Parks,perks,conflicts,and resistance in Gilgit-Baltistan's conservation paradigm

Introduction

The local communities in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) have historically exercised a complex relationship with their high mountain landscapes, co-creating a world in which humans, other-than-humans, and land are inseparably entangled. I use the term other-than-human to emphasize relational ecological worlds in which animals, landscapes, and environmental forces participate as active companions in social life instead of being treated as external objects of management. However, in recent decades, the introduction of national park conservation has placed these relationships under threat, displaced traditional livelihoods, and generated new forms of environmental conflict. I start this article through my interactions and sustained conversations with local activists and interlocutors from GB to examine how national park conservation has taken shape in the shadow of colonial imaginaries of pristine wilderness. I show how conservation projects, especially in their state and NGO-led forms, have operationalized a human–nature divide that was historically alien to local cosmologies. Conservation, far from being a neutral or benevolent act, has introduced new forms of class hierarchy and spatial control through which elites and tourists gain access while locals face surveillance, restrictions, and dispossession.

The second section delves into the creation of the Khunjerab National Park (KNP), established in 1975, tracing its institutional history and its effects on the communities who were excluded from its planning and governance. I examine how external supervision, particularly the authority of scientific expertise and international conservation organizations, delegitimizes traditional knowledge systems and pushes aside long-standing practices of communal stewardship. I argue that these interventions were legitimized through romanticized and esthetic idealization of Hunza and GB as untouched frontiers or natural sanctuaries. The construction of KNP reveals how science and spectacle work together to remake territory and authority.

In the third section, I situate these dynamics within global patterns of conservation-induced dispossession. I draw parallels with similar conflicts across the Global South, in East Africa, North America, and South Asia, to show how conservation has served as a mechanism for the expansion of state power and capitalist accumulation under the guise of environmental protection. Engaging with scholarship in environmental justice and Indigenous studies, I examine how many land-based and local communities resist the imposed human–nature dichotomies. These communities understand ecological balance through reciprocal relations, responsibility, and kinship across species and landscapes. This cosmological vision challenges the ethical and epistemic foundations of fortress conservation.

Finally, the fourth section turns to Shimshal Nature Trust (SNT) as a grounded, community-led response to the ruptures caused by conservation regimes. I trace how SNT reclaims environmental governance through a framework rooted in self-determination and communal care. SNT offers an alternate model of conservation that is both ethical and ecological, with an emphasis on education, gender inclusion, and cultural preservation alongside ecological stewardship. In doing so, Shimshalis are exercising practiced resistance by articulating an affirmative vision for environmental justice that refuses the erasure of local life and authority.

Parks, perks, and the emerging conflicts in GB's environmental conservation

In this section, I draw on my conversations in the form of formal and semistructured interviews with community members, activists, and local interlocutors engaged with questions of conservation and land governance in GB. In total, four formal and several semiformal interviews and conversations were held between January and May 2024 to reflect on the range of experiences and social positions within the region. The analysis presented in this section of the article is based on these conversations and is not intended to be statistically representative. Instead, the section is meant to be analytically illustrative. The interlocutors selected for this work hold positions that enable them to articulate the effects of conservation across various scales. The primary interlocutors and the persons I interviewed, here anonymized as Ali and Hasan, were selected because they speak from long-term engagement with environmental scholarship and activism on the ground, including sustained involvement in community-based political organizing in Gojal, Passu, and Shimshal. Their perspectives offer insight into how conservation is simultaneously lived, debated, and resisted in everyday life.

I selected educated youth and activists. The students, teachers, and politically engaged young people usually function as intermediaries between local communities and external institutions while representing the broader political and environmental realities of GB. They translate community experiences into the language of policy and human rights, while remaining embedded in the social worlds most directly affected by conservation restrictions. Their accounts, therefore, represent the broader material and discursive conditions shaping contemporary struggles over land and livelihood, and how local communities pay the cost for the protection of nature and species. The conversations, shaped by long-standing community ties and shared histories of resistance, reveal how state-led conservation in GB is more than just a simple ecological program but a mode of epistemic rupture, governance, and spatial control.

Ali and Hasan have worked at the forefront of grassroots organizing in the region, particularly around the KNP and surrounding conservancies. Their stories are entangled with those of the land, shaped by the gradual but forceful imposition of conservation regimes that transformed customary practices into violations, and ancestral spaces into restricted zones. This transformation, what Ali calls a “cosmological rupture,” emerges quite concretely in material terms in the form of dispossession of land and culture. In practice, this rupture reorganized how pastures could be entered and how mobility could be exercised. Species that were once embedded within subsistence relations became regulated assets within conservation regimes, while seasonal grazing routes were reclassified as violations. For Ali and Hasan, protected areas have formed bounded zones carved from customary commons, patrolled by armed rangers, and made legible through bureaucratic cartographies. In effect, conservation has become a technology of frontier-making (Peluso and Lund, 2011), severing kinship-based land relations and reordering ecologies to prioritize marketable species.

National park conservation in GB has unfolded within a longer preservationist tradition shaped by colonial ideas of pristine wilderness, a concept historically used to imagine landscapes as most valuable when emptied of human presence (Cronon, 1996). Scholars have shown how this model historically privileged Euro-American conservation priorities while marginalizing subsistence-based communities across the planet (Cole and Foster, 2001; Finney, 2014; Guha, 1989). In GB, these assumptions continue to shape conservation policy by treating pastoral use and mobility as ecological threats rather than longstanding forms of stewardship. In Pakistan's northern territories, conservation programs were introduced through external expertise and centralized planning structures that reshaped landscapes without meaningful participation from communities who had governed these lands for centuries. Perhaps the most telling case is KNP in Hunza, which I will discuss in detail in the following sections. But similar patterns have played out elsewhere in GB as well. Ali points out that the creation of Deosai National Park, following its designation as national park in 1993, curtailed the grazing of Astore communities on their traditional summer pastures. New parks, such as the recently approved Himalaya National Park and Nanga Parbat National Park, announced in the early 2020s as part of an expansion of protected-area governance across the region, are going to introduce new incursions that would be material as well as cultural. For instance, “the Astore community has to buy tickets to graze in the area their ancestors called home as it is now under the management of a national park.”

In GB, Hasan points out, “ancestral wisdom and knowledge systems have been transferred through generations to emphasize a balance between the human and other-than-human world.” Communities depend on the land and understand their relationship with nature as one of codependence, even kin-like, and of shared nature. Wisdom and oral history teach that nature is inseparable from human life and that mountains, glaciers, and wildlife are all embedded in the cultural and spiritual practice of relationality and responsibility. However, the imposition of a Westernized notion of parks came with an alien understanding that nature must be kept apart from people. Conservation regulations forbidding all human presence in certain areas invalidated the knowledge systems built on ecological human–nature harmony, embedded in traditions.

Importantly, these changes are recent and ongoing. While the language of colonialism or neoliberal capitalism is often used to explain such ruptures, the people of GB emphasize that the disorientation is happening now, in real time. The assault on local cosmologies and livelihoods is not a distant historical event but a lived experience for communities who feel their cultural and material foundations are being upended by policies made in Islamabad or international NGO boardrooms. Hasan, who has spent years in the pastoral regions of Gojal and Shimshal, points out the ironies in these conservation practices. “We never saw ibex around the villages before,” he said. “Now they come down from the mountains, and leopards follow them. They say conservation is working, but for whom?” State authorities celebrate the repopulation of endangered species, but community knowledge sustained through an emphasis on ecological balance was ignored in policymaking. As Haraway (2016) reminds us, multispecies relationships are not abstract ideals but lived entanglements that demand negotiation, not exclusion.

The contradiction deepens with trophy hunting. Ali describes it bluntly: “They say the animals are protected, but then they auction their lives to foreigners. And when we defend ourselves or our livestock, we are fined.” Trophy hunting, therefore, signals an inherent contradiction within conservation policy. Animals that were once governed through customary restraint became revenue-generating species circulating through permit systems structured for external visitors while prohibiting subsistence users. In this shift, wildlife becomes simultaneously protected and monetized, while local practices of coexistence are recast as threats to biodiversity. What Ali describes as a “cosmological rupture” emerges here as a reordering of relationships between humans, animals, and land, in which bureaucratic regimes of valuation and access displace customary ethics of reciprocity. Trophy hunting, promoted as a model for community-based conservation (Ali and Butz, 2003; Khan and Baig, 2020), has instead generated new inequalities. Revenues rarely reach the communities, while surveillance increases, particularly during foreign visits. The temporal rhythms of pastoral life, once governed by the seasonal pulse of grazing and weather, now synchronize to the movements of tourists and trophy permits. As Fairhead et al. (2012) remind us, instead of closing conflicting frontiers, conservation often creates them, transforming lived landscapes into governable, securitized, and contested spaces.

But a major promise of neoliberal conservation was that market mechanisms like trophy hunting and tourism would generate income for local development. As Büscher and Fletcher (2015) argue, neoliberal capitalism is attempting to solve its ecological contradictions by turning environmental protection into a new source of profit. Community-based hunting programs in GB were designed so that a significant share of trophy fees would go to local councils (Jackson, 2004). In theory, this model provides villages with funds for schools, roads, and hospitals as a “reward” for tolerating wildlife on their lands. In practice, however, many communities report seeing little of these benefits. A recent study of KNP found that trophy permits and other game yielded an average of US$16,000 per year for community projects (Rashid et al., 2020a, 2020b). Ali contends that much of the profit is siphoned off “by government officials, private outfitters, and conservation NGOs, with only a trickle reaching the affected villages.” Communities feel they were told to sacrifice and “cooperate” for conservation on the understanding of economic gains that largely remain invisible.

The result is a new kind of conflict centered on who controls the spoils of conservation. In some valleys, rival community organizations have sprung up to assert their claim over trophy hunting revenues. Pastures that were once shared grazing commons are now treated as delineated hunting blocks “belonging” to one village or another, a stark shift from communal stewardship to competitive territoriality. Thus, the commercialization of wildlife has sown disputes among local communities, as each seeks a fair share of the perks that conservation was supposed to bring. Alongside these ecological and economic tensions lie deeper fissures in social relations. The creation of KNP and surrounding conservancies has accelerated class stratification and intra-community disputes. “Those with connections to officials,” Hasan noted, “move freely through the park. The rest of us are watched, fined, blocked.”

Mining has emerged as another axis of conflict. Permits have been issued within protected zones, threatening not only the environmental integrity of the park but also exposing the contradictions in conservation governance. Ali pointed out, “How can mining be permitted in a protected area that disallows communities freedom of movement for environmental concerns?” Still, resistance persists. Through platforms like the SNT, discussed in detail at the end of this work, and the Gojal Conservancy Committee, locals have challenged these contradictions, tracking illegal hunting by powerful figures, organizing protest meetings, and documenting land use violations. The recuperative work that the communities conduct draws on traditions of ecological stewardship embedded in folklore, oral histories, and communal protocol of their ancestors. In Shinaki communities, Ali recounted, “hunting a female ibex was considered a moral failure. Hunters were respected not just for killing but for knowing when not to.” These ethics, sidelined by formal conservation science, remain vital to many communities’ environmental identities.

KNP in context: external supervisions and the reordering of communal spaces

For the local communities in GB, especially those steeped in cultural lives and livelihoods, the fight against state-led conservation is not only for land as a physical space but for land as a shared experience, in which the environment and all beings within it are treated as kin and companions. Long before the arrival of national parks or conservation laws, these communities practiced environmental stewardship without the need for external validation.

The section above sought to highlight these struggles and to emphasize that I do not just speak for the communities but with them, in solidarity with their endurance and their refusal to be erased. While approaching this problem, I draw on Linda Alcoff's intervention on “the problem of speaking for others,” and approach these accounts not as voices I speak for, but as epistemic positions through which the politics of conservation can be analytically understood. GB communities’ voices have historically been silenced within conservation discourse, especially when it comes to environmental policy contexts. As Alcoff (1991: 17) argues, while speaking with and to rather than for others is ethically preferable, a complete refusal to speak ultimately undercuts the possibility of political effectivity and leaves dominant discourses unchallenged. This challenge is essential because at the heart of conservation in GB lies not only a question of ecology, but a question of justice. To examine this more closely, I now turn to the Wakhi tribe of Shimshal and their resistance to the erasure of livelihoods and culture under the wildlife preservation regime of KNP.

As discussed earlier, communities in GB have lived in a complex relationship with their high mountain landscapes for centuries. Shimshalis, in particular, have co-created a world in which humans, other-than-humans, and nature are intricately entangled. Historically, this intricate relationship has evolved into concrete material forms through seasonal pastoral movement across altitudinal zones, customary regulation of hunting, collective access to pastures, and an ethic of multispecies coexistence tuned to the ecological rhythms rather than market demand. The section above described how grazing routes, hunting restrictions, and temporary bans enforced by elders or the Mir, the hereditary local ruler historically responsible for regulating access to pastures, mobility corridors, and hunting practices within Hunza's customary governance system, were grounded in long-standing knowledge of land regeneration and animal populations and not in external enforcement regimes. There was always a conservation paradigm in practice that did not depend on the exclusion of humans from the natural world.

Against Western conservation discourses that prioritize excluding humans to preserve a so-called pristine nature, a Shimshali perspective insists that human presence is not a threat to biodiversity but evidence of a sustainable coexistence that has endured for generations. It is based on mutual respect and the sharing of resources. Extending beyond the conservation policies, their critique exposes the innate contradictions in state-sanctioned environmental governance. For example, while Shimshalis are barred from hunting or grazing inside KNP, the government permits elite-driven trophy hunting programs that allow wealthy foreigners to kill endangered species in the name of conservation fundraising (Ali, 2019). Trophy hunting programs, introduced in the late 1980s and expanded through community-based conservation initiatives in the 1990s, reclassified wildlife as regulated revenue-generating species. Local communities are denied entry to protect wildlife, yet the same wildlife is slaughtered for the pleasure of the rich in hunts organized annually under KNP's management.

Against such contradictions, Shimshali stewardship stands not as a relic of the past but as an ongoing struggle against systems that treat land as either a resource to be managed or a wilderness to be fenced off. Their vision of land as a breathing, living space directly challenges global conservation practices that displace local worlds. This vision is expressed through the SNT, a community-led effort to reclaim environmental governance.

Before turning to SNT, it is important to understand how a large conservation area in the remote mountains of GB came into being. What were the environmental needs for developing KNP? What was the context? And did its operation depend upon its construction as a space that would necessarily require noninterference from local communities?

Established in 1975, KNP covers approximately 4455 km² in the Hunza district and was created to protect declining populations of snow leopard, ibex, brown bear, and other endangered species (Din et al., 2020; Rashid et al., 2020a, 2020b). But since its establishment, it has been a contested space between the state and the local communities, and has become a symbol of the costs of statist and capitalist approaches to environmental protection. KNP's primary motive has been to create a space that can prevent the extinction of certain species. Extinction as a future danger to be prevented is used to justify present restrictions, even as local understanding of animal life remains shaped by longer cycles of care and restraint. To fence off this extinction and keep it at a distance, KNP's creation required the acquisition of vast areas of land from local communities, who were fenced off in return.

For more than five decades, it has symbolized the costs of statist and capitalist approaches to environmental protection, which prioritize preservation over local livelihoods and worldviews. Its creation required the acquisition of vast areas of land from local communities. The village of Shimshal, home primarily to the Wakhi tribe, lost nearly 90% of its territory, without consent or dialogue. The territory had long been the basis of their livelihoods (Mir, 2011). This reflects a recurring pattern in the global conservation paradigm. The protected areas violate land rights and dispossess the communities with ancestral claims to the land, instead of recognizing them as stakeholders in the ecological preservation of their lands (Finney, 2014; Survival International, 2026; Tauli-Corpuz et al., 2020).

Conceptually, this process can be understood as a form of accumulation by dispossession as an ongoing feature of capitalist expansion. Harvey (2003) famously argued that the commodification of commons, public resources, and lands is a form of accumulation by dispossession in which capital feeds off the dispossession of marginalized communities by displacing them from their spaces. Chatterjee (2014) conceptualizes spatial estrangement as a phenomenon in which one class or group of people seizes control of and manages a space by usurping it from people who had originally produced it. The displaced community gradually becomes more landless and more placeless, the more land and the more place they produce. In other words, those who historically produced and cared for a place are separated from it, and that space is reclaimed by others who had no part in the production of that space.

Specific to Pakistan, Khan (2022) terms how the production of new elite enclaves is based on “the theft of space” from marginalized groups. This spatial reordering does not simply create new real estate but produces spatial estrangement for those expelled by alienating people from their ancestral lands. Dispossession of both rural and urban marginalized communities to make way for for-profit real estate development is becoming an increasingly common practice in Pakistan (Akhtar and Rashid, 2021). Displacement is becoming a driving engine of statist development.

The ability of Islamabad to pursue conservation-as-enclosure in GB also depends on localized power dynamics that translate federal priorities into governance on the ground. Khan and Azhar (2024) argue that dispossession is actualized through socioinstitutional arrangements and localized alliances among officials, intermediaries, and elites that normalize land-use change and manage dissent. In GB, a comparable relay operates through the Wildlife Department and park bureaucracy, district administration, security actors, and a small set of political and economic notables who benefit from the infrastructures of conservation through permits, enforcement authority, salaried posts, and the prestige economy of tourism and trophy hunting. These local elites often function as brokers who selectively translate community claims through local power dynamics materializing in who can enter, graze, hunt, and work.

As discussed in the previous section, when access to pasture, mobility corridors, or wildlife becomes a matter of authorization, conservation generates a field of privilege in which proximity to officials and institutions determines livelihood security. The result is a form of dispossession that works through differential inclusion. Communities remain physically present, but their everyday relations to land are reorganized through fines, zoning, surveillance, and selective concessions.

GB's growing geostrategic centrality in recent times has also shaped these dynamics without fully determining them. As Karrar (2021) argues, connectivity across the Karakoram has reworked the region into a key spatial node in Pakistan and China relations. In this context, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or CPEC-era investments have intensified Islamabad's interest in legibility and control of the region through new infrastructures, heightened administrative attention, and the reordering of landscapes as corridors of security, and investment. This can make conservation-friendly zoning and orderly ecotourism landscapes attractive to state planners, even as local communities experience these shifts as tighter regulation of mobility and resource use. In Shimshal, this broader reconfiguration intersects with older conservation regimes such as KNP, sharpening conflicts over who governs land and who bears the costs of protecting a landscape increasingly valued by actors far beyond the valley.

Though the recent interventions through CPEC are significant to centralize the GB position in Pakistani politics, but the conservation narrative of Northern Pakistan has by and large been shaped by the powerful narrative of the romanticization of GB as a remote and pristine space. The region of GB has mostly been a subject to objectification as a landscape of geopolitical significance, contested history, endangered traditions, local marginalization, and a paradoxical relationship with the Pakistani state (for more on this, see Dad, 2016; Flowerday, 2019; Hunzai, 2013; Sökefeld, 2005). Its abnormal relationship with the state is mirrored in the abnormal romanticization of the region. For much of Pakistan's history, GB has been portrayed as close to nature, pristine, and remote, untainted by the pollution that impair the country's mainland urban centers. Its celebrated serenity is linked to promises of tourism (Ahmad, 2021; Saqib et al., 2019). This romanticized image draws directly from colonial ideas of wilderness as untouched and pure. Hunza, where KNP is located, has become central to this construction as a place imagined for spiritual renewal and reconnection with nature. Shimshal, often described as one of the most remote settlements in GB, has become symbolic of this exotic romanticization. Over the years, this image has transformed KNP and Shimshal into exclusive territories of ecotourism, rather than spaces where environmental justice and land rights are meaningfully addressed. While GB in general, and Hunza in particular, are celebrated for their unspoiled beauty, the lived realities of local communities remain in stark contradiction to the serene image projected onto their lands.

Such contradictions intensified when KNP was constructed under the supervision of external “experts.” One such expert was George Schaller, a German-born American conservationist who came to Pakistan in the early 1970s to study the region's wildlife. Collaborating with like-minded conservationists in Pakistan, Schaller secured an audience with Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, significantly bolstering his influence over national conservation policies. Bhutto enthusiastically embraced Schaller's proposal for KNP (Knudsen, 1999). According to Hussain (2015: 194), “Schaller described the land-use practices of the Wakhi pastoralists, most notably Shimshalis, with disdain, characterizing them as a threat to wildlife.” In Schaller's own words, as recorded in The Stones of Silence, the region of Hunza is a beautiful land devastated by human activity:

Mountains have been devastated by man. Forests have become timber, slopes have turned into fields, and grass has vanished into livestock and wildlife into the bellies of the hunters. The future of some animals and plants is now in jeopardy. (1988: 97)

Obsessed with the idea of pristine nature, Schaller adhered to a preservationist ideology that framed human presence as a threat to ecological purity. While driven by environmental concerns, this perspective is a reconfiguration of colonial-era attitudes, redefined in new ways under postcolonial management systems. Locals were no longer defined as threats to the empire, but as threats to nature itself. In Pakistan, this reframing was facilitated by Schaller, under whose influence the government declared Khunjerab a national park in 1975. The resulting conservation model prioritized Western environmental ideals over local practices. Schaller had one advantage. He was able to visit and study a region so remote that its politics and culture held little value for policymakers in Islamabad. While the government in Islamabad did not know about the economic dependence of the people of Shimshal on nature, Schaller was aware of the political nature of conservation and the financial burden it puts on local people (Hussain, 2015).

Reflecting on Schaller's influence, I am reminded of Daniel Jenzen, another biologist and external conservationist, who once compared ecologists to “generals” in a battle to “reprogram humanity” away from resource exploitation (Guha, 1997: 15). Like Schaller, Jenzen advanced a vision of strict control over local spaces through supervised interventions. As KNP illustrates, this model is often reproduced in postcolonial settings with little modification. The rhetoric of conservation becomes a tool to expel local communities from protected areas. In India's Nagarhole National Park, for example, tribal communities were displaced in the name of protecting tigers, despite having coexisted with them for centuries. Rejecting this “guns and guards” mentality in favor of locally informed approaches, rooted in recognition that local communities have long practiced coexistence with wildlife, is the urgent need of our time.

However, the absence of such a holistic understanding has been the hallmark of conservation under external supervision. The creation of KNP exemplifies this, transforming the region into a space in which nature was to be protected from its own inhabitants. Its establishment disrupted the lives of many small villages in the Hunza district, most of which ceded land to the government. Shimshal, however, never formally relinquished its territory and resisted inclusion in the park (Ali, 2010). It remains the only community in the area that has not officially agreed to abide by park regulations (Abidi-Habib and Lawrence, 2007). Despite this refusal, Shimshal was incorporated into KNP's boundaries. Over the years, the state offered minor concessions, such as employment within park administration, but these were rejected by Shimshali elders who refused to serve as subordinates in a system that had dispossessed them.

The construction of the park and the resulting dispossession have affected the community's traditional grazing economy by making it illegal, damaging the community's primary sources of livelihood (Ali and Butz, 2003). The park's regulations entail a complete ban on grazing and hunting in most Shimshali pastures to preserve wildlife species and their habitats. This policy has created a paradoxical situation in which Shimshalis were expected to protect predators such as the snow leopard, which frequently prey on their livestock and cause substantial economic losses (Hussain, 2020). As a result, international conservation efforts are met with deep skepticism among the local population.

The state, allied with global conservation NGOs, acted as the agent of dispossession, seizing local space under the guise of public and environmental good. Its apparent motive has been to create a space that can prevent the extinction of certain exotic species. Extinction as a future danger to be prevented is used to justify present restrictions, even as local understanding of animal life remains shaped by longer cycles of care and restraint. In doing so, it created an estranged space or an alienated landscape in which the people who had coproduced and lived integrally with the environment were now rendered illegal. The dislocation, apart from being physical and economic, was also deeply cultural.

However, in the high-mountain context, the dynamic is cloaked in “green” rhetoric to sound less toxic than the market rhetoric. In Pakistan, such initiatives have historically been used to drive capital accumulation and elite control (Abbas, 2025). Since Pakistan is a vulnerable region when it comes to climate change because of recurring floods (Dogar and Abbas, 2025), such idioms are quite sellable to the public. The idiom is green because it is conservation and not private real estate. But the material effect, as in local people losing collective land to an outside project, is strikingly similar to real estate. In both instances, a segment of society must continuously give up space and, hence, their material existence to another. Conservation by dispossession in this sense becomes a continuous process through which environmental initiatives dispossess communities by projecting ecological goals but undermining them at the same time (Neumann, 2004). Conservation ends up threatening the environment more than preserving it, especially when it alienates local stewardship and knowledge systems. Kelly (2011) argues that conservation areas may operate as contemporary forms of primitive accumulation, in which the enclosure of land and the dispossession of local communities enable private benefit and help reproduce the conditions necessary for the expansion of capitalist production.

In Delusional States, Nosheen Ali (2019: 195–228) explores such skepticism and the enduring tensions between Shimshalis and conservation park authorities, arguing that the villagers of Shimshal have challenged the fundamental logic of international conservation. The community raises critical questions about whose knowledge is considered legitimate in environmental governance and why Western conservation paradigms have been imposed as the dominant framework in GB. They view the extensive presence of international NGOs, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), as part of a broader strategy to transform their homeland into a “living museum for wildlife” (2019: 196), where the needs and cultural traditions of communities with ancestral claims to the land are sacrificed for an abstract notion of ecological preservation. Rather than ensuring the protection of biodiversity, the park management supervises the commodification of rare and endangered species under the guise of conservation policies.

Similar dynamics shaped the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, the creation of which excluded Indigenous communities such as the Shoshone and Bannock from lands they had historically inhabited, hunted, and used ceremonially (Sapignoli and Hitchcock, 2023; Spence, 1999). The establishment of Banff National Park in Canada did the same to the Stoney Nakoda presence, and their land practices were rendered incompatible with settler visions of wilderness and recreation (Binnema and Niemi, 2006; MacEachern, 2016). Comparable logics are visible in East Africa. The colonial and postcolonial conservation efforts have repeatedly displaced Maasai pastoralists in Tanzania, from the creation of Serengeti National Park in the 1950s to more recent removals in Ngorongoro and Loliondo (Ndimbo and Haulle, 2025; Neumann, 1998). Such dispossessions have never benefited nature. Schepens et al. (2024) show that the disruption of Indigenous lifeways in the Canadian Rockies degraded ecosystems by displacing practices such as controlled burning and rotational grazing.

These cases differ in context and scale, but dispossession remains central to each. In each, conservation becomes a means of reorganizing authority over land while presenting itself as ecological protection. The motive of situating Shimshal within this broader trajectory is to highlight that such dispossessions are neither accidental nor isolated. Such exclusions rest on an ideology that separates nature from culture, and humans from other-than-human beings. Within this framework, nature is imagined either as a resource to be exploited or as a pristine space to be protected, with humans cast as external to both. Through this top-down conservation praxis, communities are removed from their forests, rivers, and lands on the presumption that protecting nature requires treating it as empty of human presence. This paradigm stands in direct contradiction to the practices of communities like Shimshalis, whose relations with land have historically been grounded in coexistence, restraint, and ecological responsibility.

Human–nature dichotomies and solidarities beyond borders

Shimshal's history offers a counter-story to the state-led conservation efforts that separate humans from nature. For centuries, the community's pastoral practices have been based on seasonal rhythms, moving between altitudes in ways that respected the regeneration cycles of grasslands, water, and wildlife. Shimshal's Wakhi community has historically managed a high-altitude mountain area through seasonal migrations and rotational grazing cycles. Generations of community members have accumulated intimate and intergenerational ecological knowledge of which place is suitable for which time, and how many yaks can be grazed for how long in a particular place, to prevent overuse and sustain biodiversity. Shimshali herding is organized through carefully calibrated seasonal and altitudinal movements, in which specific pastures are used at particular times of the year and livestock numbers are regulated according to pasture capacity (Khan et al., 2019). Animals are periodically moved between higher and lower elevations for rotational grazing.

Shimshalis practice transhumant pastoralism, moving livestock between low-lying winter settlements and high-altitude summer pastures (Pamir) according to snowmelt, grass regeneration, and water availability. These movements were governed by collectively held knowledge about pasture recovery, herd size, and climatic variability, transmitted across generations through practice instead of formal instruction. As Butz (1996) notes, these “interwoven transhumant cycles” are not ad hoc responses but the outcome of long-term collective decision-making. The community practices are an outcome of ecological knowledge passed down across generations, grounded in sustained engagement with local landscapes, which are unlike any formally codified or externally defined scientific models. Their pastoralism is deeply tied to local culture and livelihood and is embedded in seasonal rituals and cultural festivals (Al Jazeera, 2017).

Shah and Shah (2003) describe in rich detail the seasonal migration pattern and how each spring, village herders led 700 to 800 yaks from Shimshal up to the Pamir plateau, and then sequentially through a network of several alpine pastures. Pasture rotation was integral. Sustainability was practiced on the ground without the need for a national park conservation. Certain valleys were deliberately left ungrazed in summer so that they could be utilized for the winter months. The community exercised shared responsibilities and informal but long-standing, intergenerational pasture management norms through rotational grazing and seasonal allocation.

For Shimshal, land is not inert territory. It is animated with memory, sacredness, and shared life. Thus, KNP was not built atop wilderness. It was drawn across living histories. Grazing and agricultural lands were absorbed into park boundaries without dialogue or compensation, silenced by cartography. The park authorities’ claim that the community was harming the environment by using natural resources proved to be a completely false argument, as the Shimshal community had demonstrated for many generations that sustainable pasture use is feasible and can make a lasting contribution to biodiversity protection (Kreutzmann, 2025). From the perspective of the Shimshalis, the park's establishment split humans from the lands they had long protected through lived reciprocity. These histories included working landscapes structured through rotational grazing, seasonal absence, and restraint, in which withdrawal from certain pastures was as important as use, allowing grasslands and water sources to regenerate.

While conservation authorities justify displacement in the name of protecting wildlife, Shimshali knowledge, in contrast, show that true conservation emerges from presence and an intergenerational engagement with place. Through their lives, knowledge, and praxis, the community challenges KNP's idea of sustainable management. Instead of assuming humans exist in perpetual conflict with nature, the Shimshali struggle rejects the very dichotomy between the two. As Rahim Ali, a Shimshali, explains:

Our people's relationship with nature is one of respect and thankfulness. To get from nature, you have to give to it and be respectful and thankful. There is no need for conservation because nature has an inbuilt mechanism of conservation. Things finish when you only get and use, but don’t give back. (qtd. in Ali, 2019: 207)

Rahim's simple yet profound observation exposes the inadequacy of park authorities to recognize the inbuilt mechanisms of local sustainability. The ethic of being “respectful and thankful” has shaped the Shimshali perspective on nature through generations. This ethic was materially embedded in grazing practices that regulated when animals could move, how long herds remained in particular pastures, and how extraction was limited to avoid ecological exhaustion. This perspective informs and resonates with Indigenous worldviews across the globe, which emphasize that humans and the natural world are interconnected and unified rather than locked in conflict (Craft, 2013; Dei et al., 2022; Freeland, 2020; Inoue and Moreira, 2016; Simpson, 2014; Wildcat et al., 2014).

For Shimshalis, this unification is not abstract but manifested in the community's actions and conceptualized through a human–nature relationship in which humans cannot rampantly exploit nature for their benefit. Many Indigenous and land-based communities, in their cosmological worldviews, treat nature as living kin to be respected, and not as an endless resource to be consumed (McGregor et al., 2010; Salmón, 2000; Smith, 2021; Whyte, 2021). Conservation policies that restrict access to grazing lands fundamentally alter these relations by criminalizing mobility and transforming collective practices into individualized risks governed by permits, surveillance, and punishment. In doing so, they disrupt the social relations through which ecological knowledge and responsibility were historically reproduced.

Building on this, Shimshal's resistance must also be understood through an internationalist lens. Their struggle against top-down, state-led conservation is at once a demand for the recognition of local ecological values and practices and part of a wider, recurring global struggle. The fight for such recognition is significant for the survival of the planet's ecosystems. The survival of the planet is interlinked with the survival of communities, who have historically promoted the cause of protection and ethical treatment of nature (Shiva, 1995). Communities continue to register their resistance to global colonial-capitalist systems by raising pertinent questions like who gets to determine the destiny of the land, and of the people who live on it (LaDuke, 2015). Should those with power and capital be free to exploit nature and dispossess communities unchecked? Shimshali stewardship raises similar questions: who decides how conservation should be practiced, and what is truly good for the planet's health? Their refusal to surrender traditions is a way of protecting the earth from being turned into an unlivable, monotonous entity. In this sense, their very existence is their resistance.

Resistance through existence often emerges in direct opposition to the logic through which land is objectified. To turn land into a commodity for conservation or commercial use, local and land-based existence must first be stripped of meaning. The land has to be denied life and agency, reduced to a nonliving, inanimate object that can be engineered, controlled, and conserved. Over centuries, land-based epistemologies and thought systems, that promote protecting land from extraction, have come under violent attack precisely because they resist this reduction (Pihama and Lee-Morgan, 2019; Smith, 2021). Such cosmologies, once treated as depictions of reality, were dismissed as myth (Watts, 2013). Decentralized and complex knowledge systems were undermined by centralized Western knowledge systems (Yunkaporta, 2020). The land itself was reduced from its position of being alive and thinking to a position of a passive object ready to be manipulated by an active (usually white, male, and Eurocentric) subject. Contrarily, in Indigenous and land-based knowledge formation, thought develops organically with its relation to the land. Thought is the product of land (Simpson, 2017). To ensure the erasure of such a complex thought system, its relationship to the land must be disrupted.

As argued, contrary to perceiving nature as inactive and other-than-human spaces of pristine purity, the Shimshali thought system acknowledges these spaces as active and reciprocal realities. Thinking in “isolation” and in the absence of the surrounding nature, or dislocating thought from “movement,” dislocating humans from spaces, conserving spaces to their pristine forms, and preserving them from human intervention, is a state-led imposition of how spaces work or should be conserved. The imposition of such a model on Shimshal reduced its living land to an object, engineered and controlled in the name of conservation.

In Shimshal, the injustice produced by state-led conservation has taken the form of dispossession, human–nature disruptions, and the exploitation of natural resources. Yet what Shimshal faces is not an isolated case; it is the consequence of colonial-capitalist frameworks reproduced worldwide. These frameworks are imposed by settler states and mimicked faithfully by postcolonial ones, becoming integral to postcolonial statecraft. Violence against communities that refuse to sacrifice their identities for universal ideals of progress is not a matter of choice but a structural necessity through which the state justifies its existence. Beyond state borders and imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), the march toward “progress” requires concrete sacrifices, and these sacrifices recur in similar patterns across diverse places.

While each nomadic, fluid, or local community carries distinct belief systems, material realities, contexts, and histories, their struggle against the system is shared. Global capitalism thrives by devouring life forms and inventing new corpses to sustain an unending strategy of accumulation (McBrien, 2016). Historically reliant on the exploitation of labor, accumulation today increasingly depends on the active dispossession of communities from their lands (Harvey, 2003). Glen Coulthard (2014) emphasizes how colonial expansion, capitalist extraction, and state formation in North America have relied on the dispossession of Indigenous lands and lifeways. His theorization of settler colonialism as a “structure of domination predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands and political authority” (2014: 151) resonates with the histories of displacement experienced by local communities in Pakistan. The structures of domination are global. The forced exclusion of local epistemologies in GB mirrors the erasure of Native ways of knowing in North America and elsewhere. Recognizing these parallels calls for relational solidarity, so that resistance to the disruption of local ways of living can expose the ecological violence of colonialism and capitalism across borders.

Challenging KNP through SNT

The communities in GB are exercising their own ways of refusals and erasures. It's not that the communities are unwilling to cooperate to make way for a conservation strategy that could benefit both the state and society. The problem, however, as explained above, has been that the conservation strategy has, more or less, ended up dispossessing the communities of their land through an exercise of authority that has benefited only a small segment of society. But these resistances, by and large, have been constructive ways of engaging with conservation. Shimshal's resistance has been an exercise in building meaningful alternatives.

In Shimshal, this alternative has been articulated through the SNT. Established through grassroots mobilization in 1997, SNT is a local initiative to reclaim environmental governance taken from the community under KNP. As a protest against exclusion, SNT advances a model of conservation that recognizes not only local livelihoods but also the cultural history of the land and the community's connection to it. The trust insists on acknowledging Shimshal's historical role as environmental stewards and on incorporating local knowledge into policymaking. In doing so, it exposes the failures of conventional conservation models and presses for an inclusive paradigm that prioritizes environmental justice over Western ideals of wilderness preservation. Unlike the top-down enforcement of KNP, SNT is rooted in principles of self-determination and collaborative management.

In this context, Shimshali ethics include a spectrum of relational obligations between humans and land. As argued in the previous section, lived reciprocity and relationality with the land are important indicators of Shimshali ethics. These are enacted through customary land-sharing protocols, seasonal grazing restrictions, rituals tied to resource extraction, and collective decision-making grounded in consensus. Practices rooted in this ethics are manifested in the form of customary prohibitions on overgrazing, the designation of rest periods for pastures, and a cultural obligation to protect land from being commodified.

These ethics function as resistance in multiple ways. First, they create an alternative legitimacy structure that challenges the state's claim to authority. SNT bases its governance on customary laws rather than state legislation. Second, these norms sustain parallel systems of regulation, such as enforcing local grazing rules even within officially restricted areas. Third, the strong community backing for SNT weakens the social legitimacy of state park authorities and decreases their ability to enforce conservation restrictions without local compliance. And finally, while SNT does not seek court-based legal recognition in opposition to the park, it provides a moral and epistemic counterclaim that delegitimizes KNP's authority in the eyes of the community.

SNT's ethics, therefore, is less abstract and more grounded in a lived framework of reciprocity and responsibility. Ethics, in this context, refers to both human-to-human and human-to-nature obligations that structure everyday practices in Shimshal. For instance, customary laws dictate seasonal rotational grazing and communal herding responsibilities (Shah and Shah, 2003). This form of lived ethics is simultaneously ecological and practical.

This vision resonates with GB's history, where the concept of the commons has long been central. Natural resources were traditionally governed under community-led systems that ensured collective access and sustainable use (Khan and Baig, 2020; Khan and Rahman, 2011). As the threats of biodiversity loss and climate change are even more severe in a developing country like Pakistan (Baig and Aldosari, 2012), scholars of high-altitude conservation in GB argue that communities must regain authority over natural resources. Some emphasize that communities should be persuaded to conserve biodiversity by showing them the financial and developmental benefits of doing so (Ali et al., 2015; Khan and Baig, 2020; Rasheed and Ahmed, 2012; Virk et al., 2003). Their emphasis on “convincing” communities reveals an assumption of non-cooperation, but in places like Shimshal, resistance is less about unwillingness and more about a response to decades of neglect by the state and international organizations since the establishment of KNP.

The role of international organizations in shaping conservation policies in underdeveloped countries cannot be ignored. Institutions such as the IUCN and the WWF have historically legitimized fortress conservation approaches that exclude local communities. Working in collaboration with state authorities, these organizations have often implemented policies that disregard local claims to land and resources. Environmental protection, in such cases, serves as a pretext for extending state and corporate control over local territories. As global knowledge brokers, these NGOs have reinforced the resurgence of the “fortress conservation” narrative (Brockington et al., 2008). The narrative actively excludes communities from managing conservation areas, even by force, if necessary (Brockington and Duffy, 2011). One telling example is the “war against poaching” in Africa, a dominant theme in conservation and a high priority for international organizations (Bonner, 1994; Brockington and Duffy, 2011).

Against such exclusionary initiatives, the SNT emerged as a grassroots response. It exemplifies how communities can challenge global conservation models that operate at the expense of their cultural and material well-being. SNT advances local and participatory governance by giving material force to the claims of representation, livelihood, authenticity, environmental stewardship, ecological responsibility, and community-led conservation (Ali, 2019). Unlike international NGOs and state agencies, which separate humans from nature in their management practices, SNT integrates local culture with ecological needs to promote an inclusive model of conservation (Abidi-Habib and Lawrence, 2007). In this framework, resistance is productive as it functions to constitute parallel legitimacy structures rooted in local ecology and ancestral practices and offer an alternative authority to state or NGO-led conservation. The ethics authorize practices such as continued pastoralism, landscape zoning, ecological and cultural preservation, and as a symbolic and practical defiance of imposed conservation. Through an emphasis on the recognition of the interconnections of community traditions with the environment and humans with nature, SNT builds a holistic approach that strengthens Shimshal's resilience against environmental and social challenges.

To assert communal control over 2700 km² of territory, SNT has been actively promoting local consultation and traditional stewardship practices rooted in Wakhi culture and conservation ethics while protecting the community's right to ancestral pastoral grazing. Central to the SNT's mission are six programs addressing ecological and cultural preservation (Ali and Butz, 2003). These include Nature Stewardship, which zones the landscape into management areas (e.g. Wilderness, Pasture, and Agricultural Zones) to formalize traditional practices. Through Environmental Education, the community promotes modern techniques with communal knowledge in schools. The Trust also promotes Self-Help Development through volunteer-led infrastructure projects for community development, Cultural Preservation via Wakhi cultural festivals, and Tourism Management to ensure low-impact tourism without burdening the Shimshali cultural and ecological environment. Lastly, SNT ensures the Women's Development Program, which recognizes the central role women play in conservation initiatives. Governance relies on a consensus-based Board of Directors representing subclans and a Task Force of educated Shimshalis facilitating external partnerships.

Over the years, the SNT has relied on the voluntary efforts of unpaid community members. This reliance reflects strong local commitment, but it also risks burnout among those involved. The trust faces external challenges as well: the expansion of national parks, youth migration to urban centers, the relentless capitalist drive of postcolonial states, and chronic shortages of funds. Yet SNT remains committed to securing resources in ways that align with community values, ensuring that external financial support never undermines local autonomy or cultural integrity. At its core, SNT resists top-down environmental governance by prioritizing local agency, traditional and communal knowledge, and lived experience over externally imposed models. Despite persistent obstacles posed by the state and international conservation organizations, it continues to provide a platform for Shimshalis to assert their right to environmental stewardship, safeguarding both their economic livelihoods and cultural identity.

Conclusion

This article advances three central arguments about conservation conflicts in Pakistan's national parks’ conservation discourse. First, taking my lead from fellow activists from GB, I show that, instead of being treated as isolated environmental disputes, the emerging material, class, and territorial conflicts in the region must be understood as consequences of top-down conservation regimes. Second, I explain how external supervision and the reordering of local spaces disrupt material livelihoods as well as cultural traditions by reorganizing long-standing relations between communities, land, and other-than-human beings. Third, I argue that community-led conservation efforts such as those developed in Shimshal offer an alternative framework of environmental governance grounded in local autonomy while challenging exclusionary practices of conservation authority. Together, these arguments situate the question of environmental justice within the longer history of dispossession that communities in GB continue to confront.

In Shimshal's case, this requires a reassessment of the workings of KNP. Implemented without adequate consultation or consent, the park-imposed restrictions on traditional land use and livelihoods while excluding the community from decision-making processes that directly affect their environment. KNP's creation and functioning show how conservation, presented as ecological protection, has instead dispossessed communities historically responsible for sustaining the region's biodiversity. Centering local perspectives, therefore, makes visible the limits of exclusionary conservation paradigms and the need to recognize locally grounded systems of environmental stewardship that have persisted despite decades of displacement. Reframing conservation through these relational practices makes clear that ecological futures cannot be secured by separating communities from their environments, but by recognizing that systems of stewardship capable of sustaining biodiversity already exist within the landscapes that the conservation policies seek to reorganize and restrict.

Across GB, restrictions on grazing, hunting, and mobility have reshaped the ancestral relationships among communities, land, and wildlife, even as outsiders are granted new forms of access in the name of conservation. While local communities are disciplined for sustaining their livelihoods within these landscapes, trophy hunting licenses continue to authorize the killing of protected species for visiting elites. The exotic animals, communities are accused of failing to safeguard, can be legally killed if enough money changes hands. Such contradictions expose the structural logic of state-led conservation through national parks, in which ecological protection becomes a means of reorganizing authority over land instead of sustaining the relations that have long protected it.