Conservation Territorialization and Sport Hunting in Lebanon’s Shouf Biosphere Reserve

Abstract This article problematizes the narrative that states expand their control through classifying lands adjacent to a protected area under different conservation categories, such as buffer or transition zones. Through many periods of fieldwork and interviews done in language, I found that the Lebanese state could not territorialize and control such areas next to the Shouf Biosphere Reserve (SBR). Instead, SBR’s adjacent zones presented dissimilar and attenuated territories of governance, depending on different state and local actors’ abilities to effect control in these zones at different times. This work offers a reading of how state and local actors negotiate a range of legalities in efforts to territorialize these conservation zones.