Michael Bollig
Biographic Data
| ID | 78312 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Bollig |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Bollig |
| SIGNATURE | BOLLIG M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cologne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7133-6132 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 331 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Porous fences and elephant agencies
Despite a recent surge of literature on infrastructure and space, infrastructure breakdown in many domains continues to be presented as the result of technical failure, neglect of maintenance, or human sabotage. Infrastructure breakdown is thus mostly cast as abnormal and as caused by deficient materials, lacking resources or disobedient humans, reproducing normative ideas that successful infrastructure should be stable in its environment and wor…
Pan-ontological institutional bricolage? The urgent need for a dialogue between state and customary authorities in Namibian conservancies
Following independence, several southern African states established modern institutions in communal areas to manage human-wildlife relations and land tenure. These reforms were layered over existing customary governance systems, creating overlapping jurisdiction and contested authority. This study analyzes how such institutional arrangements produce governance conflicts within Namibia’s communal conservancies, where management committees and comm…
Understanding Rangeland Desertification at the Village Level
Desertification poses significant environmental and socio-economic threats to pastoral systems within the drylands of sub-Saharan Africa. However, there remains a paucity of interdisciplinary studies delving into the anthropogenic drivers of desertification at the local level of social-ecological systems, resulting in an inadequate understanding of its human-induced causes. This research aims to bridge this gap by presenting three case studies fr…
Advancing Sustainable Development
Against the backdrop of populist attacks on science and sustainable development, the Sustainability Science Summit 2025 focused on advancing sustainability transformations. With over 30 sessions structured around three high-level panel discussions, it addressed global challenges in sustainability science, the transformation of research practices, and the science-policy interface
The Aftermath – What Future for African Studies (in Europe?). A View From Behind the Scenes of Ecas9
In the spring of 2023, the ninth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) took place in Cologne. Though not unexpected (or unusual) this event sparked critical comments and questions. As the organisers, we understand and appreciate this criticism. We, therefore, felt the need to respond to at least some of them, partly because we also asked ourselves many of these questions before, during, and after the conference. At the same time, we want …
Nation-state influence on tourism path creation in Southern Africa
Coloniality of power and the imaginaries of tourism in Victoria Falls
Examines how historical and global racial dynamics affect participation and value capture within the tourism industry in Victoria Falls. • Integrates recent Global Value Chain (GVC) research with theories of coloniality to provide a nuanced analysis. • Proposes a framework for examining tourism value chains in regions with a post-colonial context. • Suggests pathways for decolonising and transforming tourism value chains to promote equity and inc…
Complexities of multispecies coexistence
The transmission of diseases between wildlife and livestock poses a major challenge to both conservation and livestock sectors in Southern Africa. Focusing on the cases of foot and mouth disease and trypanosomiasis in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, this article explores the complexity of coexistence between humans, livestock, wildlife, vectors and pathogens. Multispecies coexistence, we suggest, is best understood not only t…
Conclusion
In this special issue we assess different multispecies relations in Southern Africa and bringtogether scholars from various disciplines to contribute to the still emerging field of multispeciesethnography and add our perspectives to the ongoing debate, which we situate in Namibia, SouthAfrica and Zambia. In the following we shortly summarise the key aspects of the contributionsto this special issue and give an outlook on how research about multis…
Introduction
This special issue, “Multispecies Encounters in Conservation Landscapes in Southern Africa,” investigates the changing conditions of multispecies coexistence in conservation contexts that transform entire ecosystems, including wildlife, plants, microbes and humans. With this focus, we draw from the theoretical field of multispecies studies to stimulate and promote scholarly discussion in this field in Southern Africa. Departing from the postulate…
Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape
The decline of biodiversity is a key topic in public discussions around the globe. These debates have triggered massive efforts to increase protected areas and to safeguard the corridors connecting them. The wildlife corridors dealt with in this article are mainly thought to facilitate the mobility of elephants and some other large herbivores (for example, zebra and buffalo). Wildlife corridors are not only essential for species connectivity but …
Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa
Conservation, Markets & the Environment in Southern and Eastern Africa
Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks
Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global production network (GPN) approach to analyze institutional dynamics and actors involved in the commodificatio…
Pastoralism in Africa
Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the …
The Practice of War
The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over the long view that one can begin to see the commonalities that emerge from the different forms of conflict and can begin to generalize. [From the Introduct…
Pokot Pastoralism
Futuring Africa
Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression
How much remains? Local value capture from tourism in Zambezi, Namibia
High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natura…
The Assemblage
This article examines the concept of “assemblage” in anthropological research on multispecies relations. The contribution begins by situating “the multispecies assemblage” within the theoretical legacy of Deleuze and Guattari. Then, it delves into three case studies of multispecies research in southern Africa, first to highlight their use of the assemblage as an analytical framework, and second to discuss methodological implications. Overall, we …
Territorialising Conservation
Community-based Conservation seeks to strike a balance between nature conservation and economic growth by establishing spatial and institutional settings that maintain and even regain biodiversity while simultaneously allowing for sustainable land use. The implementation of community-based conservation blueprints on communal, often agronomically marginal lands, is in many southern and eastern African countries encouraged by the national governmen…
African Futures
The essays in this collection are written to make readers (re)consider what is possible in Africa. The essays shake the tree of received wisdom and received categories, and hone in on the complexities of life under ecological and economic constraints. Yet, throughout this volume, people do not emerge as victims, but rather as inventors, engineers, scientists, planners, writers, artists, and activists, or as children, mothers, fathers, friends, or…
Land-use and Land-cover Changes in Pastoral Drylands
The ongoing fragmentation of pastoral drylands is a matter of concern throughout Africa. Using the example of rangelands in northern Baringo County, Kenya, that were under uniform pastoral use until the late twentieth century, we trace land-use and land-cover changes (LULCCs) since the 1980s. Based on ethnographic, historical, and remote sensing data, we show how bush encroachment and dryland farming have led to the increasing modification and co…
Do Tar Roads Bring Tourism? Growth Corridor Policy and Tourism Development in the Zambezi region, Namibia
There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia's Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation areas serve as a resource base for wildlife tourism, and growth corridor policy aims to integrate the…
The making of a conservation landscape
The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller national parks (Mudumu, Nkasa Rupara and Bwabwata). While conservation agendas often start from the assum…
Translating the 'adaptation to climate change' paradigm
In the past few years, adaptation to climate change has emerged as a dominant new theme in development politics, to an extent that it can almost be considered as a new development paradigm. Yet, this new paradigm and its effects are not unproblematic, as the empirical research in three East African countries presented in this article indicates. The article argues that the current transformation of environmental governance reflects not only climat…
Environmental Change and Pastoral Perceptions
Adaptive cycles in the savannah
Comparative evidence from Eastern Africa suggests the emergence of a highly specialized mobile pastoral livelihood came about in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a distinct turn away from this model of pastoral specialization, towards a more mixed and spatially varied set of livelihood strategies. Low intensity warfare, environmental degradation, rapid population i…
The colonial encapsulation of the north-western Namibian pastoral economy
The inhabitants of Kaokoland, Himba and Herero, have recently gained prominence in the discussions concerning a controversial hydro-electric power scheme in their region. They are depicted as southern Africa's 'most traditional pastoralists' by groups opposing the dam and those demanding it. The article describes how Kaokoland's pastoralists suffered tremendously from the politics of encapsulation the South African government adopted against them…
Fragmentation, Cooperation and Power
How much remains? Local value capture from tourism in Zambezi, Namibia
High hopes are pinned on tourism and its catalytic potential to foster growth in remote rural areas. In the Zambezi region of northeastern Namibia, tourism plays a key role in the design of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes for nature conservation. Local communities form conservancies, small village-based entities of bottom-up nature conservation activities. These conservancies are granted rights for the use of natura…
Staging Social Structures
The pastoral Pokot of northern Kenya represent their society as highly structured by descent and age grading. Descent groups (clans, lineages) and age grades (age sets, generation sets) are depicted as bounded but related units within a complex hierarchical and coherent system, the essence of Pokot society which is staged and visualised in major rituals. This study shows that they are not important in Pokot economic exchange. The formal analysis …
Risk, Uncertainty and Pastoralism
Moral equality and success of common-pool water governance in Namibia
In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to share their most salient resource, water, and the costs involved in providing it. Using data from sixty communities, we examine (1) whether and to what extent different sharing rules emerge, (2) how variations can be explained, (3) how rules are perceived and influence success, and (4) what economic consequences they have. Our results reveal that eithe…
Resilience and collapse
The concept of resilience is now applied across the natural and social sciences to provide a means of examining and understanding adaptation and transformation over a longer time period, in response to environmental, economic, cultural, or political shocks or adverse events. This essay introduces a collection of 10 studies that analyse resilience in the context of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, a predominantly savannah ecological zone in Kenya's nort…
Land-use changes and the invasion dynamics of shrubs in Baringo
In the semi-arid savannahs around Lake Baringo, Kenya, the recent spread of bush encroachment by the invasive alien species Prosopis juliflora and the native Dodonaea viscosa has changed human–environment interactions. This article suggests how the spread dynamics of Prosopis and Dodonaea have operated. It also describes the strategies Baringo's peoples have adopted in the face of this dramatic bush invasion, relates these dynamics to current inv…
Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape
Drawing upon the dynamic interrelationship between human agency and space, this article sheds light on the constitution of and relation between "place" and "path" among the pastoral Pokot of East Pokot District in the Kenyan North Rift Valley. It discusses the transformation from a more mobile pastoralist model of spatialization, which relies on a flexible network approach combining paths and places, toward a more "place-making," postpastoralist …
Risk and Risk Minimisation among Himba Pastoralists in Northwestern Namibia
The making of a conservation landscape
The Kwando Basin of north-eastern Namibia is firmly embedded in current national and international conservation agendas. It is a key part of the world's largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area, and the home of seven community-based conservation areas (conservancies) and three smaller national parks (Mudumu, Nkasa Rupara and Bwabwata). While conservation agendas often start from the assum…
Towards an Arid Eden? Boundary making, governance and benefit sharing and the political ecology of the “new commons” of Kunene Region, Northern Namibia
Over the last two decades many sub-Saharan African countries have devolved rights and obligations in rural natural resource management from state to local communities in an effort to foster social-ecological sustainability and economic development at the same time. Often these governmental projects were launched in settings in which traditional commons, informed by both the demands of traditional subsistence-orientated agrarian systems and the te…
Do Tar Roads Bring Tourism? Growth Corridor Policy and Tourism Development in the Zambezi region, Namibia
There are high aspirations to foster growth in Namibia's Zambezi region via the development of tourism. The Zambezi region is a core element of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), a mosaic of areas with varying degrees of protection, which is designed to combine nature conservation and rural development. These conservation areas serve as a resource base for wildlife tourism, and growth corridor policy aims to integrate the…
The “new pastoral commons” of Eastern and Southern Africa
Editorial for: Pastoralism and the new commons: Co-management, conflict and cooperation
Notes on Land-based Conflicts in Kenya's Arid Areas
is a post-doctoral researcher within the research unit “Resil-ience, Collapse and Reorganisation” in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne. His current research focuses on land-use change, conflicts, and the transformation of social-ecological systems in East Pokot, Kenya. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg with a multi-sited ethnography on rural–urban migration in Namibia
African Futures
The essays in this collection are written to make readers (re)consider what is possible in Africa. The essays shake the tree of received wisdom and received categories, and hone in on the complexities of life under ecological and economic constraints. Yet, throughout this volume, people do not emerge as victims, but rather as inventors, engineers, scientists, planners, writers, artists, and activists, or as children, mothers, fathers, friends, or…
Nomadic Savages, Ochre People and Heroic Herders
The pastoral Himba of Namibia's semiarid northwest have been objects of colonizing and globalizing cameras over the last century. They have been presented as isolated, subsistence-oriented herders, savage beauties, polygamous patriarchs, and persistent desert dwellers. Timelessness and marginality have been salient topics of the visual presentations of herders in Namibia's semiarid northwest. Today, Namibia's discourse on "the indigenous" is freq…
Nation-state influence on tourism path creation in Southern Africa
Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system
Linstädter, A., A. Kuhn, C. Naumann, S. Rasch, A. Sandhage-Hofmann, W. Amelung, J. Jordaan, C. C. Du Preez, and M. Bollig. 2016. Assessing the resilience of a real-world social-ecological system: lessons from a multidisciplinary evaluation of a South African pastoral system. Ecology and Society 21(3):35.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08737-210335
Cross-cutting Ties and Coexistence
This paper explores the value of cross-cutting ties and conflicting loyalties for the peaceful management of conflicts and the emergence of collective action across previously violently contested community boundaries in two communities in the Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya. In the researched communities cross-cutting ties result from intermarriages, land rentals and friendship. Fieldwork was conducted in six neighbouring villages on the border betwee…
Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape
The decline of biodiversity is a key topic in public discussions around the globe. These debates have triggered massive efforts to increase protected areas and to safeguard the corridors connecting them. The wildlife corridors dealt with in this article are mainly thought to facilitate the mobility of elephants and some other large herbivores (for example, zebra and buffalo). Wildlife corridors are not only essential for species connectivity but …
Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks
Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global production network (GPN) approach to analyze institutional dynamics and actors involved in the commodificatio…
Risk, Uncertainty and Pastoralism
Risk and Risk Minimisation among Himba Pastoralists in Northwestern Namibia
Moral Economy and Self-interest
The moral economy of peasants has been a controversial concept in economic anthropology for several decades now (Hyden 1985; Scott 1976; for a critical review of relevant literature, see Lemarchand 1989). It has been defined by Scott as an economy “in which a subsistence ethos guarantees at least minimal provisioning to all households” (Scott 1976, in Ensminger 1992: 2). However, the operationalization of “moral economy” (or an “economy of affect…
Kinship, Networks, and Exchange
This collection of articles aims at revitalizing the study of kinship and exchange in a social network perspective. It brings together studies of empirical systems of marriage and descent with investigations of the flow of material resources in societies of Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe. Restudies of classic ethnographic cases and fieldwork studies of kinship and exchange demonstrate how the social and material aspects of society are relat…
The colonial encapsulation of the north-western Namibian pastoral economy
The inhabitants of Kaokoland, Himba and Herero, have recently gained prominence in the discussions concerning a controversial hydro-electric power scheme in their region. They are depicted as southern Africa's 'most traditional pastoralists' by groups opposing the dam and those demanding it. The article describes how Kaokoland's pastoralists suffered tremendously from the politics of encapsulation the South African government adopted against them…
Demographic Growth and Resource Exploitation in Two Pastoral Communities
When War Came, the Cattle Slept
Environmental Change and Pastoral Perceptions
Staging Social Structures
The pastoral Pokot of northern Kenya represent their society as highly structured by descent and age grading. Descent groups (clans, lineages) and age grades (age sets, generation sets) are depicted as bounded but related units within a complex hierarchical and coherent system, the essence of Pokot society which is staged and visualised in major rituals. This study shows that they are not important in Pokot economic exchange. The formal analysis …
Nomadic Savages, Ochre People and Heroic Herders
The pastoral Himba of Namibia's semiarid northwest have been objects of colonizing and globalizing cameras over the last century. They have been presented as isolated, subsistence-oriented herders, savage beauties, polygamous patriarchs, and persistent desert dwellers. Timelessness and marginality have been salient topics of the visual presentations of herders in Namibia's semiarid northwest. Today, Namibia's discourse on "the indigenous" is freq…
Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment
A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences. This volume by a prominent scholar of East African societies is a powerful example of this growing interest. Earlier theory and research tended to describe social and economic systems in some form of equilibrium. However recent thinking in human ecology, evolutionary biology, not to mention in economic and politi…
Practice of War
Obituary for Aparna Rao (1950-2005)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Aparna's last two books have just been published (Rao, Aparna. 2008. The Valley of Kashmir: The Making and Unmaking of a Composite Culture? and Rao, A. Bollig and Bock. 2007. The Practice of War--Production, Reproduction and Communication of Armed Violence. London: Berghahn.)--almost four years after her premature death. Both books had been her last big projects. The first book deals with the complex culture(s) of Kashmir a…
African Landscapes
Chieftaincies and Chiefs in Northern Namibia
Chiefs, in academic literature often addressed as neo-traditional chiefs, traditional authorities, or intermediaries of power, have been popular topics of research among social anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists, and perhaps to a lesser extent also among historians since the 1990s.1 One might wonder justifiably why they have stirred such interest among social scientists. It may be because of their ambiguous and almost paradox…
Notes on Land-based Conflicts in Kenya's Arid Areas
is a post-doctoral researcher within the research unit “Resil-ience, Collapse and Reorganisation” in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne. His current research focuses on land-use change, conflicts, and the transformation of social-ecological systems in East Pokot, Kenya. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg with a multi-sited ethnography on rural–urban migration in Namibia
Pastoralism in Africa
Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the …
Pastoralism in Africa
Reflections on the 22nd Conference of the African Studies Association in Germany (VAD e.V.) in Cologne, Germany (30 May–2 June 2012)
The following article comments on contents and organisation of the 22nd Conference of the African Studies Association in Germany (Vereinigung für Afrikawissenschaften in Deutschland, VAD e.V.), which took place from 30 May until 2 June 2012 at the University of Cologne, Germany. Thirty-seven panels and five round tables organised around four thematic foci (land rights, resource management, models of governance, media) served as a platform for dis…
Translating the 'adaptation to climate change' paradigm
In the past few years, adaptation to climate change has emerged as a dominant new theme in development politics, to an extent that it can almost be considered as a new development paradigm. Yet, this new paradigm and its effects are not unproblematic, as the empirical research in three East African countries presented in this article indicates. The article argues that the current transformation of environmental governance reflects not only climat…
Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape
Drawing upon the dynamic interrelationship between human agency and space, this article sheds light on the constitution of and relation between "place" and "path" among the pastoral Pokot of East Pokot District in the Kenyan North Rift Valley. It discusses the transformation from a more mobile pastoralist model of spatialization, which relies on a flexible network approach combining paths and places, toward a more "place-making," postpastoralist …
Fragmentation, Cooperation and Power
Cross-cutting Ties and Coexistence
This paper explores the value of cross-cutting ties and conflicting loyalties for the peaceful management of conflicts and the emergence of collective action across previously violently contested community boundaries in two communities in the Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya. In the researched communities cross-cutting ties result from intermarriages, land rentals and friendship. Fieldwork was conducted in six neighbouring villages on the border betwee…
The “new pastoral commons” of Eastern and Southern Africa
Editorial for: Pastoralism and the new commons: Co-management, conflict and cooperation
Towards an Arid Eden? Boundary making, governance and benefit sharing and the political ecology of the “new commons” of Kunene Region, Northern Namibia
Over the last two decades many sub-Saharan African countries have devolved rights and obligations in rural natural resource management from state to local communities in an effort to foster social-ecological sustainability and economic development at the same time. Often these governmental projects were launched in settings in which traditional commons, informed by both the demands of traditional subsistence-orientated agrarian systems and the te…
Geography (39 works) · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology (30 works) · Political science (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Ecology (18 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Biology (13 works) · Livestock (13 works) · Pastoralism (13 works) · Economics (12 works)