The WildCRU Forum on Conservation Geopolitics: developing conversations across disciplines

The aim of this conference is to spark a scholarly and practically-minded conversation around Conservation Geopolitics – how it shapes global trends that threaten wildlife, and how it might work as a site of intervention for conservation futures.

Wildlife is threatened by challenges that are global in scale. These challenges are influenced by geopolitical relationships between countries, and their multiple, sometimes conflicting but often overlapping interests. Understanding and addressing the role of geopolitics in wildlife conservation requires diverse forms of expertise. 

The forum will assemble leading figures from multiple disciplines, alongside conservation practitioners and policymakers, early career researchers and civil society groups. Through an innovative mix of plenary sessions, specialist paper sessions, workshops, agenda-setting processes and forum sessions, it will develop a conversation that transcends disciplinary boundaries. 

We will invite papers and posters on the theme of Conservation Geopolitics from fields including (but not limited to) conservation science, international relations, law, development studies, environmental economics, tourism studies, political science, political ecology, human geography, anthropology, environmental humanities, and conservation ethics. We encourage both applied and critical interventions. We aim to facilitate a broad conversation.

More information, including opening of the Call for Papers, registration details, and the plenary speakers will be released during the Summer of 2018.

This Conference is supported by the Kadas Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford and the Wildlife Conservation Unit of the University of Oxford. A limited number of travel bursaries will be available for practitioners and/or students attending from overseeas.