The recent work in critical geopolitics problematizes the notion of boundaries and interrogates the narratives, ideologies, and institutions that inform processes of boundary making, or ‘reborderings’. From the perspective of critical geopolitics, boundary making for conservation purposes is understood as an act of power embedded within a discourse of environmental geopolitics. Through reborderings, environmental geopolitics thus reflects and informs everyday practices and relations of power between local, state, and international actors. In this paper I illustrate a process of rebordering in Trinidad, the West Indies, in which local, state, and international actors engaged in a contest to define conservation boundaries and produce bounded identities within the Nariva Swamp. Rebordering in the Nariva Swamp reflected and influenced state and local practices in complex ways, altered relations of power on multiple levels, and led to the production of a bounded space that is simultaneously local and global.
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