Guerrilla agriculture? A biopolitical guide to illicit cultivation within an IUCN Category II protected area

Abstract

Protected areas now encompass nearly 13 percent of Earth's terrestrial surface. Crucially, such protection often denotes exclusion – of farmers, of pastoralists and of forest-dwelling people. Engaging with the biopolitical implications of these displacements, this paper explores the emergence of an increasingly widespread type of resistance to conservation in the developing world: guerrilla agriculture, or the illicit cultivation of food within spaces zoned exclusively for the preservation of nonhuman life. In doing so, it undertakes a comparative analysis of three groups of farmers at Mount Elgon, Uganda, which support an overarching strategy of illegal cultivation with a variety of nonviolent, militant, discursive and formal-legal tactics. Far from passive victims of global economic and environmental change, we demonstrate how the struggles of farmers at Mount Elgon are frequently effective at carving out spaces of relative autonomy from both conservationists and the Ugandan state apparatus.