Biodiversity conservation and contestations over land: Jihadist expansion in West Africa

Protected areas in Africa are sites of resource-related grievances and are located within socio-ecological landscapes where insurgent groups have increasingly operated. The connection between insurgency and protected areas is widely seen as resulting from resistance to coercive conservation, or from the role that protected areas serve as insurgent refuges. Research in Benin’s National Park W reveals that its emergence as a site of insurgency is shaped less by current grievances or refuge than by new forms of power that are grounded in histories of inter-group competition and changes in resource availability within a broader socio-ecological landscape. Long-term fieldwork shows how these landscape-level changes have intersected with different modes of park management to influence relations between managers and livestock herders which have in turn created opportunities for insurgents. Our analysis reveals two contrasting channels through which conservation zoning has shaped insurgent-local relations. The first involves resource users resisting expulsion from wildlife protection areas. The second involves users who align with insurgents to defend rights they have obtained through official park management policy. This channel demonstrates that attempts by managers to accommodate local needs can inadvertently produce new kinds of insurgent-local relationships through a combination of strict territorial management and ambiguous rights in special use zones. These findings point to a more complex etiology of how protected areas become sites of insurgency, highlighting the importance of the interaction of landscape-level resource competition and changing relations between conservation managers and rural inhabitants over time.