Dissertation Research: Manufacturing Peace: Conflict and Cooperation in an Indonesian Marine Park

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This dissertation project by an environmental anthropology student from the University of Washington will examine historical, social and political processes of conflict and cooperation within the management of Bunaken National Park, a marine protected area in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. In the past five years, intense opposition to the park has mounted, culminating in an uprising that occurred in January 2004. Through a detailed ethnographic analysis of this high profile, culturally and ecologically diverse marine park, this research explains how local people have articulated their responses to seascape transition and secondly, presents a detailed analysis of the ways that elites have represented these responses.Marine protected areas are now amongst the most common ocean conservation methods promoted throughout the tropics. However, conflict surrounds every facet of these projects, directly correlating with their high failure rate. This research seeks to illuminate political processes of this representation and local action by drawing substantially from resistance and social movement theories, focusing on peasant resistance to modernizing schemes, and political ecology theory, focusing on cooperation. Using qualitative and quantitative methods - ethnographic research combined with a household survey and document and archival analysis - it will extend theoretical frameworks developed to examine conflict to analyze cooperation in order to question taken-for-granted assumptions about marine conservation and the meaning and practice of marine conservation in the developing world. Broader impacts of the new knowledge created by this research involve helping marine policy makers to design more effective marine protected areas.