Abstract

Dominant biocultural conservation discourses on human–elephant conflict in India and elsewhere often reduce local communities to a victim/perpetrator binary. Even seemingly divergent models— fortress conservation, and rights-based approaches— reproduce this framing. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak's evocative question "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and insights from subaltern political ecology, this article argues that both perpetrator and victimhood theses encourage silencing and misrepresentation of the subaltern communities who interact with wildlife on an everyday basis. Based on qualitative research with the tribal and other traditional forest dwelling communities (the "subaltern") in Odisha, this article illustrates how these communities resist such portrayals. Through practices of livelihood adaptation, narrative resistance, and land-rights claims, they showcase their agency and frame human–elephant relations as political negotiations between "co-subalterns." This framing of co-subalternity moves beyond dominant conservation paradigms and critiques the victim/perpetrator binaries for subaltern communities in conservation discourse.

Keywords: Epistemic violence, co-subalternity, politics as negotiation, subaltern political ecologies, Asian elephant, tribes, decolonization

How to Cite:

Das, L. K., (2026) “Co-subalternity and the political ecology of human–elephant conflict in Odisha, India”, Journal of Political Ecology 33(1): 7427. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.7427