Many national parks and other protected areas (PAs) are experiencing an intensification of military actors, logics, and partnerships across the globe. This amounts to one of the most consequential conservation trends of this century, one that violates human rights and threatens conservation's long-term viability. These dynamics have been chronicled in the burgeoning literature on green militarization. Set against dire predictions of biodiversity loss and the importance of both PAs and local communities in slowing this decline, this intervention makes the argument for demilitarizing conservation and sets out an initial framework for what this entails conceptually and in practice. We show how demilitarizing conservation must be based on an ethics and politics of care and nonviolence. Although PAs are already landscapes of care for nonhuman nature, we argue for a more robustly care-full conservation that, perhaps uncomfortably, requires care to be extended to those who harm wildlife and nature more broadly. We illustrate how demilitarization requires infusing care into conservation at two related moments: the actual encounter between conservation's transgressors and law enforcement and the larger structures that produce the encounter and military buildup as a response. The latter includes how green militarization is driven by economic logics, global patterns of economic inequality, and colonial structures that continue to shape conservation. This intervention also opens space for considering how the need for demilitarization allies with other movements like Indigenous-led and convivial conservation working to radically reshape conservation theory and practice and makes a case for explicitly including demilitarization within these efforts.

Journal Article The violence of conservation in Africa: state, militarization and alternatives Get access The violence of conservation in Africa: state, militarization and alternatives. Edited by Maano Ramutsindela, Frank Matose and Tafadzwa Mushonga. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 2022. 272pp. £104.00. Isbn978 1 80088 560 8. Available as e-book. Ivan Ashaba Ivan Ashaba University of Antwerp, Belgium Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 2, March 2024, Pages 877–878, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae045 Published: 04 March 2024

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SUMMARY This briefing engages the militarised conservation literature. Three factors key to understanding present militarised conservation in Uganda are discussed: colonial legacies, the country’s post-colonial history of war and conflict, and the current militarisation under the Museveni government as exemplified in the military collaboration between the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda Peoples' Defence Forces. It argues that the debate about militarised conservation in today’s Uganda has to be situated within the widening mandate of the military institution under the Museveni government, which came to power through the military path and then gradually militarised significant sections of society more broadly.

This paper draws on the notion of state fragility in three dimensions – Authority failures, Service delivery failures and Legitimacy failures as developed by Stewart and Brown. Using Stewart and Brown’s analysis of fragile states, the authors examine how recent events in South Sudan push the country into being the most fragile state. In furthering this three-dimensional approach, we attempt two important questions. How has South Sudan succumbed to fragility since attaining independence? Who influences peace in the country? The authors grapple with these questions by investigating events in South Sudan from the period of signing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA 1 2005), independence in 2011, signing CPA 2 in 2015 up to present. The paper singles out the desire for regime survival as the major cause of fragility. The authors further argue that insecurity and instability are exacerbated by spoiling behaviour of certain powers and individuals, whose activities undermine state authority and creates disorder.

This paper focuses on the urban outcomes of protracted humanitarian intervention in Gulu town, Northern Uganda. Using the concept of humanitarian urbanism, we demonstrate how intensive external donor-aid has shaped urbanization in the capital of Northern Uganda. The starting point for our analysis is the recent process of withdrawal of humanitarian NGOs and the shifts from humanitarian to development interventions. This shift was characterized by a special focus on urban development, coordinated by the Ugandan state while largely donor supported. We argue that this shift, instead of introducing an urban involvement of aid agencies in Gulu town, actually reveals a protracted continuum of aid agencies' interventions in Gulu's urbanity. The current withdrawal of humanitarian organizations in fact makes the long-term effects of these interventions especially visible. As such, it offers an interesting starting point to investigate processes of humanitarian urbanism and its profound impacts on the urban material, socio-economic and political landscapes. This paper demonstrates how aid agencies, since the armed conflict in Northern Uganda, have been key actors in shaping different dimensions of urban governance. Three case-studies are presented, which variously focus upon the urban educational sector, Gulu's physical urban planning, and Gulu's cultural institution. They reveal how today's reconfigurations of the urban aid-landscape have redrawn the complex relations between urban inhabitants, aid agencies, and the Ugandan state.

Despite having a robust child protection framework and a burgeoning media, child rights abuse still occurs in Uganda. This takes the form of child neglect, defilement, torture, trafficking. The researchers set out to investigate media coverage of child rights issues in Uganda. A triangulation of methods was used, and as will be shown later, reporting on child rights abuses is not systematic due to fragmentation of actors. The researchers found out that 185 child abuse stories were published in The New Vision in 2015. Most of the published stories were from the country's capital - Kampala. The other obstacles to effective child rights reporting identified are as follows: concentration of reporters in urban areas, lack of special training in child rights reporting and commercial interests of media houses. The researchers recommend recruiting and training journalists to specifically report on issues of child rights and empowering upcountry reporters where many cases are committed.