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

这项研究将是约旦自然保护区的第一个持续的地理研究，并将使用跨学科思维和非殖民化方法来检查资源政治，土著和后殖民国家形成之间的关系。由于全球资源匮乏，各国政府与土著群体之间围绕自然资源控制和管理的紧张关系日益加剧。现有文献经常将这些紧张关系简化为想要开发资源的国家和与资源有着传统生态关系的土著居民之间的简单二元对立。因此，这些紧张关系经常被描绘成土著和非土著的暴力对抗。本研究通过对约旦自然保护区的关注，为这些长期持有的假设带来了细微差别，以调查资源斗争如何在日常场所发生，并与后殖民国家形成、不同的社会历史和与资源的关系以及对土著的定位理解相关联。随着资源紧张局势的加剧，了解这些斗争发生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对资源的紧张关系是（后）殖民国家形成、对土著理解的争议以及根植于北美和欧洲模式的资源管理理念的结果。从地理上讲，该项目将重点放在约旦的自然保护区，主要有三个原因：这是一个未被充分研究的后殖民地区；它面临着日益严重的自然资源短缺，特别是水资源短缺；土著、资源和国家认同以复杂而有争议的方式纠缠在一起。在约旦的自然保护区，资源紧张不是开采石油等资源的暴力对抗，而是国家、非政府组织和贝都因人如何与资源联系和理解资源以及资源在国家认同形成中的作用的日常紧张。约旦自然资源的控制和管理与土地管理的殖民遗产以及后殖民国家形成的形成身份和控制跨境资源的斗争有关。约旦的自然保护区说明了土著身份如何被选择性地纳入自然保护区，以形成民族身份，而土著群体同时被从这些遗址中流离失所，他们与资源的关系被忽视。尽管整个中东地区的自然保护区不断增加，但很少有研究探索资源紧张与这些地区（后）殖民国家形成和土著性之间的独特联系。本研究将提供政治上紧迫的见解，通过将（后）殖民国家制定的这一具体实例与现有的土著和自然保护区探索进行对话，从而超越资源紧张的主导和二元框架，从而产生对土著、资源和后殖民国家形成之间关系的原始重新概念化。本研究从非殖民化的方法论角度出发，其中土著学者认为殖民主义和欧洲中心知识系统的持续存在部分是由于研究人员使用的方法。该项目将采用一种非殖民化的方法，将自然保护区官方国家叙述的文本分析与以贝都因人与资源关系为中心的参与性方法相结合。产出将与参与者共同生产，并在项目结束后使土著社区受益。这项研究将从根本上改变理解土著群体和国家之间资源紧张关系的方式，资源政治与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。

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.