Why Fire Suppression Persists: Territorial Politics and the Criminalisation of Fire in India's Political Forests

IF 3.7 1区社会学 Q1 GEOGRAPHY

Antipode Pub Date : 2026-08-06 DOI:10.1111/anti.70192

Kapil Yadav, Emma Tebbs, Kate Schreckenberg

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Abstract

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.

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来源期刊

Antipode GEOGRAPHY-

CiteScore

9.50

自引率

10.00%

发文量

111

期刊介绍： Antipode has published dissenting scholarship that explores and utilizes key geographical ideas like space, scale, place, borders and landscape. It aims to challenge dominant and orthodox views of the world through debate, scholarship and politically-committed research, creating new spaces and envisioning new futures. Antipode welcomes the infusion of new ideas and the shaking up of old positions, without being committed to just one view of radical analysis or politics.