Settlements as dispossession: Forest conservation and frontiers’ violence in Mau Forest, Kenya

State-run forest conservation in the postcolony often comes with various forms of violence and dispossession of local populations. In this article we investigate how conservation policies and practices relate to intercommunal conflict among forest residents. We look at the case of evictions of forest residents and intercommunal clashes in the Mau Forest area, Kenya, in the years following 2018, in conjunction with a long-durée perspective on land conflicts in the region. While political ecology literature on “green grabbing” and “slow violence” of conservation has so far hardly addressed ‘second-order’ impacts of forest evictions on group conflicts, we find political ecology fruitful as a theoretical framework to understand the links between state evictions and intercommunal conflicts. Using archival research and qualitative interviews conducted between 2018 and 2023, combined with ACLED conflict data (1997–2022), the authors show how colonial and postcolonial land policies, including attempts to conserve or rehabilitate Mau Forest, fostered dispossession, contributing to today’s violence. Past research tends to attribute intercommunal violence in Kenya to elections or resource competition, but this article explores deeper mechanisms tied to land reforms and settlement schemes that fuel identity-based conflicts. In areas like East Mau (Nakuru) and Maasai Mau (Narok), socioecological shifts—such as agricultural expansion—, coupled with population growth and unclear forest boundaries, intensified tensions. These transformations have commodified landscapes, producing new frontiers of conflict and exclusion. The results are significant for forest conservation and climate finance projects because they show how the impacts of contemporary conservation enforcement practices combine with long-durée impacts of both “brute” and “slow” violence to fuel intercommunal conflicts.