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This case study of Botswana focuses on the state-building qualities of biodiversity conservation in southern Africa. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Annette A. LaRocco argues that discourses and practices related to biodiversity conservation are essential to state building in the postcolonial era. These discourses and practices invoke the ways the state exerts authority over people, places, and resources; enacts and remakes territorial control; crafts notions of ideal citizenship and identity; and structures economic relationships at the local, national, and global levels. The book’s key innovation is its conceptualization of the “conservation estate,” a term most often used as an apolitical descriptor denoting land set aside for the purpose of conservation. LaRocco argues that this description is inadequate and proposes a novel and much-needed alternative definition that is tied to its political elements. The components of conservation—control over land, policing of human behavior, and structuring of the authority that allows or disallows certain subjectivities—render conservation a political phenomenon that can be analyzed separately from considerations of “nature” or “wildlife.” In doing so, it addresses a gap in the scholarship of rural African politics, which focuses overwhelmingly on productive agrarian dynamics and often fails to recognize that land nonuse can be as politically significant and wide reaching as land use. Botswana is an ideal empirical case study upon which to base these theoretical claims. With 39 percent of its land set aside for conservation, Botswana is home to large populations of wildlife, particularly charismatic megafauna, such as the largest herd of elephants on the continent. Utilizing more than two hundred interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this book examines a series of conservation policies and their reception by people living on the conservation estate. These phenomena include securitized antipoaching enforcement, a national hunting ban (2014–19), restrictions on using wildlife products, forced evictions from conservation areas, limitations on mobility and freedom of movement, the political economy of Botswana’s wildlife tourism industry, and the conservation of globally important charismatic megafauna species.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, disability has shaped state building, citizenship, and everyday life across East European societies, especially as they struggled to rid themselves of imperial control and establish independent political systems. Maria Bucur and Maria Cristina Galmarini offer essays that analyze disability as both lived experience and social category inextricably connected to these political and cultural histories.

The independent governments and institutions that emerged from imperial control used disability to classify people, organize welfare systems, regulate labor, assign military service, and shape ethnic, religious, and gender identities. Chapters about Romania, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Ukraine cross historical periods to reveal powerful and unexplored disability narratives, from deaf education and activism to religious charity and caregiving. Throughout, the authors highlight the voices and actions of disabled people, caregivers, and activists who defied marginalization to advocate for their rights and build more accessible communities.

Contributors: Isabelle Avakumovic-Pointon, Frances L. Bernstein, Maria Bucur, Radu Harald Dinu, Maria Cristina Galmarini, Galina Goncharova, John Paul Newman, Aleksandra Oniszczuk, Natalia Pamula, Sarah D. Phillips, Leyla Safta-Zecheria, Hanna Zaremba-Kosovych