Dr Tafadzwa Mushonga was in Durban from the 27 to 29 June 2023 to attend the bi-annual POLLEN Conference. POLLEN is the Political Ecology Network, an umbrella organization of political ecology researchers, groups, projects, networks and ‘nodes’ across the globe. POLLEN was founded in 2015 by a group of European ‘nodes’ and quickly became a global network. POLLEN seeks to provide a platform for the ‘cross-fertilization’ of ideas, where the world’s many rich, diverse traditions can come together, discuss, and debate the latest developments in the field.

Dr Mushonga, together with Prof Maano Ramutsindela and Prof Frank Matose from the University of Cape Town, and Esther Marijnen from Wagenigen University, launched their book The Violence of Conservation in Africa on 27 June 2023. The presentations generated intense interest and disucssion, with many in attendence concurring that the challenge of violence in conservation cuts across Africa and in similar patterns. There was also interest in continued thinking on alternatives to violence and the further research that is needed in this area. 

On 29 June 2023, Dr Mushonga was part of a roundtable discussion on Researching Green Militarisation: The Ethical, Political, and Emotional Challenges of Conducting Research on the Militarisation of Conservation. The session abstract indicated that:

As ‘green militarization’ (Lunstrum, 2014) research is increasingly developing into a sub-field of political ecology, with increasing number of students and researchers taking on the study of the entanglements between conservation, displacement, militarization, power, race and coloniality – it is a good moment to reflect specifically about what it means to research green militarization, the problems or contradictions researchers encounter when ‘studying-up’, and the methodological challenges people encounter during their research, alongside the legal/ethical issues they are faced with. We feel that although it has now been a decade of engagement on the topic which has led to the emergence of a relatively large body of scholarly work spanning across continents, the inter-personal experiences of the scholars’ everyday narratives have not yet found a place in this work.