Land Control and Marginalisation Under Fortress Conservation: Insights from the Amrabad Tiger Reserve, India

Fortress conservation models, such as Protected Areas (PAs), are often critically examined as frontiers of land control driven by state or external actors, leading to dispossession and marginalisation of local communities. However, such analyses tend to reduce land control to its coercive outcomes, overlooking the processes and social relations through which it operates and produces differentiated impacts. This study addresses this gap by analysing how multiple sources of land control—including conservation practices, politically mediated development and welfare interventions, and local agrarian power relations—interact to shape marginalisation. Using qualitative methods—semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and oral histories—this research examines land control dynamics in the Amrabad Tiger Reserve, Telangana, India, a Protected Area embedded within a regional agrarian economy. The study employs an expansive concept of land control that incorporates historically rooted and shaped agrarian class and caste relations alongside conservation practices. The findings show that these interactions reproduce interconnected relations of oppression among caste, class, and land control. The historically discriminated against and oppressed groups amongst the generally considered marginalised communities—Dalit Madigas and Adivasi Chenchus—emerge as the most marginalised, even in spaces that previously enabled partial escape from such conjugated oppression. By demonstrating how PA-based conservation reshapes class differentiation, the study argues that marginalisation under protection is contextual, historically contingent, and differentiated, contributing to debates on equitable conservation and the agrarian political economy of conservation enclosures.