Short Abstract

This panel rethinks security beyond armies and borders, tracing how forests become sites of strategic control and resistance amid climate crisis and militarization, and explores the alternative logics of protection, care, and coexistence by Indigenous, feminist, multispecies forest communities.

Long Abstract

In the age of climate crisis and renewed militarization, security is no longer framed only in terms of armies and borders but increasingly through wildfires, invasive species, strategic minerals, and the multispecies forest communities (Dalby 2015). Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European countries have sharply increased their security budgets through new instruments (like SAFE), while NATO expands into previously non-aligned countries such as Finland and Sweden. This shift has begun to reshape ecological governance and conservation priorities: recent EU initiatives now emphasize strategic energy and resource autonomy (European Commission 2024), often backsliding from earlier just sustainability commitments (Niranjan 2025). Vulnerable forest-dependent communities, some already resisting green transition policies (Brink et al. 2023; Hanaček et al. 2024), face further marginalization through the emergence of new security apparatuses, “green frontiers” (Konczal and Asselin 2025), and “zones of green sacrifice” (Lassila 2025).

This panel invites ethnographically grounded and conceptually innovative papers that explore how forests across Europe and beyond are drawn into this evolving security landscape. How do discourses and infrastructures of security reshape forest governance, ecological restoration, and multispecies coexistence? What forms of exclusion, extraction, or enclosure emerge or re-appear when forests are reframed as strategic assets or border zones? At the same time, how do multispecies forest communities resist, negotiate, or reinterpret this securitization? How do they enact alternative logics of protection, care, and coexistence? We welcome contributions that trace these processes ethnographically and conceptually, engaging Indigenous, feminist, intersectional, and decolonial approaches to reimagine “security” beyond its militarized forms and as a contested terrain of ecological, political, and more-than-human imagination. While the panel centers on Europe, it also welcomes papers from other regions of the Global North and South where climate governance, defense policy, and forest ecologies increasingly intertwine.

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