Tropical forests as frontiers and zones of refuge: The case of Ranomafana in eastern Madagascar

Tropical forests are often problematic for states. They have been described as both zones of refuge and frontiers and their ‘unruliness’ has justified state intervention throughout the centuries. Currently, forest areas and their governance are impacted by transnational conservation and extractive frontiers. Yet, I ask whether remote mountainous forestlands still provide a zone of refuge free of state control. If they do, what is the relationship between the (possibly) spatially overlapping concepts of frontier and zone of refuge? I examine this question through an ethnographic case study of the forest in Ranomafana National Park, in the south-east of Madagascar. I analyse the state-controlling versus state-evading dynamic in the region, beginning with the refugees escaping the Merina Empire, continuing with colonial resource extraction and forest reserve creation during the 1947 uprising, and finally focusing on the violent cycles in the 2010s–2020s, involving artisanal gold mining, banditry and an increasing militarisation of conservation. The study problematises the conventional understanding of gold mining and conservation as rivals by showing that as commodity frontiers both advance territorialisation and the elimination of the zone of refuge. In Ranomafana, the interplay between conservation and other commodity frontiers has accelerated this process: conservation enclosure has removed local structures of land control and care, making way for the gold frontier, leading to a violent competition over the land, and ultimately eroding the refuge and dispossessing local peasants. The results contribute to the literature on frontiers and state-building by clarifying that zones of refuge exist due to a lack of territorial authorities and frontiers because of an excess of them, thus making them two opposite processes at the edge of state control.