Environmental journalist @NatGeo, @NYT, @bbc etc. Global Fellow @ The Wilson Center, Fellow @ Center for Climate & Security
published on New Security Beat on Jan 31, 2023
Egypt’s Gebel Elba National Park is, by all accounts, a spectacular place. But it better be to justify the fuss it takes to visit. First you have to apply for a permit. If that’s approved (and almost none have been in recent years), you need to travel with an approved tour operator. Even then, you must be accompanied by police at all times.
As an isolated, sparsely populated stretch of mountain and desert in a country where most rural travel beyond the Nile valley is heavily regulated, Gebel Elba likely wouldn’t be easy to access, no matter where it was in Egypt. But tucked as it is in the Halayeb Triangle (which is also claimed by neighboring Sudan and over which the two countries have nearly come to blows in the past), Gebel Elba isn’t a place where authorities welcome outsiders. Among environmentalists, it’s almost a given that the welfare of the park’s rare wildlife––and the tight restrictions that have ostensibly been rolled out for its benefit––are simply a handy pretext to keep most visitors at bay.
When peacebuilders talk of conservation in contentious territories, they often invoke cross-border ““peace parks”––and with good reason. Governments and civil society groups have created scores of these border-spanning projects from South America to southern Africa, most of which have strong, if sometimes controversial, track records of dousing inter-state tensions. How, the reasoning goes, are you squabble about issues like mineral extraction when that land is committed by mutual consent to flora and fauna? The concept has only gone from strength to strength in recent decades, with the number of “groups of adjoining protected areas” along borders tripling between 1988 and 2001 alone, according to the World Commission on Protected Areas.
But alongside these emblems of fraternal environmentalism, there’s a big and growing cohort of unilaterally imposed protected areas in frontier areas as well. And some of these have a darker, or at least less cooperative, side. Keen to assert sovereignty over threatened or disputed frontier territories (or territories that they deem to be threatened), many states have transformed parts of their peripheries into tightly controlled parkland. The consequences have been predictably messy in places, fueling a securitization of conservation, while frequently delivering little ecological good for troubled natural landscapes.
This instrumentalization of protected areas is a truly global practice, with examples from Kashmir to the DRC. On the India-Bangladesh border, for instance, both sides of the Sundarbans mangrove forest are (theoretically) accessible only with a permit—a consequence, in part, of Indian fears over cross-border people trafficking through the densely carpeted inland waterways.
But the tetchier the region, the more this tactic appears to have been deployed. It’s in and around the frequently unsettled Middle East where states appear to have turned to protected area designation as security device more than anywhere else.
Among many regional examples, Israel has created multiple national parks in East Jerusalem that human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, say are designed to restrict the expansion of Palestinian neighborhoods. Kurdish activists insist that protected areas––and a number of dams––in southeastern Turkey have been planned in such a way as to constrain PKK fighters’ movement to and from their bases in nearby northern Iraq. Armed militants will surely stand out among local picknickers and Gore-Tex-clad day-trippers.
In one of the more acute illustrations of the sensitivities associated with these frontier parks, some of Iran’s top wildlife biologists have been languishing in prison since early 2018 accused of espionage. Their work monitoring endangered big cats in remote protected areas appears to have contributed to security services’ undue suspicions––despite clear evidence of their environmental bona fides and the absurdity of the charges.
Ironically, at least some of these precariously placed frontier parks may be as much a statement of disregard for the environment as they are a celebration of it. Unconvinced of the merits of conservation but keen to project a green image, myriad states have fashioned “paper” parks with minimal upkeep and little genuine protection in secluded corners of their countries. The thinking seems to be that if you’re going to “waste” land or render it “unproductive,” the very least you can do is sign away peripheral areas with poor logistics and consequently uncertain agricultural or industrial potential.
The team behind Iraq’s faltering Halgurd-Sakran National Park along the Iranian border suspect that their project would never have gotten off the ground had anyone else coveted the park’s mountainous, mine-riddled land, much of which is periodically bombarded by the Turkish and Iranian militaries.
Yet, in the hands of largely authoritarian regimes (and those confronted by them), there’s frequently little doubt about the rationale behind some of their protected borderlands. As in Egypt, these areas and their resident wildlife provide useful grounds to regulate the entrance and movement of people whose presence governments seldom welcome in sensitive border areas. In the Pacific, where Chinese and other fishing fleets frequently breach island nations’ sprawling exclusive economic zones, the rollout of massive new marine protected areas (MPAs) and creation of military bases near potential flashpoints has given ill-equipped states additional tools to police activity in far flung waters.
In the Aegean, Greece has added contested islets to the EU’s Natura 2000 environmental scheme. Researcher Stefanos Levidis suggests that Athens did so partly to signal control over these uninhabited rocks—and perhaps to advertise a utility of sorts in the face of Turkish counter claims. Even in the event of invasion, protected area status can be of potential use. There’s nothing quite like an army marauding through wildlife-heavy areas to arouse international condemnation, as seen in some coverage of conflicts in places like South Sudan––though that did Armenia little good when Azerbaijani artillery repeatedly struck its Shikahogh state reserve in 2020.
This phenomenon could be seen as a largely victimless ploy, a gambit that accords at least nominal protection to ecologically significant areas that might otherwise go without any safeguards. If nothing else, parkland as a security measure is surely preferable to the mines and massive military presences that characterize many other tense border areas. But there’s a truly dangerous flipside to this. The securitization of these parks can bleed into the securitization of protected areas in general. For example, Egypt displays much the same aversion to untrammeled citizen access in its other protected areas as it does in the contested Halayeb Triangle. That has seemingly exacerbated widespread public detachment from nature.
Worst yet perhaps, frontier parks can also make tense relations with neighbors all the more likely. These protected areas, with their inaccessibility and other constraints, often limit cross-border interaction and hence cultural exchange. Experts point out that that can be precisely the point. Protected areas in peripheral parts have often been established as inward-looking expressions of sovereignty as much as outward-facing ones. By forging clear boundaries, “they’re great buffers between, in the colonial context, us and the natives,” Larry Swatuk says. Think of these as the anti-peace parks.