war and wildlife, the Clausewitz connectiond Wildlife, The Clausewitz Connection

War and wildlife:

the Clausewitz connection

JASPER HUMPHREYS AND M. L. R. SMITH

The militarization of wildlife protectionInvoking notions of force in the name of protecting the environment, and wildlife in particular, is intuitively unacceptable for many concerned analysts. Daniel Deudney argues that ‘for environmentalists to dress their programmes in the blood-soaked garments of the war system betrays their core values and creates confusion about the real tasks at hand’.1 But is this necessarily the case? We contend that such views are mistaken on intellectual, practical and moral grounds. In particular, such thinking, well intentioned though it might be, ignores pressing realities on the ground. We assert, by contrast, that appraising the thinking of the nineteenth-century Prussian philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz, could help us understand how some of the serious threats posed to endangered animal populations by war and political instability might be addressed.

Clausewitz argued that war is ‘an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will’, adding that ‘attached to force are certain self-imposed, imperceptible limita-tions hardly worth mentioning, known as international law and custom, but they scarcely weaken it’.2 Though Clausewitz plainly regarded these ‘imperceptible limitations’ as insignificant, in referring to them he touched upon a vital inter-face between the exertion of force to overcome an enemy and the myriad social and practical influences that in reality limit the scale of violence to a degree that enables the application of force, or threat of it, not only to be politically effica-cious but—just as importantly—to be perceived as proportionate and legitimate by those in whose name the act of force is carried out. In simple terms, we might suggest that Clausewitz was articulating the distinction between what we would call today ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power approaches towards the securing of political interests. In the context of his own time, Clausewitz unambiguously declared in favour of the latter, seeing the maximum application of force as inherently more logical than the introduction of moderation for its own sake: for ‘if one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand’.3

1 Daniel H. Deudney, ‘Environmental security: a critique’, in Daniel H. Deudney and Richard A. Matthew, eds, Contested grounds: security and conflict in the new environmental politics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), p. 214.

2 Carl von Clausewitz, On war, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 75.

3 Clausewitz, On war, pp. 75–6.

International Affairs 87:1 (2011) 121–142© 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Jasper Humphreys and M. L. R. Smith

122International Affairs 87: 1, 2011

Copyright © 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

War, however, is not necessarily an exercise in crude military might, and seeing it as such, as Clausewitz himself recognized, can lead to an inaccurate under-standing of the utility of force. General Rupert Smith noted that often there is a ‘deep and abiding confusion between deploying force and employing force. In many cases forces have been deployed and then force has not been employed’.4 Force—the exercise of physical coercion—can be understood in a variety of ways: as a revelation of strength and power, as an act of compulsion, or simply as the demonstration of influence. Though frequently considered synonymous with military power and organized violence, force is just one element of any strategy whenever there is a clash of wills and interests.

The use of force in the context of wildlife protection presents a unique strategic challenge in that one side of the conflict is defenceless against its human opponent, yet has to rely on the altruism of other humans for its protection. ‘Soft’ power approaches towards animal conservation predominate, notably in the form of international covenants on the protection of endangered species. Examples of ‘hard’ power protection are rare and usually spring from ancillary imperatives such as the need to protect species for the sake of tourism. Thus the forceful struggle to protect animal life is left to the more radical end of the conservation spectrum, such as the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd, whose passive–aggressive confrontations with Japanese whalers gain large audiences for the Whale Wars series on Animal Planet TV.5 Sea Shepherd’s opera-tions epitomize both the increasing militarization of conservation activities and the growing public support for such actions. Direct action of this kind gains widespread backing in part, as Sea Shepherd’s leader Paul Watson emphasizes, because his organization’s actions are intended to enforce international maritime law—one of Clausewitz’s imperceptible limitations—under the United Nations World Charter for Nature.6

The example of Sea Shepherd illustrates an evolving, and intriguing, develop-ment in international affairs, which is the capacity for self-generating resistance beyond the state in support of transnational laws and norms. Clausewitz, in fact, visualized a form of this phenomenon in his ‘Peoples in Arms’ idea, even while admitting that in his own time ‘this sort of warfare is not as yet very common’.7 But to make a more explicit connection between Clausewitzian ideas and the protection of animals requires an articulation of how threats to wildlife can be said to possess a distinctive identity within the web of international politics. Here it is possible to point in particular to the huge commercial incentives that revolve around ‘attacking’ and exploiting the natural resource base. In the worst instances, criminal enterprises operating beyond the law lead the way in the destruction of habitats and the specific targeting of sensitive wildlife in ways that have serious security implications to which responding with force is one logical option.

4 Rupert Smith, The utility of force: the art of war in the modern world (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 4.5 http://animal.discovery.com/tv/whale-wars, accessed 21 April 2010.6 Richard Grant, ‘Paul Watson: Sea Shepherd eco-warrior fighting to stop whaling and seal hunts’, Daily

Telegraph, 17 April 2009.7 Clausewitz, On war, p. 483.

War and wildlife: the Clausewitz connection



In the past, the notion of protecting species with force has been an issue where the ‘safety-catch’ has for the most part been left on. In recent years, however, there is growing evidence of a willingness to take it off. Wildlife charities now use their resources to train and equip game park rangers in several African countries to counter the sharp growth in poaching arising from the activities of increas-ingly sophisticated and violent criminal gangs. This support has seen the provi-sion of weapons, ammunition, barracks, vehicles and even light aircraft by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) for the Kenyan Wildlife Service, while the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has hired former British Army Special Air Service veterans to train game wardens in catching elephant poachers in the Gashaka National Park, Nigeria.8 According to Dominic Dyer of Care for the Wild International (CWI), sensitive animal populations

are being wiped out by poachers who are increasingly well equipped with automatic weapons, GPS satellites, night-vision kit and heat-seeking telescopes to spot animals at night. That means we also need a more robust approach to enforcement, so we are supplying kit, ranging from boots and clothing to night-vision goggles and military-style vehicles. We are also deploying armed escorts. Wardens need that kind of support to go up against people with machine guns and assault rifles.9

These developments have been fuelled by an increasing demand for wildlife products, especially from China. With ivory trading at over £1,000 per kilo and expanding markets for precious furs and animal organs, the long-term impact on sensitive animal populations has become very marked.10 Since 1979 the African elephant population has fallen from an estimated 1.3 million to under 400,000.11 The decline has been most dramatic in the past few years, which has seen the elephant population in the Zakouma National Park in Chad drop from 4,000 in 2006 to just 600 at the beginning of 2010. Elsewhere, the number of tigers in India reported across 23 game reserves registered a drop from 3,700 in 2002 to 1,400 in 2010.12 It is estimated that only about 4,200 black rhinos are left in the wild in Africa; in Asia the numbers are even lower, with just 370 Nepalese rhinos and a mere 130 surviving Javan rhinos.13

The growing militarization of wildlife protection also follows steep rises in the number of game wardens in Africa killed in gun battles with poaching gangs.14 For those states most affected, along with the wildlife organizations and charities that support them, the situation establishes a classically Clausewitzian escalatory dynamic in attempts to counter the activities of the poaching gangs. In the words

8 Jonathan Leake, ‘SAS veterans to join new war on poachers’, Sunday Times, 21 March 2010.9 Quoted in Leake, ‘SAS veterans to join new war on poachers’.10 Dominic Dyer, ‘Poaching is now greatest threat to endangered species’, Sunday Times, 21 March 2010.11 Leake, ‘SAS veterans to join new war on poachers’.12 Dyer, ‘Poaching is now greatest threat to endangered species’.13 Leake, ‘SAS veterans to join new war on poachers’. For an extensive and scientifically documented breakdown

of the rhino population see Tom Milliken, Richard H. Emslie and Bibhab Talukdar, African and Asian rhinoceroses: status, conservation and trade, report from the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN/SSC) African and Asian Rhino Specialist Groups and TRAFFIC to the CITES secretariat pursuant to Resolution Conf. 9.14 (Rev. CoP14) and Decision 14.89, 20 November 2009, pp. 1–18.

14 Milliken et al., African and Asian rhinoceroses.




of CWI’s Dominic Dyer, ‘We have to use force … and that means putting people into the field with the right training and military equipment.’15

A new moral imperative?

The increasing resort to force in wildlife protection originates not merely in a sense of desperation to save species on the verge of extinction, but in wider social and political ideas at work in the international system. As the Cold War ‘high politics’ of superpower summitry, détente and arms control have receded, problems of insurgency and ‘low politics’ that include interrelated ‘green’ issues linked to the environment, biodiversity, the global economy and population growth have grown in prominence. These developments chime with broader investigations into the sentience of animals and how this might confer increased responsibility on humans to protect them.16

These themes, in turn, resonate with reinterpretations of stewardship: just who is responsible for the management of the environment? Philosophers arguing against anthropomorphism—the attribution of human traits to non-human beings or inanimate objects—maintain that anthropomorphic understandings institutionalize the view that human life is innately superior to all other species, which are thus rendered dispensable, mere biological machines in the service of humans. Anti-anthropomorphism has gained currency since the 1960s, notably after the medieval historian Lynn White claimed that ‘the victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture’.17 The Church, it was held, had encouraged humans to regard themselves as superior to other species by its interpretation of stewardship as conferring on humans the right to exploit the earth’s resources for their own benefit.

Worldwide awareness about protecting wildlife has moved a long way since the first conservation treaty was signed in 1889 to regulate salmon fishing in the Rhine. Today there are eco-philosophers calling for ‘simian sovereignty’ in the form of ‘trust territories’ for apes, while the International Great Ape Project lobbies the United Nations for a Declaration on Great Apes to give certain species of primates the same moral recognition as humans in a ‘community of equals’ with rights to life, protection of individual liberty and the prohibition of torture.18 Philosoph-ical and ethical developments in understanding the place of animals—and indeed humans—within the biosphere has undoubtedly heightened the appreciation of human responsibilities for the protection of animals and the wider environment which they inhabit. These concerns have been reinforced by growing evidence

15 Dyer, ‘Poaching is now greatest threat to endangered species’.16 For the classic expositions see Mary Midgley, Animals and why they matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983),

and Peter Singer, ed., In defence of animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). More recent work includes Peter Singer, ed., In defence of animals: the second wave (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Marc Bekoff and Jennifer Pierce, Wild justice: the moral lives of animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jonathan Balcombe, Second nature: the inner lives of animals (London: Macmillan Science, 2010).

17 Lynn White, ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’, Science 155: 3767, 10 March 1967, p. 1205.18 White, ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’, pp. 1203–07. See also www.greatapeproject.org, accessed

8 Feb. 2010.




that many forms of wildlife are critically endangered by the human propensity for conflict with other humans.

Moreover, the earth’s richest areas of biodiversity lie in tropical and subtropical regions of developing states, many of which have been affected by conflict at one time or another. A report by the leading US-based charity Conservation Interna-tional (CI) showed that 80 per cent of the armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 occurred in areas it designates as ‘hotspots’, which are areas deemed to contain particularly diverse ranges of threatened species.19 According to CI’s president, Russell Mittermeier: ‘The fact that so many conflicts have occurred in areas of high diversity loss and natural resources degradation warrants much further inves-tigation as to the underlying causes and strongly highlights the importance of the areas for global security.’20

Given that a linkage between conflict and an adverse impact on wildlife can be demonstrated, it may be argued that conservation efforts register crucial connec-tions with issues related to sovereignty, statehood and the security arrangements within and around national borders. Out of this milieu arises a potentially new arena of international interventionism that takes its cue from the UN-endorsed ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) agenda and the principle of just cause in war, which, as Michael Walzer observes, springs from ‘the articulated norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles and recip-rocal arrangements that shape our judgement’.21

The prospects for interventionism

Estimates of the number of species disappearing globally vary, but one informed study suggests that the scale ranges between 10,000 and 25,000 a year. This equates roughly to the extinction of one species every 20 minutes.22 Some consider that this rate of destruction constitutes ‘ecocide’, or, as the Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood puts it, that the world is riding ‘the Eco-death Express’.23

One side of the attempt to combat the scale of decline involves ‘soft’ power diplomacy and the threat of sanctions aimed at protecting the environment through a range of treaties and international declarations. There is even a move to create a global environmental legal enforcement framework led by the Rome-

19 The notion of biological hotspots was formulated by the British ecologist Norman Myers with the intention of establishing global conservation priorities. See Norman Myers, ‘Threatened biotas: hotspots in tropical rain forests’, Environmentalist 8: 3, 1988, pp. 187–208.

20 Quoted in ‘Study finds most wars occur in earth’s richest biological regions’, press release, Conservation International, 20 Feb. 2009, http://www.conservation.org/newsroom/pressreleases/Pages/study_wars_occur_biodiversity_hotspots.aspx, accessed 8 April 2010.

21 Michael Walzer, Just and unjust wars: a moral argument with historical illustrations, 4th edn (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 44. On R2P see International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The responsibility to protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001). See also Report of the Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility (New York: UN General Assembly, 2004).

22 See Conservation International, ‘Ensuring species survival’, http://www.conservation.org/LEARN/BIODIVERSITY/SPECIES/Pages/overview.aspx, accessed 9 April 2010.

23 Margaret Atwood, ‘Act now to save our birds’, Guardian, 9 Jan. 2010.




based International Court of the Environment Foundation.24 The Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is the best-known example of ‘soft’ power protection. Established in 1973 and now with 175 signatories, CITES aims ‘to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival’.25 While CITES has attempted to construct an international consensus, its weakness is that it relies solely on goodwill and cooperation among signatories and lacks the means of enforcing compliance in the face of mounting and complex threats to animals, including some threats that did not exist and some animals that were unknown when CITES was originally established. The growing challenges presented to soft power approaches will be examined in more detail below with a study of the dilemmas faced by the WWF over the strategy to protect the endangered northern white rhino in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The ineffectiveness of international conventions is underlined by the fact that while international law has been applied to environmental disputes, such as the Trail smelter case between Canada and the United States in 1938,26 and in spite of the existence of a panoply of declarations in favour of environmental protection, no action has been taken against any actor for wilful environmental destruction.27 The lack of enforcement or collective intervention with respect to environmental damage, let alone to protect endangered species, would seem to support Clause-witz’s robust scepticism towards the limitations of international law.

Nevertheless, the idea of internationally coordinated ecological intervention has gathered adherents. Robyn Eckersley, for example, has offered a theoretical rather than prescriptive approach, pulling together the philosophical and practical strands regarding legitimacy and morality relating to the possibilities for ecological intervention. She was unafraid to explore freighted words like ‘ecocide’ and ‘speciesism’ (prejudice against non-humans because they are not humans) through various philosophical prisms (Kantian, utilitarian, communitarian), and to consider the subtleties of animal rights advocacy (animal liberation, biocen-tric and ecocentric) as well as international law. Ultimately, Eckersley posed the question: ‘Might the wilful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destruction be regarded as “crimes against nature” such as to support a new form of ecological intervention and an international environmental court? If the international community condemns genocide, might it one day be ready to condemn ecocide?’28

24 See http://www.icef-court.org/, accessed 17 March 2010.25 ‘What is CITES?’, http://www.cites.org/eng/disc/what.shtml, accessed 19 April 2010.26 Reports of International Arbitral Awards (Trail smelter case, United States, Canada), 16 April 1938 and 11

March 1941, vol. III, pp. 1905–82 (United Nations, 2006), http://untreaty.un.org/cod/riaa/cases/vol_III/1905–1982.pdf, accessed 26 Feb. 2010.

27 There was talk of prosecuting Saddam Hussein for the deliberate firing of Kuwait’s oilfields during the first Gulf War but this was never translated into action. See Aryeh Neir, ‘Putting Saddam Hussein on trial’, New York Review of Books 40: 15, 23 Sept. 1993; Tara Weinstein, ‘Prosecuting attacks that destroy the environment: environmental crimes or humanitarian atrocities?’, Georgetown Environmental Law Review 28: 4, Summer 2005, http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/international-law/950618-1.html, accessed 5 April 2010.

28 Robyn Eckersley, ‘Ecological intervention: prospects and limits’, Ethics and International Affairs 21: 3, Autumn 2007, p. 293.




Ecocide and resource wars

According to a number of studies the incidence of resource-based wars has been growing steadily. One UN report suggests that 18 of the 35 conflicts recorded since 2000 have been about or fuelled by issues to do with the exploitation and control of natural resources, as opposed to wars fought over issues of ideology or territorial security.29 Such wars are less clashes of interstate interests and more often civil wars within states, and are particularly prevalent in Africa.30

Clausewitz conceived war in its totality as a ‘paradoxical trinity’, ‘composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone’.31 He goes on to elaborate that these three elements of war comprise politics (usually a state government), which govern a social actor’s use of force; military power, exercised by an army; and collaboration between government and the people serving the state.32

A critique of the Clausewitzian view, albeit one built on shaky foundations, holds that this conception of war is redundant in areas where state power dissolves and power is wielded instead by actors such as drug barons and warlords.33 These new forms of power, it is maintained, give rise to a new typology of warfare that Mark Duffield has termed ‘network war’. ‘The new wars, as well as requiring the mobilization of networks to realize wealth and provision violence, are similarly concerned with restricting the effectiveness of other networks, taking them over or eliminating them altogether.’34 An important driver of network war is the control of extractable resources, of which wildlife is a major element. These conflicts work through and around states: the threat of interstate war as the primary security concern has been replaced by ‘the fear of underdevelopment as a source of conflict, criminalized activity and international instability’.35 In this regard, network war is a development of the ‘new wars’ thesis in that the causes and financing of such conflicts take place in an era of globally interconnected markets,36 ‘particularly those webs of illicit markets that have thrived in an era of greater communication and weaker regulation’.37

‘New wars’ theorists have detected an essentially contra-Clausewitzian, ‘apolitical’ character to such conflicts. Warlords are deemed to have no political 29 United Nations Environment Programme, ‘Disasters and conflicts’, http://www.unep.org/conflictsand

disasters/, accessed 28 Jan. 2010.30 See Charles Alao, The tragedy of endowment: natural resources and conflict in Africa (Rochester, NY: University of

Rochester Press, 2007).31 Clausewitz, On war, p. 89.32 Clausewitz, On war, p. 89.33 An extreme version of this thinking is provided in Robert D. Kaplan’s dystopian The coming anarchy: shattering

the dreams of the post Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001); see also Martin Van Creveld, The transformation of war (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

34 Mark Duffield, Global governance and the new wars: the merging of development and security (London: Zed, 2001), p. 190.

35 Duffield, Global governance and the new wars, p. 7.36 See Mary Kaldor, New and old wars: organised violence in a global era (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).37 Christopher Cramer, Civil war is not a stupid thing: accounting for violence in developing countries (London: Hurst,

2006), p. 76.




programme and to employ violence to accumulate wealth for its own sake, devel-oping inherently despotic and kleptocratic elites. Although this view captures something of the essence of resource wars, the new wars thesis is based on an elementary misreading of Clausewitz’s ideas.38 In particular, it misses the impor-tance of Clausewitz’s key understanding that all war derives from political circum-stances: ‘War is an instrument of policy. It must necessarily bear the character of policy and measure by its standards.’39 Thus, when substate groups aggregate polit-ical power by force through the accumulation of wealth, even though the process defies the conventional notion of politics as some sort of ideological struggle it is still deeply political and invariably results in the emergence of a quasi-state apparatus, the influence of which is often restricted to urban concentrations and dominated by criminal plunder, with limited jurisdiction over its subjects, and minimal or non-existent supply of welfare and social services to the population. These are different kinds of wars, and a different kind of politics drives them.

Isabelle Duyvesteyn demonstrates the relevance of Clausewitz’s ‘paradoxical trinity’ in relation to resource wars in Africa, showing that the participants in these wars pursue their political agendas through violence in order to increase their power by whatever means necessary at the expense of time-consuming state-building, using force with ‘brutalising terror, plumbing the depths of depravity’. In so doing, new forms of rule and authority are created.40 In other words, ‘the state’ merely becomes a conduit for booty for these elite groups. The politics of criminally directed looting can have significantly adverse effects on wildlife as plunder and wealth accumulation take precedence over the preservation of the environment.41 The crucial question that arises is: how should the effects of these wars be mitigated? In the absence of viable state institutions or coordinated intervention from other states this unenviable task often falls to non-govern-mental organizations (NGOs), either those sponsored by multinational bodies or individual charities.

The dilemmas of the NGO mandate

One of the more relevant contentions of the ‘new wars’ thesis is that sovereignty is being eroded not just by the collapsing authority of failed or failing states in the aftermath of the Cold War but also by the increasing power of supranational actors, ranging from transnational corporations and alliances like NATO through entities like the European Union and the UN to an array of international agree-

38 For a discussion see M. L. R. Smith, ‘Strategy in an age of “low intensity” warfare: why Clausewitz is still more relevant than his critics’, in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom, eds, Rethinking the nature of war (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 28–64.

39 Clausewitz, On war, p. 610.40 Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Clausewitz and African wars: politics and strategy in Liberia and Somalia (London: Frank Cass,

2005), p. 6.41 This is a process that can occur irrespective of whether a situation of civil strife exists. For example, the

Madagascan government of former disc jockey Andry Rajoelina has been accused of encouraging the ‘timber mafia’ so that it can reap a percentage of export tax on hardwood sales, a policy that has had disastrous effects on the sensitive habitats that support the native lemur population. See David Smith, ‘Madagascar lemurs in danger from political turmoil and “timber mafia”’, Guardian, 17 Nov. 2009.




ments, norms and associations, including NGOs. Jessica Tuchman Mathews even identified a ‘power shift’ from state to non-state actors, arguing that NGOs had the ‘power to push around even the largest of governments’.42 As we shall see, this is not actually true.

In reality, NGOs are constrained by physical and self-imposed limitations. Poten-tially, the more prominent and well-endowed NGOs can weaken the capacity of developing states to manage their own societies. More commonly, though, NGOs assist state power by helping to consolidate central authority, thereby helping to secure sovereignty over both territorial borders and the resources they contain. Yet there are several areas of contention in the NGO mandate, including, first, how far they can, or should, intrude on sovereignty, and second, whether they have an independent mandate to use force in the name of conservation, especially in places where state authority barely exists.

Wildlife forms part of the natural resource base of the state. The principle of permanent sovereignty, as enshrined in the UN Charter, is regarded as a basic right of self-determination, and provides for exclusive control of the resources within state boundaries.43 The issue of sovereignty, however, becomes particu-larly fraught in resource-rich areas. Wildlife parks and reserves are themselves often located in areas possessing abundant mineral wealth—oil, diamonds, timber products and coltan, for example. These areas invariably become sites of conflict, which rapidly erodes any concern for conservation,44 not least because the remote terrain often shelters the armed groups along with the wildlife. Consequently, in conditions of conflict territorial boundaries, whether belonging to a state, a park, a reserve or a protected area, are rendered meaningless, further facilitating the exploitation of wildlife. Nor, given the commercial opportunities involved, is such activity necessarily confined to non-state gangs or guerrilla groups. A South African commission, appointed by Nelson Mandela in 1989, alleged that the South African army had organized the smuggling of wildlife products, principally ivory and rhino horn, on a massive scale during its incursions into Angola and Namibia in the 1970s and 1980s.45

Since the end of the Second World War there have been an estimated 160 wars. Fifty-two active conflicts in 42 countries were recorded for 1993, 34 in 1995 and 27 in 1999. It is calculated that during the 1990s there were three times as many ongoing wars than at any time in the 1950s and twice as many as at any point during the 1960s.46 As the predominant face of war has increasingly exhibited an intrastate character, involving political factions and ethnic groups, the resulting mass migrations of refugees come to share a common need with the military forces

42 Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ‘Power shift’, Foreign Affairs 76: 1, Jan.–Feb. 1997, p. 53.43 Franz Perrez, ‘The relationship between permanent sovereignty and the obligation not to cause transboundary

environmental damage’, Environmental Law 26: 4, 1996, p. 1207.44 See e.g. Charles Alao, ‘Diamonds are forever … but so are controversies: diamonds and the actors in Sierra

Leon’s civil war’, Civil Wars 2: 3, 1999, pp. 43–64.45 ‘Pretoria inquiry confirms secret battle for the rhino’, Independent, 18 Jan. 1996. It should be noted that these

allegations are contested.46 See Paul Collier, Economic causes of civil conflict and their implications for policy (Washington DC: World Bank,

2000).




that oppress them, namely to survive off the land, with devastating effects on wildlife and wider ecosystems. During Rwanda’s civil war nearly 50 per cent of the country’s 7 million people were displaced into camps along the eastern regions of the Congo. Of these, approximately 860,000 refugees settled around the Virunga National Park, home of the mountain gorilla, with another 330,000 camped in the Kahuzi Biega National Park, the only home of the Grauer’s gorilla.47

The scale and the continuing aftermath of wars such as that in Rwanda exacts a massive environmental price that inevitably leads to further problems, such as illegal logging and the expansion of the ‘bushmeat’ trade, as well as the supply of ‘luxury commodities’ like ivory and rhino horn. Taken together with the illegal trade in live species, the combined wildlife trade is estimated to be worth $10 billion a year—the third biggest market in illicit goods after those in drugs and guns.48

There are many other commercial and social factors that are exerting unprec-edented pressure on wildlife. These include overpopulation and changing migra-tion patterns, which result in massive loss of habitat.49 Moreover, with the growing influence of China in the developing world comes a heightened scramble for resources along with different cultural attitudes to the natural world.50 The Chinese policy of offering soft loans channelled through Eximbank and the secre-tive China International Fund,51 which provides aid with no political strings, has enabled it to discreetly ‘invade’ the continent, extracting raw materials on a vast scale to fuel its burgeoning economy.52 China’s involvement in the process of resource exploitation brings with it an enticement for local people to poach and trade wildlife. The decision by CITES in 2008 to allow a limited trade in ivory in response to Chinese pressure has been blamed for an increase in poaching in eastern and southern Africa.53

With prices soaring so that, for example, a rhino horn may fetch $250,000,54 the illegal wildlife trade presents high-reward/low-risk opportunities for poachers, especially given exceptionally weak enforcement regimes. Despite being signa-tories to a raft of treaties and agreements, many countries do not live up to their obligations, whether through inertia, lack of money or corruption. The cumula-tive impact of these political, economic and social forces is one of unrelenting pressure on sensitive wildlife. Governments and wildlife charities have begun to react to the challenge in ways that have sought to bring an element of coercive

47 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda crisis, 1959–94: history of a genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 31.

48 Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking, ‘Illegal wildlife trade’, http://www.cawtglobal.org/wildlife-crime/, accessed 14 April 2010.

49 See World Wildlife Fund, ‘Treading softly on a fragile earth’, WWF-UK Annual Review, 2004/2005, p. 13, http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/annualreview04–05.pdf, accessed 17 April 2010.

50 ‘Shopping habits of China’s suddenly wealthy’, Financial Times, 21 Aug. 2010.51 On Eximbank see ‘Chinese bank defends record in Africa’, Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2010.52 See John Garnaut, ‘State or mate? Who’s behind China fund’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 March 2010.53 Paul Eccleston, ‘China allowed to buy ivory from Africa’, Daily Telegraph, 15 July 2008.54 Jeremy Hance, ‘In the midst of poaching crisis illegal rhino horn tops gold’, Mongabay.com, 25 Nov. 2009, at

http://news.mongabay.com/2009/1126-hance_rhino_gold.html, accessed 14 April 2010. This report recorded that a kilo of horn was fetching $60,000. If this is multiplied by the average horn weight of 3–5 kilos it gives a mean figure of around $250,000 per horn.




pressure to bear in order to curb the worst excesses of the illegal killing of endan-gered species. Two case-studies examined below illustrate some of the methods that have been tested in the field to date. As will be shown, these initiatives have met with varying degrees of success. Efforts at coercive conservation are employed by organizations very much as a last resort and often in appallingly difficult condi-tions—none more so than the first case to be evaluated, that of the attempt to defend the white rhinos of the Congo.

Case-study 1: soft power—the protection of the northern white rhino

Garamba National Park is one of five parks and reserves in the DRC that are designated World Heritage Sites. The park was founded in 1938 and is located in the north-eastern corner of the country. It once held significant populations of savannah animals including giraffes and elephants. Further, it is the last bastion of the northern white rhino, for some years listed as ‘critically endangered’ on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.55 Estimates of the numbers of white rhino in Garamba have hovered precariously from 1986 to 2004 at between 13 and 22.56

In the late 1980s the WWF combined its efforts with those of other interna-tional groups to develop and restore the park.57 According to the study under-taken by Deborah Avant, the plan was ‘designed as a holistic attempt to integrate wildlife and human uses of the natural resources Garamba offers’:

the project combined the provision of essential services (health care, water and food supplies) and education to the local community with efforts to improve anti-poaching (including reconnaissance flights, airstrips, roads, river crossings, and observation posts). It provided new vehicles, HF (high frequency) walkie-talkie radios, computers, guard uniforms, patrol rations, and solar energy equipment in the anticipation that these would ensure effective patrols, and offered bonuses (salary support) to staff.58

Initially, this ‘hands-off ’ approach, working in conjunction with and supporting the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN), proved successful and the park was revived by the early 1990s. However, the ICCN struggled in the face of economic and political collapse following the genocide in Rwanda, along with the spillover effects of the longstanding civil wars in southern Sudan and in Uganda. Thousands of refugees, along with guerrilla groups from Sudan, partici-pated in a sustained poaching campaign orchestrated by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Avant records that the ‘park guards in Garamba were no match 55 ‘Rhinos on the rise in Africa but northern white nears extinction’, http://www.iucn.org/knowledge/

news/?1146/Rhinos-on-the-rise-in-Africa-but-Northern-white-nears-extinction, accessed 14 March 2010.56 See Kes Hillman-Smith, Mankoto ma Oyisenzo and Fraser Smith, ‘A last chance to save the northern white

rhino’, Oryx: International Journal of Conservation 20: 1, Jan. 1986, pp. 20–26; ‘White rhino numbers “halved”’, BBC News, 6 Aug. 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3542060.stm, accessed 16 March 2010.

57 Deborah Avant, ‘Conserving nature in the state of nature: tragic choice for INGO policy makers’, paper presented at the meeting of the Structure and Organization of Government Research Committee of the International Political Science Association, George Washington University, Washington DC, 22–24 May 2003, pp. 5–6, http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/4/4/9/pages64495/p64495–1.php, accessed 27 March 2010.

58 Avant, ‘Conserving nature in the state of nature’, p. 7.




for the numbers of refugees and military capacity of the guerilla fighters. More elephants and buffalo fell to poachers and the number of armed contacts between park guards and poachers grew.’ For several years after 1993 there were numerous shoot-outs between rangers and poachers, resulting in deaths and injuries among the park’s staff.59

In 1994 the International Rhino Foundation (IRF) joined forces with the WWF to help administer Garamba, but two years later the DRC itself collapsed into full-scale civil war, with troops and guerrillas from all sides invading the park, forcing the rangers to leave, which in turn resulted in the further slaughter of wildlife.60 By 1997 the WWF was faced with a difficult choice. Garamba was now taking up 60 per cent of its rhino budget: could it afford to carry on, or would the money be better used elsewhere? The WWF reviewed its options, one being to employ private security companies to mount armed patrols and train local guards, which to some seemed like the only way of stopping the poaching. But was it right for a wildlife charity to initiate an armed approach? Moreover, there was the issue of impinging on the DRC’s sovereignty by assuming a role that was more properly the function of the central government (even if that government had for all practical purposes ceased to function). Other questions arose: what might be the rules of engagement? Would it be right to shoot poachers, some of who were starving refugees, who used only crude nooses and snares to capture the animals?61

The ‘tragic choice’, as Avant termed the WWF’s dilemma, prefaced all the problems confronting conservation organizations in the years ahead over the dilemmas and limitations of resorting to force:

While hiring mercenaries was appalling and violated both an intrinsic anti-militarism many felt and the explicit purpose of a non-governmental organization to act within its mandate to advocate conservation but not to replace the government, the thought that the organization would preside over the extinction of a species—an explicit violation of its mission—was equally unspeakable.62

After delaying any decision, in 2000 the WWF handed over full control of the park to the IRF. Five years later a well-rehearsed plan to transfer five rhinos to Kenya was vetoed by Congolese politicians, who used the long-neglected rhino as a convenient nationalist vote-catcher, a decision that effectively signed the rhinos’ death warrants.63

Around the same time heavily armed poachers appeared on horseback from over the Sudanese border, slaughtering elephants and using mule-trains to trans-port the ivory.64 A further setback occurred on 9 January 2009 when the park’s

59 Avant, ‘Conserving nature in the state of nature’, p. 7.60 A WWF aerial survey in July 1997 recorded the presence of 49 poacher camps, along with 1 rhino, 29

elephants, 24 buffaloes, and 16 hippos listed as killed: WWF, press release, ‘New Congo in great need of help to save endangered species,’ 25 July 1997, wysiwyg://18/http://www.panda.org/news/press/news_140.htm, cited in Avant, ‘Conserving the state of nature in nature’, p. 9.

61 See The African bushmeat trade: a recipe for extinction (Cambridge: Ape Alliance, 1998), pp. 12–32, 40.62 Avant, ‘Conserving nature in the state of nature’, p. 9.63 Marc Lacey, ‘War and politics threaten Congo’s endangered rhinos’, New York Times, 28 March 2005.64 ‘Garamba park under attack!’, press release, International Elephant Foundation, 13 July 2004, http://www.

elephantconservation.org/downloads/news/1/PR_GNP.pdf, accessed 18 April 2010.




administrative centre was destroyed after the combined forces of the Ugandan, DRC and Rwandan armies attacked the Lord’s Resistance Army militia, which was camped in the park. Ten people were killed in the ensuing fighting, mostly rangers and members of their families.65

Since 2010 Garamba Park has been administered by African Parks, a Johannesburg-based company that ‘manages parks in public–private partnerships with governments on a long-term basis, by combining world class conservation practice with business expertise’.66 However, the damage caused by the turmoil of the preceding years appears already to have been done. A survey in 2008 failed to locate any trace of the white rhino.67 According to Martin Brooks of the IUCN Species Survival Commission African Rhino Specialist Group, ‘Unless [these] animals are found during the intensive surveys that are planned under the direction of the African Parks Foundation, the subspecies may be doomed to extinction.’68

Saving species: the challenge to sovereignty

The dilemmas of the soft power option in conditions of war and civil strife of the kind that faced the WWF in the Congo raises a fundamental question: is the international community prepared to stand by and allow the massacre of rare species? Just as the wars in Bosnia and Rwanda compelled commentators to ask how far collective action could go to intervene in states with the aim of ‘saving strangers’ from massacre and genocide,69 so the idea of ‘saving species’ requires similar consideration. A former director-general of the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), Major-General Peter Davies, says: ‘Intervention of any sort is not popular after Iraq and Afghanistan. Realistically I can’t see any country invading on behalf of animals.’70 Robyn Eckersley concurs, but suggests attitudes are changing.71 Some commentators, such as Lynton Caldwell, argue that nothing less than ‘a second Copernican revolution’ is taking place: ‘The first revolution removed the Earth from the centre of the Universe; the second removes humanity from the centre of the biosphere.’72 If attitudes are changing about the centrality of humans in the environment, then a discussion naturally follows about the extent to which traditional notions of state sovereignty can be transgressed in the name of protecting wildlife.

The sorry history of the northern white rhino in Garamba Park brought to the fore the issues connected with sovereignty, intervention and the defence of

65 ‘Garamba National Park (DRC) attacked by LRA rebels’, World Heritage UNESCO News, 7 Jan. 2009, http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/479, accessed 17 April 2010.

66 African Parks Network, http://www.african-parks.org/apffoundation/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=71, accessed 28 March 2010.

67 Milliken et al., African and Asian rhinoceroses, p. 3.68 Quoted in ‘Rhino numbers at record levels … but rare white rhino feared extinct’, Daily Mail, 17 June 2008.69 Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving strangers: humanitarian intervention in international society (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003).70 Interview with authors, 5 Jan. 2010.71 Eckersley, ‘Ecological intervention’, pp. 311–12.72 Lynton Caldwell, International environmental policy: from the twentieth to the twenty-first century (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 1996), p. 578.




wildlife. In the case of Garamba, the prospect of hiring a private security firm split the WWF: those ‘on the ground’ were in favour, while those working at a distance, for example in offices in Nairobi, were against. The debate also highlighted an area of tension within the conservation community between the ‘developers’ and the ‘protectors’. ‘Protectors’ argued that in the absence of government security inaction would be disastrous and therefore all potential avenues for action should be explored. ‘Developers’ saw the insertion of an armed unit as a decision for governments and not for any wildlife charity, and felt that assuming a security role would go beyond the bounds of legitimate action set out in its mandate.73

The UN Charter enshrines the principle of sovereign equality of all its members and clearly forbids any state to use or threaten force against ‘the territo-rial integrity or political independence of any state’, except in cases of individual or collective self-defence against armed attack under UN Charter Articles 2(4) and 51.74 Though environmental and conservation issues were not covered in the original Charter, the General Assembly and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) have developed a range of important environmental decla-rations and treaties over the last four decades. The 1992 Rio Declaration, for example, announced that ‘peace, development and environmental protection are interdependent and indivisible’,75 and Eckersley noted that the then British Prime Minister, John Major, speaking as president of the Security Council, declared that ‘non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields have become threats to peace and security’.76

Furthermore, out of the original ‘Responsibility to Protect’ study in 2001 an embryonic principle was developed which asserted that states have an obligation to protect their citizens: moreover, in the face of any systematic failure to safeguard the population in conditions of gross human rights violations ‘the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect’.77 After a surge of early enthusiasm, R2P has faded from view in the light of western inter-ventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but nonetheless the process of debate and aware-ness has edged along.

So, would it be inconsistent with UN authorizations for intervention in states for humanitarian reasons if similar action were sanctioned to save a highly endan-gered animal? As we have shown in the case of the northern rhino, its extinction was guaranteed by the vociferous last-minute interference by self-serving Congo-lese politicians, and thus a prima facie case for international action might have been established.

While wildlife has been traditionally understood to form part of the natural resources of a country and therefore to be subject to the sovereignty and self-determination of the state, as codified in the UN Resolution on Permanent

73 See Avant, ‘Conserving nature in the state of nature’, pp. 16–20.74 UN Charter, Chapter 1: ‘Purposes and Principles’, 26 June, 1945, article 2(4).75 UN Environment Programme, ‘Rio Declaration on Environment and Development’, http://www.unep.org/

Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163, accessed 12 April 2010.76 Quoted in Eckersley, ‘Ecological intervention’, p. 299.77 ICISS, The responsibility to protect (1), B.




Sovereignty over Natural Resources in 1962,78 putative modifications to the sover-eignty principle have been taking place. The 1972 Stockholm Declaration and 1992 Rio Declaration have signified changing attitudes as to what is acceptable environ-mental behaviour.79 In theory, the Rio Declaration could permit the Security Council to authorize military intervention under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, as Major’s speech intimated.80

Now that international support can be found for certain standards of human decency, the idea of intervention on behalf of threatened wildlife is potentially more viable. As Eckersley states, there is a mood ‘to develop new policies and laws that enable the mutual flourishing of the human and non-human world rather than the flourishing of humans at the expense of the non-human world’.81

Laws, covenants and international goodwill are one thing, but giving practical meaning to these positive values ultimately requires enforcement on the ground. The willingness to acknowledge the status of the non-human world has, as we have observed, led to increased public acceptance of tough measures to protect wildlife, whether in the form of support for the activities of groups like Sea Shepherd, or the readiness of conservation charities to train and equip park rangers in paramili-tary techniques, even to the extent of contracting private military companies to oversee such work. These developments have at various times crystallized into state-directed military intervention to defend wildlife. It is here that we examine our second brief case-study, relating to the use of ‘hard power’ to stop the killing of elephants in Botswana.

Case-study 2: hard power—the curbing of elephant poaching in Botswana

The 1980s witnessed a huge rise in professionalized poaching over eastern and southern Africa. Well-armed criminal gangs took advantage of regional conflict and instability to boost sales of ivory and rhino horn to the Persian Gulf and Far East. So serious did the problem of elephant hunting become that in Botswana the country’s armed forces (the Botswana Defence Forces or BDF) were given an explicit mission to protect the country’s wildlife. The mission stemmed from

78 The declaration grants ‘recognition of the inalienable right of States to dispose of their natural resources in accordance with their national interests’. See ‘Official documents: permanent sovereignty over natural resources—resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly at its 1194th plenary meeting’, American Journal of International Law 57: 3, July 1963, p. 710.

79 Principle 4 of the Stockholm Declaration states: ‘Man has a special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat, which are now gravely imperilled by a combination of adverse factors. Nature conservation, including wildlife, must therefore receive importance in planning for economic development.’ Declaration of the United Nations conference on the human environment, June 1972, at http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?documentid=97&articleid=1503, accessed 17 April 2010.

80 Principle 24 of the Rio Declaration states: ‘Warfare is inherently destructive of sustainable development. States shall therefore respect international law providing protection for the environment in times of armed conflict and cooperate in its further development, as necessary.’ Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, June 1992, http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?documentid=78&articleid=1163, accessed 17 April 2010.

81 Eckersley, ‘Ecological intervention’, p. 307.




the desire to protect the country’s internal security from the destabilizing effects of well-organized foreign criminal poaching gangs, as well from a concern to safeguard the wildlife tourism industry, a substantial revenue earner in a country where 17 per cent of the territory is designated either as national park land or as conservation areas.82

The plan to employ the BDF to counter poaching activities sprang from the initiative of their deputy commander at the time, now the country’s president, Sandhurst-educated Major-General Ian Khama, a keen conservationist who had become exasperated at the ineffectiveness of the police and the department of wildlife in tackling the deepening crisis.83 The involvement of the armed forces in conservation efforts was a matter of some controversy: not only did it provide the BDF with an explicit internal security mandate, but some Botswanan politicians argued that the anti-poaching move merely pandered to the privileged concerns of westerners, perpetuating a supposedly colonialist mentality. But Khama’s force of character drove through the policy.

The BDF began its first anti-poaching operations in northern Botswana in October 1987, deploying a specialized commando squadron to hunt down the poaching gangs, some of which numbered as many as thirty. These gangs were skilled at bushcraft and heavily armed with automatic weapons. According to the authoritative study by Dan Henk of the Air University in Alabama, the BDF evolved an effective counter-poaching strategy utilizing small-unit foot patrols of skilled trackers from Botswana’s hunter-gatherer society backed up by helicopter-borne rapid reaction forces.84 ‘Within months’, Henk wrote, ‘dozens of poachers had been killed or captured, and the amount of poaching began to fall off dramatically.’85

The Botswanan anti-poaching effort was characterized by good organization and well-trained troops. In the mid-1990s the theatre of operations was expanded towards the country’s southern and western borders, with up to 10 per cent of the BDF, some 800 troops, being committed to the operation. By 2004 the number permanently engaged on anti-poaching duties stabilized at around 300–400 personnel, and by this stage the operation had developed a successful intelligence network to track down the gangs, along with effective inter-agency cooperation involving the police and other elements of the bureaucracy.86 Henk points out that the BDF’s anti-poaching role was readily accepted by society at large, this acquiescence arising from a widespread desire for public order that provided the government with considerable latitude to crack down on poachers with hard military power.87

82 Nature Worldwide: National Parks and Nature Reserves World Institute for Conservation and Environment, ‘The national parks and nature reserves of Botswana’, http://www.nationalparks-worldwide.info/botswana.htm, accessed 21 April 2010.

83 Dan Henk, ‘Biodiversity and the military in Botswana’, Armed Forces and Society 32: 2, Jan. 2006, pp. 278–9. See also Lethoglie Lucas, ‘Botswana’s new high flyer’, BBC News, 2 April 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7325400.stm, accessed 23 April 2010.

84 Henk, ‘Biodiversity and the military in Botswana’, p. 280.85 Henk, ‘Biodiversity and the military in Botswana’, p. 279.86 Henk, ‘Biodiversity and the military in Botswana’, pp. 279–81.87 Henk, ‘Biodiversity and the military in Botswana’, p. 284.




This use of the Botswanan armed forces illustrates what can be achieved with sustained commitment and effective organization. Undoubtedly this has influ-enced evolving anti-poaching operations elsewhere, as other military and paramil-itary forces in Africa take the lead in similar operations. In 2009, a year that saw 84 rhinos killed across the country, the South African authorities set up a special anti-rhino-poaching investigation unit, while the armed forces started patrolling the porous border between Mozambique and the Kruger National Park tourist ‘hotspot’ where numerous rhinos have been slaughtered.88 In Kenya in 2009 the poaching of endangered species hit new levels, with twelve black rhinos and six white rhinos being reported killed. Kenya has 27 national parks managed by the Kenya Wildlife Service. Its ranger department is now run on paramilitary lines: rangers are armed, wear uniform, and employ spotter planes and infrared cameras. Between 1999 and 2007 42 Kenyan rangers were killed in clashes with poachers until the current director, Julius Kipng’etich, ordered a crackdown and increased ranger recruitment. ‘It’s a deadly war. We shoot to kill and last year got five poachers,’ he said.89 In war, unfortunately, hard power solutions are usually the only truly effective ones.

No voice, no choice

The discussion presented in this article has been concerned with exploring Clause-witz’s views on war in order to engender a debate about the utility of force in conservation. The debate highlights how humanity struggles, intellectually and morally, when trying to articulate a comprehensive relationship with the rest of the planet’s ecology. It also illustrates a particular paradox. On the one hand, the concern for animal conservation springs directly from secular liberal thought, where the principle of universal human rights is now progressively broadening into animal rights. Yet, on the other hand, this conservation agenda clashes with emphatic notions of sovereignty and self-interest in a way that directly confronts a post-colonial guilt complex that is itself a product of western liberal thinking. From this paradox a number of controversial, even incendiary, implications follow. We shall not seek to hide from these contentious issues but deal with them directly.

The most controversial implication that might be seen as underlying the conservation agenda is exemplified by the difference between the two case-studies cited. Botswana is an example of a strong, functioning state. Where an effective government has control over the means of destruction it can secure the territory of endangered wildlife and physically defend the animals. This, of course, is the template that provides physical security for humans as well. Botswana was thus able to utilize the military instrument to destroy the poaching gangs.

The DRC, by contrast, is a failed state with almost no civil institutions capable of offering protection to wildlife. In the absence of workable governmental 88 International Rhino Foundation, ‘New unit to rescue rhinos in South Africa’, 7 Oct. 2009, http://www.

rhinos-irf.org/en/art/737/, accessed 23 April 2010.89 Cassandra Jardine, ‘The very human values that saved the rhino’, Daily Telegraph, 15 Jan. 2010.




structures, external intervention through the activities of animal charities is the only way to help protect endangered species. But here is the rub: the DRC is far more typical of the contemporary African state than is Botswana. In the DRC, as in much of Africa, the state has turned pathological and the rudiments of govern-ance are used as a means of exploitation and the enrichment of small elites, with no vestige of a social contract with the rest of the population.90

Investigating the possibilities of using force to protect wildlife, then, unavoid-ably confronts the paradox embodied in bien pensant western social ethics that asserts an increasing desire to defend animals but recoils from confronting the failure of post-colonial arrangements in Africa, where much of the species degra-dation takes place. Moreover, the message potentially communicated by the heightened interest in conservation is that the welfare and protection of animals are more important to westerners than the welfare and protection of Africans, who have been left to suffer and die in their millions as a result of war, famine and underdevelopment. Many Africans see the white westerners they encounter—the safari tourists—as more obviously interested in, and more concerned about, the animals than the local human population, which sets up an uneasy, if unspoken, tension in conservation efforts. It is this tension that accounts for the initial resist-ance from Botswanan politicians Ian Khama experienced with his plans to tackle elephant poaching,91 and it certainly explains the way in which the WWF tore itself apart over how best to respond to the crisis over the northern white rhino.

So, what is this tension exactly? Let us be blunt. It is the sense that conservation is the harbinger of a sublimated racism that places a concern for animals above the lives of black Africans. We can be equally forthright in responding. Five reasons can be put forward to refute any such charge and, more significantly, to convey where the true moral imperative to protect animals resides.

First, the concern for animal conservation and welfare is not confined to what is happening in Africa. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Conservationists and animal welfarists, whether they are individuals or organizations, often demon-strate similar levels of commitment to issues that arise within developed countries. One needs only to note the campaign against the innate cruelty of killing foxes for pleasure in debates over foxhunting in the United Kingdom in recent years to illustrate the point.

Second, as the examples, among others, of Ian Khama in Botswana and Julius Kipng’etich in Kenya demonstrate, the desire and the feeling of obligation to protect endangered animals are not confined to privileged westerners.

Third, that so much human and animal suffering is caused by state failure should be a cause for alarm wherever it occurs and signifies that conservation and humani-tarian concerns are, or certainly should be, explicitly linked. If intervention to protect animals is countenanced then it should be countenanced wherever humans are endangered as well.

90 See R. J. Rummel, Death by government (New York: Transaction, 1994). We are grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this point.

91 See Henk, ‘Biodiversity and the military in Botswana’, pp. 278–9. See also Lucas, ‘Botwana’s new high flyer’.




Fourth, animals do inhabit a different moral category from humans. As a conse-quence of the advanced development of their consciousness humans are able to exert a measure of control over their surroundings. If we accept the logic of Darwinian thinking that humans are not at the centre of some divine plan, then a responsibility to defend animals clearly arises out of the human capacity for sympathy for beings, be they human or non-human, weaker and less advantaged than ourselves (sympathy, according to Charles Darwin, being one of the noblest virtues with which humans are endowed).92 Lacking the capacity to understand the human world, animals cannot, unlike even the most distressed of human souls, choose to flee a war zone. Even if that choice is only to escape to a squalid refugee camp, it is still a choice. Animals are, thereby, the ultimate victims, and the moral imperative to protect becomes paramount, because in war, as in so many other areas of their engagement with humans, animals have no voice, and therefore they have no choice.

A fifth and final reason is that the collision of social forces related to animal, humanitarian and environmental concerns is already having an effect and presaging further change. It is happening all around us, and we had all better get used to it. Charles Darwin himself, as ever, was prescient in his observation that the exten-sion of ‘humanity to the lower animals’ is a ‘virtue’ that while ‘honoured and practised by some few men’ is likely to spread ‘through instruction and example to the young’ until it eventually ‘becomes incorporated in public opinion’.93 The point is that where some organizations may remain reticent and conflicted about their obligations to intervene to protect animals, others will act to fill the void in line with evolving public sentiment. These forces are likely to be more robust in their approach, less tortured by guilt complexes, and less concerned with feelgood posturing. Here, the example of Sea Shepherd’s Paul Watson is instructive. Watson himself was a founder member of the Greenpeace environmental organization, but was expelled because he was considered a violent extremist. According to the journalist Richard Grant, during an anti-whaling mission in 2008, filmed by the Discovery Channel, the ‘dramatic tension comes from watching his amateurish, incompetent, bickering crew make an incredible, agonising series of blunders. You watch it on the edge of your seat, shaking your head and clasping it from time to time, waiting to see what will go wrong next and if it will get someone killed.’ Yet, Grant continued:

Ultimately a kind of tragic absurdity shines through the whole enterprise. Greenpeace went down to Antarctica too. Its volunteers held up their signs and took pictures as whales were slaughtered all around them. When the Sea Shepherds finally arrived, the whaling stopped because the Japanese were too busy defending themselves or running away. For all their bungling, Watson and crew did succeed in saving the lives of some 500 whales.94

92 Charles Darwin, The descent of man (London: John Murray, 1871), p. 96.93 Darwin, The descent of man, p. 96.94 Grant, ‘Paul Watson’.




Conclusion: Clausewitz and conservation

Wildlife conservation stands at a major crossroads, with a growing number of species confronting extinction as they face overwhelming economic and social pressures that lead to habitat loss and the relentless hunting of animals for commer-cial gain. There is now a realization in conservation circles that drastic measures are required. One solution is to relocate threatened species either to zoos or to other parts of the world where they are less threatened.95 Just as assisted migra-tion of species has emerged out of heightened necessity, so does the use of force to protect wildlife, as this study has endeavoured to argue.

But where does this ‘necessity’ come from? Why should we seek to protect endangered animals? The environmental law expert Philippe Sands suggests there are three reasons why we should be concerned to promote conservation: first, because the environment is a source of biological resources; second, because it maintains conditions that support life on earth; and third, because ‘biodiversity is worth maintaining for non-scientific reasons of ethical and aesthetic value’.96

Western social ethics would seem now to recognize the inherent virtue of these three imperatives, and consequently conservation efforts are placed higher on an evolving policy agenda. Though environmental and wildlife conservation did not greatly concern those drafting the UN Charter, the UN has fostered a range of treaties, declarations and initiatives over the last four decades, starting with the establishment of the UN Environment Programme in 1972 and continuing with CITES and the 1992 Rio Declaration, which recognized that ‘peace, development and environmental protection are interdependent and indivisible’ (principle 25).

Although there are plenty of legal instruments and international conventions in relation to the protection of wildlife, legal enforcement rests with local judicial structures that are often fragile or non-existent. Armed conflicts in many parts of the world today are often battles over the creation and control of new economic space. The fighting, be it over trade routes or natural resources, is often illicit in nature and its participants are rarely constrained by the web of international laws and norms, meaning that conventional conservation organizations struggle to confront the dangers to sensitive animal populations with soft power solutions in areas where state power and corresponding civil institutions are weak.

Clausewitz’s warnings about the weakness of legal constraints suggest that ‘hard’ power is the only realistic answer to wildlife protection in many parts of the world. Yet, as we have shown, the notion of ‘fighting’ to protect wildlife sits on the horns of a philosophical dilemma. On the one hand, the urge to defend wildlife through force springs from the liberal tendency, principally in western society, to conserve the natural environment, and enjoys much popular support. Indeed, as John Vogler notes, as political discourse increasingly securitizes the environment, people ‘will be tempted to stretch traditional definitions of security’ in accordance

95 ‘Conservation news’, Oryx, July 2010, p. 323.96 Philippe Sands, Principles of international environmental law: frameworks, standards and implementation (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 369.




with the evolution of the cultural and moral values that motivate the public.97 But on the other hand, the conservation agenda places heavy demands upon altruism which ultimately clash with established notions of sovereignty and self-interest.

As this analysis has argued, the destruction of wildlife is not a naturally occur-ring activity but reflects political circumstances arising from a concerted effort towards resource extraction, which confirms the Clausewitzian maxim that ‘war is a continuation of politics by other means’. For Clausewitz, force was a fact of life, which he had observed at first hand, while war’s purpose was to achieve an outcome that met political objectives. Clausewitz prefigured ‘network war’ with his idea of the ‘people in arms’, noting the emerging phenomenon of non-state guerrilla fighters taking up arms for their own cause. While he did not live long enough to explore the implications of his insight for state sovereignty, Clausewitz had realized that it was not only the state that could effectively employ force. Rupert Smith has perhaps come closest to completing the Clausewitzian chain of reasoning implicit in the idea of ‘people in arms’, when observing not only that the modern battlefield has shifted to ‘war amongst the people’, but also that the purposes of war have changed from clear objectives of interstate war to objectives that relate directly to the interests of individuals or groups within the state, or indeed, in the case of animal defence organizations, beyond the state.98 In other words, the increasing militarization of wildlife protection by non-state organiza-tions like animal charities and the self-generating resistance of groups like Sea Shepherd that take it upon themselves to physically defend animal populations are classic manifestations of Clausewitzian imperatives.

Fundamentally, the exercise of force in the context of wildlife protection can be readily understood within the parameters of Clausewitzian thought. At the end of the first chapter of On war, Clausewitz introduced the ‘wondrous trinity’, which explains the essence of force. This trinity, like the Christian trinity, is really three autonomous elements united in one, arising out of the constant interplay of popular passions, chance and reason. From the perspective of conserving wildlife the trinity can be seen to relate to the motivations of both the resource extractors and the resource protectors (passion); to the contingent intervention by either side that produces clashes between extractors and protectors (chance); and to the objectives of the controlling end-user of the exploited resource, or the myriad conservation groups, states and charities that seek to counter those actors intent on wildlife and environmental degradation (reason).

Therefore the thinking of Carl von Clausewitz, as we have argued throughout this study, provides an effective framework in which to view current trends in wildlife protection. Furthermore, Clausewitz’s aphorism about war and politics can also provide guidance about the best strategy to adopt towards wildlife conser-vation. In book six of On war, he weighs up the theoretical advantages and disad-vantages of defence versus attack, concluding that defence is the easier form of war, but with the weaker motive, conducted in order to preserve the agents of force.

97 John Vogler, The global commons: environmental and technological governance (New York: Wiley, 2000), p. 366.98 Smith, The utility of force, p. 17.




Ultimately, defence will not achieve the positive aim of victory, which guarantees the attainment of the political ends sought; for this, attack is usually necessary: ‘A war in which victories were used only defensively without the intention of counter-attacking would be as absurd as a battle in which the principle of absolute defence—passivity, that is—were to dictate every action.’99 Despite the reserva-tions of some analysts, and the seeming incongruity of summoning a philosopher of war in the name of threatened species, Clausewitz’s thinking about war and politics is both practically and morally relevant to the conservation of wildlife.

99 Clausewitz, On war, p. 358.