Luregn Lenggenhager is a historian and geographer specializing in Namibia and Southern Africa. His research focuses on colonial legacies in nature conservation and land governance, with particular emphasis on militarization, transfrontier conservation, human-animal relations, and borderland histories. He has published extensively on these topics and has been instrumental in facilitating student exchange programs between Namibia and Switzerland.

From September 2025, Luregn leads the SNSF funded research project Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscapes in Times of Climate Change (CEDEL). The project explores how elite retreats and the designation of landscapes as uninhabitable are interconnected processes. Whether occurring in the same places or elsewhere, these dynamics shape social inequality and climate politics in Africa and beyond. Luregn and the CEDEL team will investigate colonial and racial-ideological roots of derelict landscapes and curated escapes, their current development and their future importance.

Luregn co-authored (with Bernard C. Moore) the monograph Space is the Ultimate Luxury: Capitalists, Conservationists, and Ancestral Land in Namibia (Brill, 2025). It examines how global capitalists, operating under the banner of conservation, have threatened long-established forms of land use by African small-scale farmers along the Orange River in southern Namibia. By tracing the entanglements of elite conservation projects and land dispossession, the book challenges dominant conservation narratives and highlights the ongoing struggles over land and livelihoods.

Lenggenhager earned his PhD from the University of Zurich and has held postdoctoral positions at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, the University of Cologne, the Okavango Research Institute in Botswana and the University of Warwick (UK). His recent Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral project Past Natures for Future Conservation (PANATURE) shows how current conservation initiatives, both in Switzerland and in Southern Africa, often refer back to selective pasts to legitimate their future plans.,

He maintains longstanding collaborations with the University of Namibia, the University of Botswana and the University of Cape Town where he has spent extended research and teaching periods. Lenggenhager is happy to supervise students interested in African environmental history, conservation and land politics, and other related topics.

Full list: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7480-0495

Scientific Journals

Lenggenhager, Luregn; Mogende, Emanuel (2024): Nature conservation, borders and violence along the Chobe River between Botswana and Namibia in the 20th and 21st century. Journal of Borderland Studies.

Lenggenhager, Luregn; Akawa, Martha; Miescher, Giorgio; Nghitevelekwa, Romie (2024): Crossing Etosha - A History of Donkeys in Namibia's Central North. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 167-182.

Lenggenhager, Luregn, Ramutsindela, Maano (2021). Property killed a peace park dream: the entanglement of property, politics and conservation along the Gariep. Land Use Policy (105).

Lenggenhager, Luregn; Nghitevelekwa, Romie; Bloemertz, Lena (2021): Turning Land into Money: Land, Inequality and Reforms in Namibia. Review of Agrarian Studies, 11(1).

Merron, James; Lenggenhager, Luregn (2021): "Left Button Picture, Right Button Bomb: Nature, warfare and technology in a Southern African border region". Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 7(1). 67-89.

Lenggenhager, Luregn; Rosengarten, Andrea (2020). Flood levels and borderlines: Livestock farming and evictions resistance at the !Garib/Orange River in Southern Africa. Arcadia, 34.

Lenggenhager, Luregn (2015).Nature, War and Development: South Africa's Caprivi Strip, 1960-1980. Journal of Southern African Studies, 41(3): 467-483.

Monographs

Moore, Bernard C.; Lenggenhager, Luregn (2025): Space is the Ultimate Luxury: Capitalists, Conservationists, and Ancestral Land in Namibia. Leiden: Brill.

Lenggenhager, Luregn (2018). Ruling Nature, Controlling People. Nature Conservation, Development and War in North-Eastern Namibia since the 1920s. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien. 

Edited Volumes

Lenggenhager, Luregn; Akawa, Martha; Miescher, Giorgio; Nghitevelekwa, Romie; Sinthumule, Innocent (eds.) (2023). The Lower !Garib / Orange River: Pasts and Presents of a Southern African Border Region. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Book Contributions (peer-reviewed)

Lenggenhager, Luregn; Miescher, Giorgio (2024): Dividing, Connecting and Complicating the Hinterland. The Lower !Garib / Orange River. In: Gupta, Pamila; Nuttall, Sarah; Peeren, Esther and Stuit, Hanneke (eds.). Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care. Palgrave Macmillan.

Lenggenhager, Luregn (2023): Onseepkans: Irrigation, removals and resistance in the borderlands of Namibia and South Africa. In: Lenggenhager, L ; Akawa, M;. Miescher, G.; Nghitevelekwa, R.; Sinthumule, I. (eds). The Lower !Garib / Orange River: Pasts and Presents of a Southern African Border Region. Bielefeld: Transcript, 151-164.

Miescher, Giorgio; Lenggenhager, Luregn; Ramutsindela, Maano (2023): The Lower !Garib / Orange River: A Cross-border Microregion. In: Lenggenhager, L ; Akawa, M;. Miescher, G.; Nghitevelekwa, R.; Sinthumule, I. (eds). The Lower !Garib / Orange River: Pasts and Presents of a Southern African Border Region. Bielefeld: Transcript, 11-24.

Lenggenhager, Luregn(2016).Circulating nature: from north-eastern Namibia to South Africa and back, 1960-1990. In: Ramutsindela, Maano; Miescher, Giorgio; Boehi, Melanie (eds.). The Politics of Nature and Science in Southern Africa. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 87-105.

Lenggenhager, Luregn(2009), Empty Landscapes, Wild Animals an Unspoiled People: Motifs in Namibian Tourism Advertising, In: Miescher, Giorgio; Rizzo, Lorena; Silvester, Jeremy. Posters in Action. On the History of Production, Circulation and Reception of Namibian Posters. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 31-44.