Territoriality by Conservation in the Selous-Niassa Corridor in Tanzania

In this paper we argue that historically emerging frontiers of conservation pave the way for continuous top-down territorialization. Drawing on a concrete case in the Selous-Niassa Corridor in Southern Tanzania, we show how a frontier emerged in the form of community-based conservation. Decades of consecutive and continuous territorialization projects, based on mapping and boundary making, have ensured that conservation is beyond questioning, despite failures in the processes of demarcating, controlling, and managing this large-scale socio-spatial intervention. Although these failures produce territorial conflicts and confusions on the ground, we argue that in the context of a conservation frontier the gap between the envisioned ideal and the messy reality is used to legitimize continuous conservation interventions that rely on technical expertise rather than political dialog. While such top-down territorialization by community-based conservation inevitably remains partial and contingent, this is nonetheless a powerful and resilient project that gradually transforms communal landscapes into conservation territories with little room for public debate.