Challenges and Development of Making Political Forests in Bangladesh

This book offers an anthropological and genealogical account of forests and social forestry, in particular the way they came to be constituted over time in one particular social- ecological context of Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork to examine how discourses of forest and forest relations in CHT since British rule have changed and shaped agrarian relations of the hill peoples and their relations to power. As such, this book explores forest history in relation to an 'ethnically' different and 'small group' of population living within a nation-state so as to understand how nature/environment is constituted as a terrain of governmental power, subject formation, and state building. The chapters of this book are organized around the political regimes of Britain, Pakistan and Bangladesh, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the making and remaking of political forests. Throughout the chapters, there run several underlying themes: opposition to jhum cultivation; development; environmental change; and social forestry.