Last week, our Principal Investigator, Prof. Lorenza Fontana, was in Bolivia for a series of research and outreach activities carried out within the framework of FIREPOL and Playing with Wildfire projects.

On Monday, March 16, she held a coding meeting with members of the research team to discuss recent progress and coordinate ongoing work with our Latin American partners and coders. The meeting provided an opportunity to review methodological developments, align coding practices, and strengthen collaboration across the regional network.

On Tuesday, March 17, Prof. Fontana delivered a talk hosted by the NGO Ciudadanía Bolivia, presenting the paper Wildfires as Political Weapons, which draws on data collected in Bolivia as part of the Playing with Wildfire project. The presentation sparked a lively discussion and generated valuable feedback on a topic that is highly relevant to current political and environmental debates in the country.

The paper explores how wildfire crises can be politically instrumentalized, asking which socio-ecological characteristics make fire particularly susceptible to manipulation in struggles over land, identity, and power. Focusing on Bolivia’s Chiquitania region, the study examines how wildfire events are transformed from environmental emergencies into tools of political contestation through processes of blame attribution and narrative construction. Using a mixed-methods approach, combining content analysis of 1,234 media articles published between 2002 and 2020 with 63 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2022, the research shows that wildfire crises intersect with land conflicts, migration dynamics, and electoral politics, producing highly polarized narratives of responsibility. These narratives often target marginalized rural populations, particularly highland migrant settlers, while obscuring broader structural drivers such as agribusiness expansion and land-use policies. The paper further argues that certain characteristics of wildfires—their mobility, predominantly anthropogenic origins, and cyclical recurrence—make them especially prone to politicization. These features blur the boundary between natural and political phenomena, allowing different actors to selectively assign responsibility and mobilize wildfire events for electoral, territorial, and ideological purposes.