Pyropolitics and the Production of Territory

Abstract

Abstract This review article puts recent social science research on the politics of landscape fire into conversation with scholarship on territory. It argues that contemporary efforts to regulate and suppress fire are fundamentally territorial in that they represent strategies to shape production and accumulation within politically bounded spaces. Reading literature on fire governance through the lens of territory demonstrates the role that a particular disposition toward fire played in the emergence of modern, territorial states. It also helps to illuminate the relationship between state policies to regulate burning and efforts to control labor and resource access. Recent work on the uses of remote sensing technology in the detection and depiction of fire activity shows how territory is reproduced as a modality of rule that justifies hierarchical models of environmental governance. The article concludes with a brief discussion of efforts to implement pluralistic forms of fire management and the obstacles they face.