Why Fire Suppression Persists

Territorial Politics and the Criminalisation of Fire in India's Political Forests

Bibliographic Data

ID24020189
AuthorsKapil Yadav (0009-0009-6976-2154, King's College London, corresponding author), Emma J Tebbs (0000-0003-0575-1236, King's College London), Kate Schreckenberg (0000-0002-3666-3792, King's College London)
Year2026
Volume58
Issue5
Publication date2026-08-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntipode (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4812 • E-ISSN: 1467-8330
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anti.70192
OpenAlexW7196943039
LanguageEN
References cited56

Why does fire suppression remain central to forest governance globally, despite the increasing recognition of fire's ecological and livelihood significance? This study examines the persistence of fire suppression in India, arguing that it continues not for ecological reasons but as a political technology of state territorial control. Drawing on archival research and interviews, we trace how colonial era legal and institutional frameworks criminalising community fire use have been carried across successive policy shifts, from timber extraction to biodiversity conservation to carbon sequestration, centralising authority over forest landscapes and reordering ecologies to serve external interests over local populations. Political forests, however, are not only state projects. Forest‐dwelling communities sustain relational lifeworlds through fire practices that exceed the logics of state and capital. Recognising fire suppression as a political tool demands reckoning with the colonial legal frameworks that sustain it and opens the possibility for more just and ecologically grounded fire futures.

Biodiversity · Colonialism · Corporate governance · Livelihood · Political ecology · Politics · State (computer science) · State forest · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Fire effects on ecosystems · Geographies of human-animal interactions

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