A cultural politics of nature reserves: resource tensions, state-formation, and indigenous Bedouin

自然保护区的文化政治：资源紧张、国家形成和土著贝都因人

• 批准号: ES/W003376/2
• 负责人: Olivia Mason
• 金额: $ 9.98万
• 依托单位: Northumbria University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FW003376%2F2
• 关键词: cultural; politics; nature; reserves; resource

This research will be the first sustained geographical study of nature reserves in Jordan and will use interdisciplinary thinking and decolonising methodologies to examine the relationships between resource politics, indigeneity, and postcolonial state formation. Global resource scarcity has seen increasing tensions between states and indigenous groups over the control and management of natural resources. Existing literature often reduces these tensions to simple binaries between states which want to exploit resources and indigenous populations who have traditional, ecological relationships with resources. These tensions are therefore often portrayed as violent indigenous and non-indigenous confrontations. This research brings nuance to these long-held assumptions through a focus on nature reserves in Jordan to investigate how resource struggles occur in everyday sites and are connected to postcolonial state formation, differing social histories and relationships with resources and situated understandings of indigeneity. With resource tensions predicted to increase it is important to understand the everyday spaces in which these struggles occur. By focusing on nature reserves in Jordan, I hypothesise that tensions between states and indigenous populations over resources are the result of (post)colonial state formation, contested understandings of indigeneity, and ideas of resource management rooted in North American and European models.Geographically, this project focuses on nature reserves in Jordan for three primary reasons: it is an understudied postcolonial location; it faces growing natural resource scarcity, especially water scarcity; and indigeneity, resources and national identity are entangled in complex and contested ways. In nature reserves in Jordan, resource tensions are not violent confrontations over extraction of resources such as oil, but instead everyday tensions over how states, NGOs, and Bedouin relate to and understand resources, alongside their role in national identity formation. The control and management of natural resources in Jordan is connected to colonial legacies of land management and the struggles of forming identity and controlling transborder resources as a result of postcolonial state formation. Nature reserves in Jordan illustrate how indigenous identities are selectively incorporated into nature reserves to forge national identity, while indigenous groups are simultaneously displaced from these sites and their relationships with resources ignored. Despite the rise in nature reserves throughout the Middle East remarkably few studies have explored the unique ways resource tensions are connected to (post)colonial state formation and indigeneity in these sites. This research will provide politically urgent insights that move beyond dominant and binary framings of resource tensions by putting this specific instance of (post)colonial state making into dialogue with existing explorations of indigeneity and nature reserves to produce an original re-conceptualisation of the relationships between indigeneity, resources, and postcolonial state formation.This research is taken from a decolonial methodological perspective in which indigenous scholars argue the persistence of colonialism and Eurocentric knowledge systems is in part due to the methods used by researchers. This project will employ a decolonial methodological approach by combining textual analysis of official state narratives of nature reserves with participatory methods that centre Bedouin relationships with resources. The outputs will be co-produced with participants and benefit indigenous communities beyond the end of the project. This research will fundamentally alter the way in which resource tensions between indigenous groups and the state are understood, the links between resource politics and postcolonialism, and the everyday spaces in which these tensions emerge.

这项研究将是约旦第一次对自然保护区进行持续的地理研究，并将使用跨学科思维和非殖民化方法来研究资源政治、土著和后殖民国家形成之间的关系。由于全球资源稀缺，各州和土著群体之间在自然资源控制和管理方面的紧张关系日益加剧。现有的文献往往将这些紧张关系简化为想要开发资源的国家和与资源有传统生态关系的土著人口之间的简单二进制。因此，这些紧张局势常常被描述为暴力的土著和非土著对抗。这项研究通过对约旦自然保护区的关注，对这些长期持有的假设带来了细微的差别，以调查资源斗争如何发生在日常地点，并与后殖民国家的形成、不同的社会历史和与资源的关系以及对土著的情景理解联系在一起。随着资源紧张预计将加剧，了解发生这些斗争的日常空间是很重要的。通过关注约旦的自然保护区，我假设国家和土著居民之间在资源问题上的紧张关系是(后)殖民国家形成、对土著的有争议的理解以及植根于北美和欧洲模式的资源管理思想的结果。从地理上讲，这个项目关注约旦的自然保护区有三个主要原因：它是一个未被充分研究的后殖民位置；它面临着日益严重的自然资源稀缺，特别是水资源短缺；以及土著、资源和国家认同以复杂和有争议的方式相互交织。在约旦的自然保护区，资源紧张不是围绕石油等资源开采的暴力对抗，而是关于国家、非政府组织和贝都因人如何与资源联系和理解以及它们在国家认同形成中的作用的日常紧张局势。约旦自然资源的控制和管理与土地管理的殖民遗产以及由于后殖民国家的形成而形成特性和控制跨界资源的斗争有关。约旦的自然保护区说明了如何有选择地将土著身份纳入自然保护区，以打造国家身份，而土著群体同时被赶出这些地点，他们与资源的关系被忽视。尽管整个中东的自然保护区在增加，但很少有研究探索资源紧张与这些地方的(后)殖民国家形成和土著特性有关的独特方式。这项研究将提供超越资源紧张的主导和二元框架的政治上紧迫的见解，将这一(后)殖民国家形成的具体实例与现有的土著和自然保护区的探索进行对话，以产生对土著、资源和后殖民国家形成之间关系的原创性重新概念化。这项研究是从去殖民主义的方法论角度进行的，土著学者认为殖民主义和以欧洲为中心的知识体系的持续存在在一定程度上是由于研究人员使用的方法。该项目将采用非殖民主义方法，将自然保护区官方国家叙述的文字分析与以贝都因人与资源的关系为中心的参与性方法结合起来。这些产出将与参与者共同制作，并在项目结束后惠及土著社区。这项研究将从根本上改变对土著群体和国家之间资源紧张关系的理解方式，改变资源政治和后殖民主义之间的联系，以及这些紧张关系出现的日常空间。