Jeff Schauer (History) published an invited blog post, "An Ecological Anomaly: Wildlife Policy on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt," on the Oxford University-based, European Research Council-funded Comparing the Copperbelt project site. Comparing the Copperbelt combines the efforts of transnational and borderlands scholars of the colonial and national eras to explore the significance of the central African Copperbelt (which spans contemporary Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to national, regional, and global histories, as well as to policy thinking about development, mining, and movement.

Schauer's contribution documents how this highly urbanized and industrialized space — built around a political economy that fed colonial coffers and anxieties in equal measure — challenged the model of colonial wildlife policy that was constructed around assumptions of static African rurality. The Copperbelt appeared to colonial officials to be a site of industrial-scale poaching, and to African subjects a space for making entrepreneurial use of the channels of movement between company towns, their peri-urban surroundings, and wildlife-rich regions of Northern Rhodesia.