PhD Defence Wisse van Engelen | Bordering Animals | Biosecurity in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

Bordering Animals | Biosecurity in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

Wisse van Engelen is a PhD student in the department Science, Technology & Policy Studies. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr. E. Turnhout from the faculty of Behavioural Management and Social Sciences (BMS), University of Twente and prof. M. Bollig from the University of Cologne.

This thesis addresses the need to repoliticize biosecurity through a case study of biosecurity in the Okavango Delta, where conservation and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) control are two prominent forms of biosecurity that construct borders between humans, wildlife and livestock. This process started in the 1960s and is currently still unfolding. By tracing biosecurity in a colonial and postcolonial context, this thesis explores how coloniality plays a role in biosecurity – an aspect which has remained largely overlooked in the biosecurity literature. Based on the recognition that a borderless multispecies world is not possible nor desirable, and seeing political potential instead in the channels and cracks through which biosecurity’s power is exercised and challenged, the thesis examines how the bordering of more-than-human life is done in practice. It demonstrates that biosecurity has colonial roots and still reflects and reproduces colonial power relations. Not only are many of the decisions that shape biosecurity in the Okavango Delta made by foreign actors, the consequences of biosecurity are also distributed unevenly and the negative impacts continue to be felt strongest by marginalized rural populations. The thesis discusses how these insights relate to ongoing discussions about the politicization of biosecurity and sketches a way forward for a more just, equitable and sustainable biosecurity for the future. Critical in this regard is the need for biosecurity to take accountability for its exclusions and to adopt a restorative justice approach.