Capitalism, Wealth, and Conservation in the Age of Security: The Vitalization of the State

This article illustrates how for-profit actors and private wealth vitalize state power, here in the form of advancing the state's project of militarized conservation. My contribution complements, first, the neoliberal natures and conservation literature, which largely sees state power as diminished by neoliberal processes or else reinvented as a handmaiden of capital. In contrast and by drawing in part on Gramscian perspectives of state natures, the study shows how capitalism and wealth help consolidate state power and do so by enabling green militarization. More specifically, drawing on the case of commercial rhino poaching in Southern Africa, I show how state power is vitalized by the contributions of for-profit military corporations and the private wealth of affluent benefactors financing rhino relocation. Vitalization here encompasses how these economic actors and their contributions help the state shore up power over territory and resources but at a deeper level enable biopolitical intervention in the realm of (rhino) life and (poacher) death. In so doing, these actors and contributions allow the state to further establish its own significance and centrality, that is, its own vitality. The article is hence a call for a more robust reinsertion of the state back into our investigations of the economy, nature, and conservation and especially their intersections. By bringing together the neoliberal conservation, Gramscian state natures, and green militarization literatures, the article equally offers a view into how these intersections can result in novel, often lethal forms of militarized state making.