Visioning African lionscapes: Securing space,mobilizing capital,and fostering subjects

Introduction

In July 2015, Cecil the lion's death sparked international furore over the practice of lion trophy hunting. Cecil, a 13-year-old male lion who lived in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, was killed illegally by American bowhunter Walter Palmer. After American celebrity Jimmy Kimmel gave an impassioned monologue on his late-night talk show on 28 July, the Cecil story went viral (Macdonald et al., 2016). Kimmel appealed to his audience to make good from the event by donating money to the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), the organization that tracked Cecil as part of a lion ecology study. The appeal ultimately raised over $1 million (Macdonald et al., 2016) from over 13 thousand donors (most from North America). Interest in the Cecil story was truly spectacular. In the wake of the Kimmel monologue, the story spread explosively on social media and traditional news coverage; both WildCRU's and Oxford University's websites crashed under the weight of sudden public interest; a photograph of Cecil was projected onto the Empire State Building; TIME magazine named Cecil the most influential animal in the world, wild or domestic; and there were many other remarkable tributes. The Cecil Moment clearly exemplifies the spectacular and understudied role that individual animals can have in galvanizing and shaping public opinion about conservation (Bear, 2011; Doubleday, 2017).

What kind of movement follows from such a spectacular moment? Who decides? In this paper, we focus on the momentum of the Cecil Moment. Specifically, we focus on the momentum carried forward by the powerful actors emboldened by the Kimmel appeal.^1,2 In the aftermath of the immense public reaction to Cecil's death, WildCRU Director David Macdonald felt a responsibility to “transform the Cecil moment into the Cecil movement” (WildCRU, 2016d). While pondering how to do that, he was urged by his friend, long-time WildCRU supporter and billionaire philanthropist, Thomas Kaplan, to announce a summit to address that question. And so, in early September 2016, 14 months after Cecil was killed, 58 individuals gathered at Oxford for the Cecil Summit.

The Cecil Summit was hosted by top lion conservation organizations Panthera and WildCRU and supported by the IUCN. It brought together 30 so-called lion “insiders” (i.e. biologists, ecologists, zoologists) with 30 so-called lion “outsiders” (i.e. political scientists, economists, development experts). While we watched the public sessions of the Cecil Summit available on YouTube, we found ourselves feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, we felt compelled by the urgent narrative of lions-in-crisis and encouraged by the rhetoric of approaching local communities with humility, fairness, and respect. On the other hand, much of the meeting was, in the words of Nancy Peluso (1993: 215), “uncomfortably imperialistic” and we were often confused by the ways in which contradictory remarks were subsumed into a stabilized vision. According to a commentary titled Outbreeding Ideas for Conservation Success penned by organizers after the event, the format of the Cecil Summit was experimental, designed to “break the mould and identify innovative conservation strategies to prevent the extinction of lions Panthera leo in Africa” (Macdonald and Chapron, 2017). Yet, as our analysis shows, rather than breaking molds, the vision for lion conservation put forward at the Cecil Summit was very much aligned with new conservation trends, namely, securitized and neoliberal conservation. Moreover, rather than outbreeding ideas, the Summit replicated a particular, entrenched human mastery, reproducing geopolitical, racial, gendered, and classed orders by (re)positioning the elite, white, male from the Global North as the authority to save lions.

In this paper, our aim is to contribute to recent discussions in political ecology about the dovetailing of conservation, security, and economics. In particular, we are motivated by Lunstrum (2018: 4) who writes, “as these intersections among conservation, security, and the economy begin to expand, we need additional tools to comprehend how they come together and with what impact.” Existing research on the security–economy–conservation encounter has largely focused on how it has emerged in and through the political economy. Our analysis of the Cecil Summit illuminates a different explanation. Through an analytics of governmentality, we argue that subject-making plays a central role binding security, the economy, and conservation together. We develop this argument after briefly situating the paper in the literature on securitized and neoliberal conservation, outlining governmentality as an analytical frame, and providing methodological details. We close the paper by providing a critique of the vision for lion conservation put forward at the Cecil Summit and pointing to its implications. We are particularly concerned with the way the Cecil Movement shifts the politics of the Cecil Moment and sets the stage for the militarization of lion conservation.

Conservation security, economics, and subject-making

A prominent theme of contemporary political ecology and critical conservation scholarship is the securitization of conservation space and practice. This refers to the framing of conservation threats as security issues and responding accordingly (Masse and Lunstrum, 2016), often through increased control of space like protected areas (Lunstrum, 2018). Another trend robustly examined in critical conservation scholarship is neoliberal conservation which is among the main paths being taken in mainstream conservation (Brockington et al., 2008; Collard et al., 2015). The neoliberal conservation literature describes how conservation practice is increasingly shaped by “the language of the market” (Dempsey and Suarez, 2016) which “has turned land, fauna, and flora into ‘natural resources’ whereby their principal value is their exchange value and their right to existence based on what the market is willing to pay for them in monetary terms” (Buscher and Whande, 2007: 29).

Recent scholarship has noted that securitized and neoliberal conservation approaches are beginning to intersect and scholars have started to investigate their relation. Research on the intersection of securitized and neoliberal conservation has largely focused on the political economy of securitized conservation, revealing how the security–economy–conservation encounter has emerged in and through market-based instruments and capitalism (Devine, 2014; Duffy, 2016; Lunstrum, 2018; Marijnen, 2018; Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016; Masse and Lunstrum, 2016; Ojeda, 2012). For example, scholars have shown how private wealth and corporations, commodification, and marketization enable securitized conservation (e.g. “selling green militarization” ; Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016) and how capital accumulation is enabled by logics of security (e.g. “accumulation by securitization”; Masse and Lunstrum, 2016). In these explanations, capital is afforded a great deal of causal power. This paper illuminates a different explanation, bringing to the fore how the security–economy–conservation encounter can articulate through the making of good lion conservation subjects, globally and locally.

The cultivation of good environmental subjects (and thus actions and behaviors) has long been recognized as an important mode of achieving conservation goals. Luke (1999) and then Agrawal (2005a, 2005b), building on Foucault's governmentality concept, coined the term environmentality to describe how local people could be enrolled in community conservation efforts in order to transform them into “‘environmental subjects’ – people who care about the environment” (Agrawal, 2005b: 162). The centrality of subject-making in conservation has since been recognized in a variety of contexts from managing forests in the United States (Kosek, 2006) to turtle conservation in India (Srinivasan, 2014) among others (e.g. Bose et al., 2012; Jepson et al., 2012). Recently, the governmentality concept has been complicated, suggesting that environmental subject-making can take several forms. Fletcher (2017), building on Foucault (2008), points to a disciplinary form in which subjects internalize particular norms of values (i.e. they become people who care about the environment); a sovereign form in which subjects comply to environmental regulation in response to top-down control and punishment (i.e. fortress conservation); a neoliberal form in which environments are modified such that subjects act in environmentally friendly ways through rational economic behavior (i.e. economic incentives); among others. Research on this multiple governmentalities vein has revealed that these different forms of subject-making often overlap and operate simultaneously (Bluwstein, 2017; Boelens et al., 2015; Fletcher, 2017; Youdelis, 2013).

At the Cecil Summit, logics of security and economic rationality clearly came together in the proposed vision for lion conservation. Yet, security and the economy alone are not sufficient to explain this vision. We argue that the vision is also underpinned by a governmental logic; that is, it relies heavily upon the production of lion-prideful subjects. We unearth this third logic of subject-making, together with security and economy, by applying an analytics of governmentality to the Cecil Summit.

Critical scholars of human–environment relations have built upon Foucault's (1991) writings on governmentality to explain how power operates in the realms of environmental management and conservation (e.g. Agrawal, 2005a; Fletcher, 2017; Kosek, 2006; Li, 2007; Rutherford, 2007, 2011). To study government is “to start by asking what authorities of various sorts wanted to happen, in relation to problems defined how, in pursuit of what objectives, through what strategies and techniques” (Rose, 1999: 20). Extending the study of government to nature, Rutherford (2011: vxii) argues that an analytics of government is useful to explore how the truth of nature is produced and governed by exploring “the ways in which the environment is constructed as in crisis, how knowledge about it is formed, and who then is authorized to save it.” Moments when the rationalizations underlying government are laid bare are relatively rare and happen at particular places and times (Dean, 2010; Rose, 1999). The Cecil Summit is one such rare site where governmental rationality of lion conservation is revealed and thus an analytic of government is a particularly useful perspective from which to examine the production of authority to vision African lionscapes and the vision itself.

Our analytics of government proceeds in two broad categories and emphasizes how questions to reveal the production of environmental crisis narratives and authority, rather than taking these as self-evident truths (Dean, 2010). We begin by analyzing the production of authority. Here, rather than asking “who rules African lionscapes,” we ask “how are the actors visioning lionscapes constituted as authoritative and powerful?” Then, we analyze their vision which itself involves two stages. The first asks how the issue of lion decline is problematized or framed. The second asks how the problem is rendered governable which involves attending to the practices concerned with representing “the domain to be governed as an intelligible field … defining boundaries, rendering that within them visible, assembling information about that which is included, and devising techniques to mobilize the forces and entities thus revealed” (Rose, 1999: 33). Although our analysis proceeds in distinct categories, authority and vision are not separate. As others have shown, authority, problematization, and rendering governable are intimately linked such that the framing of environmental problems “anticipates the kinds of solutions experts have to offer” (Li, 2007: 7).

While we contend that governmentality is a fruitful framework to explain the proceedings at the Cecil Summit, it is not without its limitations. Studies employing governmentality sometimes appear to suggest that the governmental visions they describe operate and circulate as intended with very little deviation. Rose (1999) argues that it is important to distinguish between two types of studies: analysis of governmental vision and analysis of what happens when these visions “hit the road” when they entangle with the “things” and processes they seek to govern. In this paper, we conduct the first type of analysis, using governmentality as a framework to unpack the production of authority and the vision laid out at the Cecil Summit. While we cannot analyze the beyond the vision, we can draw upon existing critical conservation literature to suggest how this vision may come to matter for lionscapes.

Methodology

This paper is part of a broader research project investigating the politics of the Cecil story. The research includes interviews with individuals closely involved in the Cecil event as well as a review of documents and media published about the Cecil story. Information from these data serves as background information to the conclusions drawn below. Initially inspired by event ethnography, we employed discourse analysis to examine the Cecil Summit. ³ Empirical data were gathered from video and document review as well as semi-structured interviews. Participation in the Cecil Summit was by invitation; thus, we did not attend the Cecil Summit in person, rather we analyzed two of the Cecil Summit's capstone, public sessions that were livestreamed and archived on YouTube by WildCRU. These sessions took place on the final day of the Summit and were titled Engagement with the Scientific Community and Public Outreach. We treated these videos as a “visual text” (Rutherford, 2011: xxiv). Further, we conducted document review of publications and news articles related to the Cecil Summit. These included scientific papers (e.g. Bauer et al., 2015) and conservation reports (e.g. Beyond Cecil: Africa's Lions in Crisis; Panthera et al., 2016) mentioned during the event as well as summaries (e.g. Saving Cecil: Agenda Analysis; Fair, 2016) and news articles about the event. Information gleaned from documents included the expressed purpose of the meeting and details about the threats faced by lions. Finally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with Cecil Summit participants. We reached out to 11 participants in the public sessions and conducted 7 interviews. Interviews were semi-structured, conducted over telephone, WhatsApp, or Skype, and lasted 34–80 minutes. Interview questions probed participants' understanding of the purpose of the Cecil Summit, their reactions to the event, as well as their interpretation of the vision. We have considered their insights throughout our analysis and integrated some quotations from interview transcripts. All quotes taken from these interviews are attributed to a pseudonym to protect the participants' anonymity.

Results from the video and document review and interviews were analyzed using discourse analysis which we define as the study of not just language (talk and text) but of human meaning-making more broadly (Wetherell et al., 2001). Our discourse analysis was attentive to not only language but also practices, embodiments, and images that altogether produced specific ways of thinking about and visioning lion conservation at the Cecil Summit (Rutherford, 2011; Taylor, 2015). The discourse was coded based on phrases related to our analytical framework (e.g. authority, vision). Initial coding passes revealed broad threads in the data (e.g. vision: securing space) and subsequent passes probed broad themes with greater specificity (e.g. how is lion decline problematized in terms of insecure space?).

The production of authority

Authority is central to governing conservation. According to Rutherford (2011: 190) “the claim to authority is powerful, shaping, in many ways, how environmental issues are imagined” and subsequently addressed. In this section, we examine the production of authority at the Cecil Summit as a first step toward understanding the vision for lion conservation, especially how the vision weaves logics of subject-making together with security and economics.

At the Cecil Summit, a particular actor—the expert—was authorized to save lions. Notably, white, male, elite individuals from the Global North predominantly occupied the position of expert. The two public panels, Engagement with the Scientific Community and Public Outreach, had five and nine panelists, respectively. ⁴ All panelists were men. In the former session, four panelists were white and one was black, while in the later session, seven panelists were white and two were black. The elite titles and affiliations of these men ranged from expert on lions living on the borders of parks to Minister of International Development of the United Kingdom. Observing these panels prompted us to question (a la Braun, 2002b): how did these experts (predominantly white, upper-class, male, from the Global North), emboldened as they were by the Cecil Moment, produce the authority to vision African lionscapes?

We take as an underlying premise that authority is neither given nor static. It is not inevitable that these experts possess the authority to vision lionscapes. According to Rose (1999: 27), “to govern … is to be condemned to seek authority for one's authority” and it appears that the Cecil Summit organizers were aware of the precarious and contested nature of authority to vision lionscapes. David Macdonald, in his introductory remarks to both sessions, was at pains to emphasize that that those at the summit were having a conversation rather than proposing a directive. He mused aloud:

Why do I say it is a conversation? What we have not been seeking to do is, in our ivory tower perched as angels on a pinhead, to come up some emphatic answer that we would deliver unilaterally to the world that waits agog. Rather, what we have been doing is talking amongst ourselves about ideas that might be helpful; ourselves includes people from the range states who actually live with lions, and whose communities and nations must make policies that we hope will reverse this dreadful trend.

First, authority of experts at the Cecil Summit was produced, in part, by scientific discourses of crisis and urgency. In the introduction to the Public Outreach session, for example, David Macdonald summarized the current state of scientific knowledge on African lions, citing statistics of population decline and range contraction. The statistics were drawn from a scientific paper (i.e. Bauer et al., 2015) recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and an image of the publication was projected on a screen as were maps of the African continent visually displaying the lion's contracting range. Macdonald characterized lion populations as “in a mess” and posited that “something needs to change, and radically, due to the horrific decline in lion numbers of the past three decades.” He then posed the question, “what has brought us to this state?”; a question to which the answer was supplied by a recently published audit of risks titled, Beyond Cecil: Africa's Lions In Crisis authored by Panthera et al. (2016). The cumulative effect of framing lion decline through scientific discourses of crisis and urgency is that it sets the stage for particularly located experts to narrate the cause of the problem and provide solutions. In this case, the experts invited to the space are those who authored the reports and presented the scientific evidence. In effect, the lion experts who authored the scientific reports authorize their own authority (Braun, 2002a).

The legitimacy of the scientific discourses of crisis and urgency relied heavily on the figure of the expert many of whom were described as being “in the room” at the Cecil Summit. Panelists and key audience members were introduced with prestigious titles and it appeared that lion experts are a small, tight network of individuals. Craig Packer, for instance, was introduced by David Macdonald in the following manner: “anyone who knows lions knows that there are some remarkable, distinguished lion biologists and Craig is the first among equals, he is a leader in this field.” Later in the Summit, Craig Packer returned the grandiloquent remarks: “David's group, WildCRU, is a world leading organization in bringing the best practice.” Our point here is not that these remarks are aggrandizing; Craig Packer is indeed a renowned lion biologist and WildCRU is a world-class conservation institution. Rather, our point is that repeating the elite status of participants functioned as a discursive strategy which reinforced the experts' claim to scientific authority.

Second, authority at the Cecil Summit was generated by particular representations of lions and rural Africans. Lions were discursively framed as “part of our common global heritage,” a representation which serves several crucial functions. Building on Braun (2002a), placing lions in the arena of the global suggests that lions belong to all citizens of the world flattening out differences in global citizenry in terms of space, race, class, and gender and erasing historical colonial relations. In turn, this justifies the intervention of whomever can function as the best steward of “our heritage” including actors outside the African continent and any claims to lions from particular groups can only enter the realm of conservation politics as special interests. At the Cecil Summit, this discursive move made community interests special interests in a political arena that is inherently global, rather than the other way around. Take, for instance, the fact that panelist Lovemore Sibanda (Zimbabwean PhD Candidate at Oxford) self-declared his role at the Summit with the following statement: “I am here to represent the communities who couldn't be here. I am carrying their voice, their message,” while other panelists retained their claims to global stewardship without locating themselves or situating their particular interests. Moreover, the abstraction of lions from their specific African political landscapes to the global scale is only possible if lions are understood as apolitical objects. Diverging from Neumann (2004) and Lunstrum (2014), then, who observed that elephants and rhinos are invited into an expanded human and national community through anti-poaching conservation discourse, lions through discourse at the Cecil Summit are at once brought into the expanded global community and are also objectified as belonging to humans as our common global heritage over which humans reside as stewards.

On the other hand, rural Africans were most often discursively framed as “poor” and “threat.” We saw the former articulation in the words of Craig Packer as he described the importance of dealing with poverty while addressing conservation challenges: “Around wildlife areas is rural Africa. And the poorest of the poor are the ones around the wildlife areas.” An example of the later framing comes from Amy Dickman (lion biologist): “as conservationists, we are terrified of the impending human population increase in Africa, we see it as a threat.” These representations also serve several functions. Notably, they justify intervention in the name of improving rural livelihoods. In this way, poor, rural Africans whose predominantly agricultural livelihoods are threats to conservation become opportunities upon which to intervene, benevolently.

Economic rationality was a third powerful discourse of truth at the Cecil Summit. Next to scientists, economists, or at least actors who privileged economic thinking were the second most prominent panelists at public sessions of the Summit. Economic rationality circulated ubiquitously. For example, lions were configured as “assets,” “goods,” and “endowments,” the symbolic value of which was said to be an incredibly powerful “sell” to the developed world that, through conservation, can safeguard a multitude of “natural capital” benefits for African states. It was said that local communities bear the costs of lions at the moment, and thus, the “cost:benefit ratio” of lion conservation is skewed. One of our initial reactions to the summit was, in fact, the degree to which the Summit focused on financing lion conservation. Why did economic rationality carry so much weight? At the Cecil Summit, economic rationality was presented as inevitable, rational, and fair. Panelist Achim Steiner (high-level intergovernmental policymaker), for instance, was particularly resolute about the need to rationalize lion conservation in economic terms, calling this “the brutal reality, unfortunately” and claiming that “the frontier between wildlife in an ecological, habitat sense and humans in their economic habitat is where conservation needs to define its points of intervention.” Moreover, economic rationality held sway because the experts linked economic rationality with fairness. Fairness, as defined at the summit, had two central components: (1) the wealthy should pay for lion conservation and (2) the poor should reap economic benefits from lion conservation.

Configuring lions as goods or assets in their ecological habitat, abstracting humans from their complex social, cultural, and political ties and relocating them in their “economic habitat,” and narrowing the definition of fairness into purely economic terms paves the way for particularly located experts—economists—to provide solutions and renders the problem of lion decline vastly simplified. Devoid of the messy, political dynamics of resource management and access, conservation fairness defined in purely economic terms is a much simpler lionscape on which to intervene.

The vision for lion conservation

With authority produced, albeit contingently, experts at the Cecil Summit were enabled to vision the future of lion conservation. The vision comprises three components of intervention into African lionscapes: secure space, mobilize capital, and foster subjects. In what follows, we explore how the problem of lion decline is diagnosed (problematization) and the processes through which these prescriptions come to fore (rendering governable) —questions central to a governmental analysis. Before proceeding with the analysis, it is important to note that what follows is an analysis of the stabilized, official vision for lion conservation presented as the outcome of Cecil Summit. Alternative perspectives were expressed though, as we will show, frequently subsumed by this vision. The subsuming or closing-off of divergent, at times contradictory perspectives, may be considered an inherent characteristic of consensus building in environmental knowledge production (Montana, 2017). On the other hand, some evidence suggests that this vision may have been somewhat predetermined. On 30 August 2016, one week before the Cecil Summit, WildCRU (2016b) posted a video to YouTube titled Cecil the lion: one year anniversary update which outlines priorities for lion conservation that are remarkably similar to those that emerged from the Cecil Summit. Moreover, one Cecil Summit participant described the “vanishing” of ideas generated remarking,

I was worried that what might be happening is that a group of us had been co-opted to give an impression of some sort of broader, participatory processes to what was really a kind of fairly well in-advance determined outcome.

Conclusion

This study provides new insight into the encounter between conservation, security, and the economy that currently preoccupies the political ecology of conservation. Much of the existing literature usefully illuminates the emergence of this encounter through the political economy, where capital is afforded a great deal of causal power—i.e. “selling green militarization” (Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016) and “accumulation by securitization” (Masse and Lunstrum, 2016). As we have shown, however, the vision for lion conservation articulated at the Cecil Summit illuminates a different dynamic. Here we see securitized lion conservation enabled by fostering lion-prideful subjects globally and locally. While our case study exposes the governmental logic active in lion conservation discourses, we imagine governmental logics are also at work in rhino and elephant conservation, which have thus far been the focus of securitized conservation literature.

Our analysis of the Cecil Summit's vision for lion conservation found that the overarching goal was to secure space for lions. Economic rationality was indeed central to enabling this securitized lion conservation, but security and economic logics alone are insufficient to explain this vision. Fostering good conservation subjects at the global scale was understood as a prerequisite for mobilizing the capital required to securitize conservation and producing good conservation subjects at the local scale was considered equally imperative to securitized conservation, whether the approach was community-based or fortress-inspired. In other words, with the problem of lion decline defined in terms of insecure space, saving the lion was understood as a matter of not only getting the economics of lions right (locally and globally) but also configuring the right subjectivities (locally and globally). Speaking back to the broader scholarly concerns, as the securitization of conservation extends toward lions, it brings with it, not just economic rationality but also governmental logic. Global and local subjectivities matter in the effort to secure the lion.

Moreover, the Cecil Summit reveals new actors shaping the security–economy–conservation encounter. Rather than actors tied to economic and security concern, it illuminates the roles of global actors tied to conservation concern; that is, experts from universities, NGOs, and global environmental governance institutions as well as a conservation philanthropist. That conservation actors have bought wholeheartedly into applying economic rationality to conservation is well documented (Dempsey, 2016). That actors tied to conservation concern have taken readily to the application of security logics to conservation is not as well known, but perhaps not surprising. Protecting space for species is a central postulate of conservation science (Soule, 1985), and thus, securing space is a mere extension of fundamental conservation logic. Notably, the conservation actors shaping this encounter at the Cecil Summit were particularly situated: predominantly white experts from the Global North many of whom were members of the transnational conservation elite (Holmes, 2011). Existing research has uncovered the white, Western, elite actors at the heart of neoliberal conservation (Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Dempsey, 2016; Holmes, 2011), securitized conservation (Buscher and Ramutsindela, 2016; Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016), and African conservation in general (Garland, 2008). The Cecil Summit reveals a reassertion of this geopolitical and racial order. Further, it shows these actors (still) stake their claim to authority over African environments via well-worn representations of African wildlife as global heritage and rural Africans as threatening to conservation goals.

Visioning a world in which lions can live wild lives is necessary and commendable; it also demands we think carefully about how this visioning occurs. Efforts to narrate and solve environmental crises like lion decline are always infused with relations of power and require selecting and validating specific forms of knowledge and representations of nature that always have the potential of marginalizing others. At the Cecil Summit, scientific and economic rationality as well as particular representations of lions and rural Africans positioned the white expert from the Global North as the authority to solve the problem of lion decline, a problem caused by the actions of rural African people, and a problem to be solved by leveraging financial support from the Global North to enforce laws upon them, pay them, and change their minds. In many ways, our concern about this vision for lion conservation echoes decades of political ecological research: global environmental politics too often directs our attention away from the structures of power driving crises like biodiversity loss and toward the poor. We find the reinscription of this pattern at the Cecil Summit particularly troubling because it completely shifts the politics of the Cecil Moment. While the Cecil Moment unleashed outrage over the practice of lion trophy hunting—a practice of the wealthy, Western, elite—the vision for lion conservation proposed the Cecil Summit (i.e. the Cecil Movement) will bring all that agency to bear on rural African landscapes, livelihoods, and identities.

On a final note about how this vision for lion conservation may come to matter, we find it pertinent to point out that the Cecil Summit appears to set the stage for future militarization of lion conservation; that is, “the use of military or paramilitary actors, techniques, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation” (Lunstrum, 2014: 817). Whether, in practice, securing space for lions takes the extreme, often violent, form of green militarization it is not possible to say; however, some signs are troubling. Cecil Summit participants who favored community-based and fortress conservation approaches alike suggested that “there is going to be a drift toward reinvigorating that sort of fortress-mentality” (Participant C), especially given that lion decline is “set to get worse” (WildCRU, 2016c). The projected rarity of lions is part of the rationale for increasing security measures in protected areas in the present and, if trends proceed as forecast, green militarization may follow. As Participant C stated:

we don't want to get to the same place tigers are in. There are only 3000-odd [tigers] left, and the only way to save tiger is through a quasi-military approach. It is lock-down for tigers… . Tigers are epitome of the requirement for fortress-mentality and for lions, if we are not careful, we are going to be there before we can blink our eyes.

Militarized approaches to conservation are deployed in circumstances where conservation articulates with particular discourses (Lunstrum, 2014; Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016). We argue that such a discursive context was established at the Cecil Summit. As we showed in our empirical analysis, lions were discursively framed as part of “our common global heritage” while rural Africans were framed as threating to lions. As Participant B stated, “it is all too often the case that … local people are seen as the enemy of lions.” Moreover, wealthy, lion-prideful individuals and states in the Global North were framed as the primary opportunity for lion conservation funding. Our concern is that collectively these discourses may, together with projected future lion decline, authorize the deployment of militarized lion conservation. If lions are read as belonging to the global community and rural Africans are the enemy of “our heritage,” these discourses could, in time, justify a war to protect the lion. Add to this the fact that there is an appetite in the Global North for extreme, violent measures to be taken against humans who threaten highly valued African wildlife (Buscher, 2016; de Greef, 2018; Lunstrum, 2017), it is possible that leveraging support for lion conservation from the Global North could further stimulate a militarized approach. Ample research suggests that militarized conservation can yield negative, often violent, consequences for local communities (and in turn for wildlife) which risks alienating the very people who need to be meaningfully and respectfully engaged in solutions (for overview, see Duffy et al., 2019). In fear of this end, we ally ourselves with those voices at the Cecil Summit who pointed to the dangers of placing particular knowledges on the margins. In the words of Joseph Mbaiwa (social scientist), “There is a need to recognize that local communities have traditional knowledge of how to conserve. You ignore it at your own peril.”