Author Archives: Bilal Butt

About Bilal Butt

Bilal Butt is an assistant professor of natural resources and environment and a faculty affiliate of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. He is a people-environment geographer with regional specialization in sub-Saharan Africa and technical expertise in geospatial technologies. His general research interests, which lie at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, track questions of how people and wildlife are coping with and adapting to changing climates, livelihoods, and ecologies in arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa. His current projects investigate the spatiality of livelihood strategies among pastoral peoples under regimes of increasing climatic variability and uncertainty.

Conservation, Neoliberalism, and Human Rights in Kenya’s Arid Lands

March 25, 2016 by
No comments
In the last century and a half, over 105,000 protected areas (PAs), encompassing about 11 percent of the world’s land, with different levels of “protected” area status, have been established on every continent.1 The establishment and operation of these PAs have resulted in numerous human rights abuses.2 Literatures on the relationships between human rights and conservation are rich with theoretical and empirical examples that typify two main waves of conservation over the last fifty years. In this essay I describe how a third but less Continue reading → Continue reading →