Society of Scholars Cohort Archive

Green Wars: Conservation, Remilitarization, and Decolonizing Activism in Guatemala's Maya Forest

Green Wars is an ethnography of how Maya land activists challenge settler colonial conservation in Guatemala’s tropical forest. Bringing together political ecology and Indigenous Studies, I argue that the Guatemalan nation-state uses settler colonial logics of elimination, denying “local” indigenous rights by imagining their eventual disappearance with the concomitant ascendance of “global” conservation. Today, the fate of the Maya Forest hinges on the meaning and practices of protection for “protected areas.” In centering the role land-as-relationship in political ecology, the book imagines what the repatriation of land and life might look like in conservation practice that respects indigenous self-determination.