The Elevation of Protection: Civil Unrest and Biodiversity Conservation in Liberia
UW Ingraham Hall 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin
media release: Every Wednesday at noon — since 1973! — UW African Studies Program faculty, students, and community members have gathered for AFRICA AT NOON, a one-hour weekly lecture series bringing diverse African research from scholars around the world to a campus and community audience.
You can view available recordings of past Africa at Noon speakers here and on the event page as well.
Liberia holds the largest remnant of the Upper Guinean Forest Ecosystem of West Africa and was once the only country on the African mainland covered entirely by forests. Consequently, Liberia’s forests, noted for their biodiversity richness, have become a global conservation priority of international NGOs. How did the preservation of Liberia’s high forest cover come to be? The history of forest conservation in Liberia is not a simple story of an “enlightened” government favoring conservation over extraction.
In 1953, more than a century after independence, Liberia passed its first legislation specifically targeting the management of the country’s forested landscape. Until then, the forest was regarded as untamed frontier territory, and traditional rulers managed it locally. The law marked a decisive shift, bringing forests under the Liberian state’s authority and linking its management to state-building, economic development, and territorial control. Despite sustained international pressure from international organizations, particularly the IUCN and WWF, for the stricter protection of various forested areas, passage of a law that established Sapo National Park, the first protected area in Liberia, took thirty years and happened by military decree. In 2003, the East Nimba Nature Reserve was added as Liberia’s second protected area; at the same time, a bill was passed committing 30% of the country’s forest estate to conservation. Since then, Liberia has added three new protected areas and designated 11 more sites for protection.
The protection of Liberia’s forests remarkably happened over the course of a military coup in 1980 and a brutal civil war from 1989 to 2003 that destroyed the fabric of the country’s institutions. Centralized forest governance collapsed, turning forested areas into battlegrounds that warring factions fought over and plundered to sustain their campaigns of violence, but also a site of refuge and survival for the displaced local population. Conflict reconfigured relations among people, territory, and authority. Forests became sites of hustles for survival. In this talk, I argue that conflict has generally benefited biodiversity conservation as a forest management strategy in Liberia. I show how periods of unrest have enabled (inter)national conservation actors to advance conservation as the logical option to safeguard the forest, often to the detriment of local communities.
Speaker’s Bio
Shadrach Kerwillain is a Liberian conservation biologist whose interests and training in environmental and natural resource management span the biological and social sciences and the humanities. A graduate of the University of Liberia, where he developed his passion for biology, Shadrach earned a Master of Philosophy in conservation leadership from the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. As an ERC Researcher, Shadrach recently completed his doctorate in Environment and Society at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His historical political ecology research on Liberia’s forests examined how the valuation of these spaces has changed over time. With more than a decade of experience as a conservation practitioner in Liberia, Shadrach is committed to finding practical solutions that advance environmental sustainability that works for local people in biodiversity-rich spaces. He has taught conservation biology at the University of Liberia and mentors many young Liberians aiming for careers in natural resource management.
This event is sponsored by the Department of History, UW-Madison.
The event is free and open to the public.
