Pig Non Grata: Understanding Biopower, Necropolitics and Securitization of Nature through the ‘War on Boars’
Informations
- Funding country
Norway- Acronym
- -
- URL
- -
- Start date
- 1/1/2021
- End date
- 12/31/2025
- Budget
- 981,171 EUR
Fundings
| Name | Role | Start | End | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FRIHUMSAM - Independent Projects humaniora and social sciences | Grant | - | - | 981,171 EUR |
Abstract
The wild boar is a species of wildlife that is managing to thrive in a world where other large mammals tend to struggle and sometimes become extinct. The boar’s fast spread into Norway has earned it a place on the blacklist, making it an outlaw species to be contained at all costs. In this project, we explore the ‘war on boars’ across societal sectors. Capturing how various actors prepare for a wild boar invasion, including building preparedness plans for the mitigation of disease risks and threats to agriculture, enables our project to study a real-time process of biosecuritization. Biosecuritization refers to the protection of various forms of life against threats to this life. This means culling some forms of life, wild boar, to protect others, like public health, biodiversity and agricultural assemblages. We use interviews and participant observation of hunters, farmers, landowners and forest users to reveal bow biosecurity over wild boars is negotiated and implemented on the ground. Within this, we examine the technologies of control that wild boars invite at various levels of society, from fencing, zoning, quarantine, isolation and processing of meat to more outlandish proposals of immunocontraceptives. In the analysis, the wild boar is understood as a catalyst for changed human-nature relations, including how hunters and farmers adapt their traditional practices with biosecurity agendas. In a world in which we aim for the increased control of borders and the movement of life, what does the 'war on boar' tell us about future directions for nature conservation?