The violence of involuntary resettlement and emerging resistance in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park: The role of physical and social infrastructure

Abstract

Nature conservation turns violent when it leads to enclosure, dispossession and militarisation, causing suffering among people living in the environment that is to be protected. Resettlement projects are meant to facilitate the process of repossession for dispossessed people as the proponents promise improved housing and physical infrastructure outside the protected area. While scholarly attention has been paid to the violence of dispossession, little is known about the ways in which the post-resettlement built environment turns violent for displaced people as well as people remaining in the protected area. Drawing on field research on water infrastructure in two resettlement villages in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP), this paper analyses how the violence of resettlement is entrenched in the material, ecological and political framework that shapes the resettlement project. It pays particular attention to the process by which the resettled citizens struggle with the everyday sufferings in their new built environment in order to expose how physical infrastructure and the lack thereof led to new social infrastructure, which have enabled the remaining park residents’ resistance against resettlement. The emerging resistance indicates the urgent need to pay attention to the built environment expanding outside the conservation area in order to address the violence of resettlement as well as to pursue nature conservation itself.