounter,
dispossess, clash culturally with, and try to govern native people
across the world. Yet, these diverse ethnographies often say little
about what motivates those encounters firstly: local and global
nature, especially wildlife, plants, and the planet’s ecological crisis.
Thus, this paper seeks ways how ethnographic writing on
conservation practice could better reflect that the planet’s many
self-willed, struggling, and valued non-humans, too, enter
conservation’s encounters. To find paths toward such a ‘wild-ing’
of ethnography, the paper locates and reviews disparate materials
from across the social-anthropological literature on biodiversity
conservation. The review is structured through three questions:
How does and could the ethnography of conservation represent
nature’s value? How can it show that animals, plants, and other
nature make and meet worlds? How can it incorporate natural
science data about non-human worlds and ecological crisis?
Altogether, we understand nature conservation clearer through
the interdisciplinary and more-than-human ethnography of worldmaking encounters. Such wilder ethnography may also better
connect people’s suffering and nature’s vanishing – as problems
both for anthropology and conservation science.
*
See more at: http://kachinceasefire.weebly.com/laur-kiik.html
*