Political Geography 83 (2020) 102251 0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Conservation as counterinsurgency: A case of ceasefre in a rebel forest in southeast Myanmar Kevin M. Woods a, * , Jared Naimark b a Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’i at M¯ anoa, 2424 Maile Way, Saunders Hall, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA b Independent Scholar, USA ABSTRACT We demonstrate how international conservation practices in a rebel forest during ceasefre are shaped by and contribute to legacies of racialized political violence. Nature conservation has been shown in some cases to be implemented by armed forces and directly contribute to acts of “green violence” and the makings of “green war”. Less explored in the critical conservation literature, and the focus of our study, are the ways in which conservation projects can also be implicated in the continuation of counterinsurgency through “softer” non-militarized means. Based on ethnographic feld research, interviews, and document analysis conducted by both authors, we present a feld case study from the lowland forests of Tanintharyi Region in southeast Myanmar. The proposed Lenya National Park falls within territory contested by an ethnic Karen rebel group, who have been under a tenuous ceasefre since 2012 but who have not yet reached a political settlement to end armed confict. We fnd that the mapping of Lenya during ceasefre by foreign conservationists legitimizes past forced displacements of Karen civilians by the Myanmar military during decades of war, and impedes the potential return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their customary lands now zoned for the park. Conservationists working to establish the park invoke and build upon racialized discourses of Karen forest dwellers as criminals, frst as dangerous rebel supporters, and now as forest destroyers. The ceasefre has also opened up political space for Karen leaders to challenge the making of state forests, who envision an alternative model of community-led conservation based on indigenous rights. 1. Introduction In the rebel-controlled forests in southeast Myanmar (Burma), biodiversity conservation carried out in ceasefre is entangled with legacies of political violence towards ethnic and religious minorities. Examining international conservation practices conducted in a forest frontier under insurgent control, with a tenuous ceasefre agreement in place yet no peace settlement, reveals how conservation in ceasefre simultaneously depends on and naturalizes the forced displacements caused by military-led counterinsurgency in war. The case of nature conservation in Myanmar’s rebel forests represents an attempt at “green grabbing” much like studied in other places (Fairhead et al., 2012), but here we highlight how this process converges with militarism and ra- cialized violence, and specifc to the context of rebel ceasefre. Much of the literature on conservation and armed confict demonstrates the linkages of conservation practices and militarized approaches (Duffy, 2014; Lunstrum, 2014). We focus instead on how even non-militarized conservation practices – in this case international technical assistance for mapping to establish a national park – invoke and contribute to legacies of political violence against ethnic and religious minorities, and thereby operate as a “softer” form of counterinsurgency after war. In this article we seek to understand the emergent racialized political effects of global conservation practices in a forest landscape that has undergone militarization and forced displacement of civilians from military-led offensives. The forest frontier on the edge of the state is contested by an armed rebel group currently under ceasefre arrange- ments with the military, but with no political settlement in sight. We examine how these territorial and racialized exclusions provide a con- tinuum for counterinsurgency from war to ceasefre. We show how in- ternational conservation practices in ceasefre have the potential to legitimate war-time dispossession led by the military to separate ethnic minority rebels from civilians, and foreclose the possibility of return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees. This is done by reconstructing the forest that the military forcibly depopulated during war as a once-in-a-lifetime global conservation opportunity in ceasefre to protect “pristine” uninhabited primary forests before it is thought to be potentially destroyed by returnees. In 2012, the Karen National Union (KNU), Myanmar’s longest- running and one of the best-known ethnic-based rebel groups, which administers a vast forested territory in the country’s southeast, signed their frst ever ceasefre agreement with the military after six decades of fghting. Despite no political settlement, the ceasefre renewed interest * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: woods34@hawaii.edu (K.M. Woods), jwnaimark@gmail.com (J. Naimark). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102251 Received 21 December 2018; Received in revised form 13 June 2020; Accepted 20 June 2020