Visioning African lionscapes

Securing space, mobilizing capital, and fostering subjects

Bibliographic Data

ID4464708
AuthorsSandra G Mccubbin, Sandra Mccubbin (Queen's University, corresponding author), Alice J Hovorka (York University)
Year2020
Volume3
Issue4
Pages1053-1073
Publication date2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/2514848619878167
OpenAlexW2978802813
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited58

In September 2016, 14 months after the illegal killing of Cecil the lion raised an international furore over trophy hunting, 58 individuals gathered at Oxford University for the Cecil Summit, a meeting of experts designed to vision the future of lion conservation in honor of Cecil. This paper explores the Cecil Summit through an analytic of government as a means to provide new insights into securitized and neoliberal conservation governance in action. On this basis, we show how the actors emboldened by the Cecil Moment claimed the authority to vision the Cecil Movement. Using video and document review, and semi-structured interviews, our discourse analysis highlights three components of intervention into African lionscapes emerging from the summit-securing space, mobilizing capital, and producing subjects-that are founded upon claims to scientific and economic rationality as well as specific representations of lions and rural Africans. Our analysis of the vision contributes to recent discussions in political ecology about the dovetailing of conservation, security, the economy-and we add-subjectivity. We conclude by pointing to the way in which militarized conservation appears to be inching closer to the lion and offering a critique of the vision for lion conservation put forward at the Cecil Summit

Corporate governance · Economics · Epistemology · Geography · Honor · Management · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Summit · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Public Administration · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Zoonotic diseases and public health

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