Kendra Mcsweeney
Biographic Data
| ID | 124916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kendra Mcsweeney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kendra |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcsweeney |
| SIGNATURE | MCSWEENEY K |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7961-3023 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 493 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Narcotrafficking Across a Nation
Cocaine trafficking is a significant driver of deforestation and land use change in Central America’s tropical forests. Over the past 18 years, Honduras, situated between cocaine supply regions in South America and major markets in North America and Europe, has experienced significant narcotrafficking activity. This activity has led to rapid land use change as traffickers secure territorial control, launder illicit proceeds, and build transportat…
A convergence research approach to resolving ‘wicked problems’
Many contemporary social and environmental problems are increasingly ‘wicked.’ Convergence research offers an effective approach to tackle wicked problems by integrating diverse epistemologies, methodologies, and expertise. Yet, there exists little discussion of how to develop and employ a convergence research approach. This article describes our collaborative research efforts to achieve convergence research and team science. For over a decade, w…
Central America’s agro-ecological suitability for cultivating coca, Erythroxylum spp
We assess how much of Central America is likely to be agriculturally suitable for cultivating coca ( Erythroxylum spp), the main ingredient in cocaine. Since 2017, organized criminal groups (not smallholders) have been establishing coca plantations in Central America for cocaine production. This has broken South America’s long monopoly on coca leaf production for the global cocaine trade and raised concerns about future expansion in the isthmus. …
Intersection of narco trafficking, enforcement and bird conservation in the Americas
Complex social challenges such as narco trafficking can have unexpected consequences for biodiversity conservation. Here we show how international counter-drug strategies may increase the risk of narco trafficking, which is associated with deforestation, in two-thirds of the important landscapes for forest birds in Central America. Soberingly, over half of Nearctic-Neotropical migratory species had more than one quarter, and 20% of species had ov…
Interventions on public geographies
Generative tensions
We reflect on Geography in the US university by focusing on the paths taken by undergraduates into and beyond our classrooms. Those paths reveal aspects of Geography that appear unique to this national context, and include the structural barriers to US students' entry into Geography, from their highly uneven exposure to Geography in school to their unfamiliarity with it as a university degree. Yet many students still manage to find the field, wit…
Prohibition geographies
Shifting landscape suitability for cocaine trafficking through Central America in response to counterdrug interdiction
Cocaine traffickers, or ‘narco-traffickers’, successfully exploit the heterogeneous landscapes of Central America for transnational smuggling. Narco-traffickers successfully adapt to disruptions from counterdrug interdiction efforts by spatially adjusting smuggling routes to evade detection, and by doing so bring collateral damages, such as deforestation, corruption, and violence, to new areas. This study is novel for its integration of landscape…
Challenging conventional wisdom on illicit economies and rural development in Latin America
Illicit economies have become a major driver of socio-environmental change in Latin America’s rural spaces. The arrival of transnational drug trade networks in rural communities has significantly altered the economic, political, and social dynamics of entire regions. The drug trade has particularly affected the ancestral territories of Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples, which coincide with significant areas of forests and high biodiversity, …
Acknowledging Cocaine Capital in Central American Development
Cocaine trafficking has a significant but understudied influence on Central American economies. The economic implications of this trade have repercussions for both regional development and drug control policy debates, and therefore deserve greater attention. Towards that end, in this paper we provide estimates of 1) the value of trade of primary cocaine movements that were delivered to Central America, by country (excluding El Salvador) between 2…
The Long Honduran Night
On the day of this writing (6 October 2020), top headlines out of Honduras can be paraphrased as follows: 2,433 people in the country of 9.5 million have officially died of the coronavirus, althoug
Spatialising illicit commodity chains
Among geographers, recent focus on the illicit and illegal has tended to fall into two camps. Economic geographers focus on regimes of illicitness and corresponding production of specific forms of economic space; political ecologists and land change scholars, on the other hand, scrutinised how illicit commodity flows shape land and resource use, especially in the global South. This paper offers an initial integration of these two relatively separ…
Narcotrafficking and Land Control in Guatemala and Honduras
On frontiers dominated by illicit activities such as narcotrafficking, criminal organizations’ usurpation of land and resources is profoundly changing rural livelihoods and prospects for biodiversity conservation. Prior work has demonstrated how drug trafficking catalyzes forest loss and smallholder dispossession but does not make clear the extent to which the long-term control of land is moved from state, Indigenous, or smallholders to criminal …
Comparative Analysis of Illicit Supply Network Structure and Operations
Illicit supply networks (ISNs) are composed of coordinated human actors that source, transit, and distribute illicitly traded goods to consumers, while also creating widespread social and environmental harms. Despite growing documentation of ISNs and their impacts, efforts to understand and disrupt ISNs remain insufficient due to the persistent lack of knowledge connecting a given ISN’s modus operandi and its patterns of activity in space and tim…
Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano) by Directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra
Reliable drug war data
Illicit Drivers of Land Use Change
The impacts of cocaine-trafficking on conservation governance in Central America
Introduction to the Special Issue
It has been almost 20 years since the Geographical Review’s special issue on “Doing Fieldwork,” edited by Dydia DeLyser and Paul F. Starr. That 2001 double-volume broke new ground, offering 56 high
The 'Colombianisation' of Central America
Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's 'Colombianisation'. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, …
Addressing Root Drivers of Land-Climate Dynamics
It's time to recognize how men's careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia
Corporate social responsibility and the reproduction of (neo)colonialism in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Grounding traffic
A spatio-temporal analysis of forest loss related to cocaine trafficking in Central America
A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal activities associated with drug trafficking networks are a progressively important driver of forest loss in Central America. However, the scale at which drug trafficking represents a driver of forest loss is not presently known. We estimated the degree to which narcotics trafficking may contribute to forest loss using an unsupervised spatial clustering of 15 spatial and temporal forest loss patch …
Rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment
"A "Demographic Turnaround
In contrast to the rich scholarship documenting the traumatic post-contact destruction of indigenous populations in the Latin American tropics, little is known about their contemporary population dynamics. What accounts for the "demographic turnaround" reported for some groups? How widespread is population recovery, and what are its implications for indigenous political resurgence? We address these questions by compiling recent (post-1980) demogr…
Household determinants of deforestation by amerindians in honduras
Beyond Rainforests
Indigenous societies across lowland Latin America have recently made impressive political and territorial gains by emphasising their stewardship of and attachment to particular rural landscapes. But surprising new censal and microdemographic evidence shows that these groups have simultaneously been developing a presence in domestic and foreign metropolises. Cities offer employment and advanced education opportunities as well as escape from rural …
Natural insurance, forest access, and compounded misfortune
Forest Product Sale as Natural Insurance
The rural poor are known to turn to tropical forest resources in times of need. But what explains differential use of this “natural insurance” policy among households? Drawing from a 1998 survey of 116 indigenous households in Honduras, this article shows that households sell forest products to pay for crop shortfalls and illness, but that loans from kin are a more common way to weather calamity. Young households with few liquidatable assets and …
Grounding traffic
Using economic geography to reinvigorate land-change science
Conditional Cash Transfers, Food Security, and Health
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become an increasingly popular component of poverty-alleviation policies worldwide. The highly publicized success of Brazil's Bolsa Família program (BFP), the largest such program in the world, has become a model for CCT programs elsewhere, including in highly rural African nations. This is despite the dearth of information on the impact of the program in rural contexts. Drawing on a unique natural ex…
Environmental Politics After Nature
This article is about the logic and dynamics of environmental politics when the environment at stake is profoundly socioecological. We investigate the socioecological forests of the coalfields of Appalachian Ohio, where once decimated forests are again widespread. Conceptualizing forests as power-laden relationships among various people, trees, and other nonhumans, we identify multiple distinct forest types that currently exist as both material r…
A Demographic Profile of the Tawahka Amerindians of Honduras
Latin America's lowland indigenous groups have been characterized in contradictory ways. Are populations shrinking or growing? Do groups face cultural extinction, or are they increasingly asserting their ethnic identities? This article uses a case study of the Tawahka Amerindians of Honduras to show how basic demographic techniques can shed light on these issues. A multimethod approach resolves conflicting reports of population growth and ethnic …
It's time to recognize how men's careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia
Assessing the Potential of Indigenous-Run Demographic/Health Surveys
Challenging conventional wisdom on illicit economies and rural development in Latin America
Illicit economies have become a major driver of socio-environmental change in Latin America’s rural spaces. The arrival of transnational drug trade networks in rural communities has significantly altered the economic, political, and social dynamics of entire regions. The drug trade has particularly affected the ancestral territories of Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples, which coincide with significant areas of forests and high biodiversity, …
Conservation as It Is
Interventions on public geographies
Illicit Drivers of Land Use Change
The Dugout Canoe Trade in Central America's Mosquitia
For over 300 years, dugout canoes have been traded within and between ethnic groups in the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I describe the development and contemporary dynamics of the canoe trade in order to operationalize, in one particular landscape, recent calls by geographers and anthropologists for greater ethnographic engagement with rural livelihoods. For example, historical analysi…
Corporate social responsibility and the reproduction of (neo)colonialism in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Introduction to the Special Issue
It has been almost 20 years since the Geographical Review’s special issue on “Doing Fieldwork,” edited by Dydia DeLyser and Paul F. Starr. That 2001 double-volume broke new ground, offering 56 high
The impacts of cocaine-trafficking on conservation governance in Central America
Native Amazonians’ Strategic Urbanization
Este artículo se basa en fuentes etnográficas dispares con la finalidad de examinar la relación entre la urbanización de la población de la Amazonía y su lucha por los derechos al territorio. En el argumento que ésta dinámica contraria a la intuición, merece una mayor atención, especialmente porque recientes políticas sobre la urbanización indígena ocultan dicha posibilidad. Específicamente muestro cómo en la Amazonía: (1) las cadenas migratorias…
Looking under the canopy
Comparative Analysis of Illicit Supply Network Structure and Operations
Illicit supply networks (ISNs) are composed of coordinated human actors that source, transit, and distribute illicitly traded goods to consumers, while also creating widespread social and environmental harms. Despite growing documentation of ISNs and their impacts, efforts to understand and disrupt ISNs remain insufficient due to the persistent lack of knowledge connecting a given ISN’s modus operandi and its patterns of activity in space and tim…
Does Economic Growth Cause Environmental Recovery? Geographical Explanations of Forest Regrowth
This study examines the links between economic change and environmental recovery. We first review the influential framework known as Forest Transition Theory (FTT), which uses the experience of the North to posit a causal linkage between economic growth and forest regrowth. We then lay out problems with this theory and offer an alternative. Our central argument is that FTT provides faulty explanations of forest regrowth because it treats economic…
The cohune palm (Orbignya cohune, Arecaceae) in Belize
Rates of return on investments in cattle among Amerindians of the rain forest of Honduras
Household determinants of deforestation by amerindians in honduras
Human Capital, Wealth, Property Rights, and the Adoption of New Farm Technologies
Interest in vanishing rain forests has led scholars to say that the adoption of new farm technologies such as improved plant varieties could increase yields, thus reducing deforestation. Results of past studies show that human capital (e.g., schooling, literacy), wealth, and security of land tenure help farmers adopt new farm technologies. These studies have focused on villages with tight links to the market and little land. Do results apply to m…
Local financial benefits of rain forests
A Demographic Profile of the Tawahka Amerindians of Honduras
Latin America's lowland indigenous groups have been characterized in contradictory ways. Are populations shrinking or growing? Do groups face cultural extinction, or are they increasingly asserting their ethnic identities? This article uses a case study of the Tawahka Amerindians of Honduras to show how basic demographic techniques can shed light on these issues. A multimethod approach resolves conflicting reports of population growth and ethnic …
Forest Product Sale as Natural Insurance
The rural poor are known to turn to tropical forest resources in times of need. But what explains differential use of this “natural insurance” policy among households? Drawing from a 1998 survey of 116 indigenous households in Honduras, this article shows that households sell forest products to pay for crop shortfalls and illness, but that loans from kin are a more common way to weather calamity. Young households with few liquidatable assets and …
Outbacks
What is an 'outback'? Why is the term being applied to landscapes bearing little resemblance to the Australian interior? Based on a survey of the rising international use of this term, and a case study from Ohio, it is suggested that outbacks are discursively produced: (a) where post-industrial relationships between an urban place and its much larger, contiguous periphery have matured; (b) where economic shifts have resulted in patchy but recogni…
The Dugout Canoe Trade in Central America's Mosquitia
For over 300 years, dugout canoes have been traded within and between ethnic groups in the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I describe the development and contemporary dynamics of the canoe trade in order to operationalize, in one particular landscape, recent calls by geographers and anthropologists for greater ethnographic engagement with rural livelihoods. For example, historical analysi…
Natural insurance, forest access, and compounded misfortune
"A "Demographic Turnaround
In contrast to the rich scholarship documenting the traumatic post-contact destruction of indigenous populations in the Latin American tropics, little is known about their contemporary population dynamics. What accounts for the "demographic turnaround" reported for some groups? How widespread is population recovery, and what are its implications for indigenous political resurgence? We address these questions by compiling recent (post-1980) demogr…
Rural household demographics, livelihoods and the environment
Beyond Rainforests
Indigenous societies across lowland Latin America have recently made impressive political and territorial gains by emphasising their stewardship of and attachment to particular rural landscapes. But surprising new censal and microdemographic evidence shows that these groups have simultaneously been developing a presence in domestic and foreign metropolises. Cities offer employment and advanced education opportunities as well as escape from rural …
Waorani at the head of the table
In 'Ecuador's Yasuní Biosphere Reserve: a brief modern history and conservation challenges', Matt Finer and colleagues draw from a wide literature to describe the overlapping jurisdictions, confusing designations, and conflicting imperatives that are the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. Yasuní's complexity is emblematic of 21st-century conservation landscapes world-wide: products of long isolation at the global periphery, they are erstwhile biological a…
Conservation as It Is
Does Economic Growth Cause Environmental Recovery? Geographical Explanations of Forest Regrowth
This study examines the links between economic change and environmental recovery. We first review the influential framework known as Forest Transition Theory (FTT), which uses the experience of the North to posit a causal linkage between economic growth and forest regrowth. We then lay out problems with this theory and offer an alternative. Our central argument is that FTT provides faulty explanations of forest regrowth because it treats economic…
Assessing the Potential of Indigenous-Run Demographic/Health Surveys
Looking under the canopy
Prying Native People from Native Lands
Additional informationNotes on contributorsK. McSweeneyK. McSweeney is a geographer, and Z. Pearson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University. An additional author has chosen to remain anonymous out of concern for the safety of colleagues in Honduras.Z. PearsonK. McSweeney is a geographer, and Z. Pearson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University. An additional author has chosen to …
Drug Policy as Conservation Policy
Drug trafficking is taking a toll on Central America's biodiverse forests.
Using economic geography to reinvigorate land-change science
Environmental Politics After Nature
This article is about the logic and dynamics of environmental politics when the environment at stake is profoundly socioecological. We investigate the socioecological forests of the coalfields of Appalachian Ohio, where once decimated forests are again widespread. Conceptualizing forests as power-laden relationships among various people, trees, and other nonhumans, we identify multiple distinct forest types that currently exist as both material r…
Native Amazonians’ Strategic Urbanization
Este artículo se basa en fuentes etnográficas dispares con la finalidad de examinar la relación entre la urbanización de la población de la Amazonía y su lucha por los derechos al territorio. En el argumento que ésta dinámica contraria a la intuición, merece una mayor atención, especialmente porque recientes políticas sobre la urbanización indígena ocultan dicha posibilidad. Específicamente muestro cómo en la Amazonía: (1) las cadenas migratorias…
Conditional Cash Transfers, Food Security, and Health
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become an increasingly popular component of poverty-alleviation policies worldwide. The highly publicized success of Brazil's Bolsa Família program (BFP), the largest such program in the world, has become a model for CCT programs elsewhere, including in highly rural African nations. This is despite the dearth of information on the impact of the program in rural contexts. Drawing on a unique natural ex…
A spatio-temporal analysis of forest loss related to cocaine trafficking in Central America
A growing body of evidence suggests that criminal activities associated with drug trafficking networks are a progressively important driver of forest loss in Central America. However, the scale at which drug trafficking represents a driver of forest loss is not presently known. We estimated the degree to which narcotics trafficking may contribute to forest loss using an unsupervised spatial clustering of 15 spatial and temporal forest loss patch …
Geography (36 works) · Ecology (24 works) · Economics (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Biology (16 works) · Business (14 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (14 works) · Indigenous (12 works)