Session: 4a
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair: Celandine Fleur Seuren
Melvin Geib Caballero (University of Kaiserslautern-Landau), “The Political Inclusion of Invasive Species”
Abstract: Following the political turn in animal ethics, political scientists began exploring the political inclusion of animals into the political community. In this discussion the migration of animals has received little attention thus far. This paper discusses the implications and pitfalls of including so-called invasive species into the demos. Central to this discussion is the question of how to deal with so-called invasive species that threaten the lives of native animals. While that question might seem arbitrary from the standpoint of animal ethics focusing on animal sentience, the question arises when conceptualizing native animals as members of the political community. Does the state have a duty to protect native animals from so-called invasive species? To answer this question, this paper (1) gives an overview of the discussion on so-called invasive species in the realm of animal ethics (2) argues for the political inclusion of animals into the demos according to the All Subjected Principle (3) discusses the implications of their political inclusion (4) differentiates between different approaches to animals and politics and (5) applies this theory to so-called invasive species, concluding by drawing critical comparisons with the political inclusion of human migrants to further illuminate these challenges.
Bio: Melvin Geib Caballero is a research associate and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) in Germany where he works in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on the political inclusion and representation of animals. In his dissertation he explores whether animals should and how they can be politically represented and analyzes the role of the German Animal Protection Commissioners in this context.
Hatib Kadir (Aarhus University), “The Resistance of Co-species Invasion at the Eastern End of Indonesia”
Abstract: The concept of “co-invasion” points to the role of non-human species in colonial, neocolonial, and settler occupation. This paper argues that introduced fish, originally planned to help remake landscapes for settler projects, have become feral and invasive. It shows how these species enact their own forms of resistance, blurring the lines between domestication and ferality, and thereby unsettling both human and non-human orders under settler colonialism.
Based on five consecutive summers of fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2025 in the city of Sorong, West Papua, Indonesia, this paper examines how introduced species have shifted into invasive dynamics. It analyses how the government, by promoting these species, justifies the infrastructure-driven destruction of Indigenous wetlands and their replacement with a settler food-security regime. Since Indonesian occupation in the 1960s—and especially after 2000—wetlands, rivers, and swamps have been converted into canals, embankments, and sediment-filled drains. In this transformed environment, the introduced fish not only survive but thrive, establishing feral and invasive populations that displace endemic fauna and resist domestication. This more-than-human violence reveals not only how infrastructural change and species introduction work together to remake Papuan waterscapes, but also how the introduced fish resist planned domestication and thrive in these polluted, sedimented, and modified swamplands and rivers.
This paper focuses on four invasive freshwater fish as the main actors—the Snakehead, Catfish, Mozambique Tilapia, and Nile Tilapia—all of which have become feral in West Papua’s waterscapes. These freshwater fish were introduced as part of a larger Indonesian program of landscape transformation and settler colonial projects known as Transmigration, involving military, agricultural, fisheries, and food security experts. However, their domestication turned into ferality, eradicating endemic Papuan fish. This act not only demonstrates the blur between domestication and ferality, but also shows how non-human factors, including settlers themselves, operate within what anthropologist James C. Scott calls “the act of trespassing,” referring to state-led projects and introduced species transgressing socio-ecological orders, when resistance emerges from the unexpected movements of non-human species beyond the planned boundaries of domestication.
Bio: Dr. Hatib A. Kadir earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018. In 2024-2025 he was a postdoctoral researcher in Global Studies at Aarhus University under the project of Multispecies Intellectual History. Beginning in January 2025, Hatib join the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) as a mid researcher in the Netherlands. Hatib’s research centers on environmental humanities, with a particular focus on the Anthropocene in peripheral regions. His work explores settler colonialism, multispecies interactions, and the rise of feral species in the swampy landscapes of coastal West Papua. He examines how settler colonial projects are inherently multispecies enterprises, involving the settlement not only of people but also plants and animals.
Barrie Blatchford (University of Northern British Columbia), “America’s ‘Global Goose-Chaser‘: Nelson Gardiner Bump, the Foreign Game Introduction Program, and the Scientific Theory of Wild Animal Introductions”
Abstract: The contemporary hegemony of the discourse of “invasive species” makes willful introductions of non-native species seem to belong to a distant, unenlightened past. Indeed, historians have generally viewed the organized, intentional introduction of non-native species – what contemporaries called “acclimatization” – as a misguided nineteenth-century phenomenon. According to this narrative, acclimatization abruptly lost scientific credibility and popular support with the proliferation of unwanted species, like house sparrows and European starlings in North America, in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet the introduction of new foreign game species – particularly birds – became a core component of America’s twentieth-century wildlife management regime. Indeed, American government biologists spent millions of dollars attempting new animal introductions until the late 1970s, all while articulating sophisticated scientific justifications for acclimatization projects.
I assess the persistence of animal acclimatization and its enduring scientific credibility in America by examining the career of the biologist Nelson Gardiner Bump. Celebrated by the media as America’s “global goose-chaser,” Bump traversed the world for 25 years as head of the federal Foreign Game Introduction Program (FGIP, founded 1948). Ranging as far afield as Argentina, Finland, India, and Japan, Bump investigated over 100 birds for possible introduction to America. He and his colleagues ultimately facilitated the American introduction of hundreds of thousands of individual creatures drawn from several dozen distinct species. Throughout, Bump argued that FGIP was “slow, careful, and scientific,” bringing “reason and order” to the practice of animal acclimatization. Indeed, Bump espoused ecological rationales that legitimated animal acclimatization as a scientific wildlife management technique. While Bump’s acclimatization attempts rarely succeeded, he was largely successful in defending the scientific validity of acclimatization during his career. Thus, his life offers an aperture into the complexities of scientific authority as well as the abilities of animals and nature to defy human control.
Bio: I am an environmental historian of North America who focuses particularly on the relationship between humans and non-human animals. I have written about the interplay of settler colonialism with projects of wild animal introduction and propagation, the practice of exotic petkeeping, and the commercial animal trade in North America. I wish that the world was better for all animals, human and otherwise, and hope my work convinces more people to take that goal seriously.
Deborah Hardt (University of Wollongong, Dubai), “Beasts of No Nation: Pablo Escobar’s Cocaine Hippos and the Audacity of Survival”
Abstract: In the 1970s, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar imported four hippos from the United States to inhabit his private menagerie. When Escobar was killed in 1993, most of his exotic animals were left behind along the Magdalena River. Against the odds, a group of four hippos not only survived but thrived, expanding to a population nearing 200 individuals. Today, these so-called “cocaine hippos” have become both ecological marvel and management nightmare: thriving in Colombia’s lush wetlands with no natural predators, they are celebrated by some as a charismatic part of the landscape and condemned by others as a dangerous, invasive species.
Efforts to control the population, including sterilization programs and even state-sanctioned culling, have backfired. The killing of a male hippo named Pepe in 2009 provoked a national outcry, revealing the deep ethical and political fault lines surrounding human attempts to contain animal life. These hippos embody a paradox: they are illegal immigrants to Colombia, yet their continued survival resists human designs, bureaucratic control, and pharmaceutical attempts at tranquilization. Their nocturnal, semi-aquatic habits and massive size make them nearly untouchable.
This paper explores the poetics and politics of the “cocaine hippos” as an emblematic case of multispecies conflict, asking what it means to label thriving nonhuman lives as invasive, and what forms of justice are possible when animals refuse to be controlled. By reading the hippos’ reproduction and persistence as a form of nonhuman resistance, I argue that they force us to reckon with questions of belonging, sovereignty, and co-existence—challenging anthropocentric notions of territory and control. In light of a recent U.S. court decision granting the hippos limited legal personhood, I consider how their case unsettles both legal frameworks and ecological imaginaries, opening space for rethinking the politics of invasion and imagining alternative modes of multispecies solidarity.
Bio: Deborah Hardt is an Assistant Professor in the Media Department at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. She is the author of “Dangerous Play: Orcas, Mêtis, and the Global Lockdown” (Humanimalia, 2024) and the book chapter “Animal Agency and Animal Subjectivities in Roar” in Animality and Horror Cinema: Creaturely Fear on Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). She is currently completing her monograph, Animal Revolt, forthcoming with Sydney University Press.