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Drawing on ethnographic research in Argentina’s Chaco, this paper shows how the native forest securitization redistributes risk, prioritizes certain forms of being and becoming, and normalizes trade-off frameworks through which present losses are rendered acceptable in the name of projected futures.

Paper long abstract

As climate change is increasingly framed as a planetary concern, global attention has turned toward the Gran Chaco Americano, South America’s second-largest terrestrial ecosystem spanning Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Long rendered peripheral within global economic, political, and environmental imaginaries, this vast mosaic of grasslands, thorny forests, and wetlands sustains dense yet fragile webs of human and more-than-human life. In recent decades, however, the Chaco has come to be known less for this abundance than for the rapid disappearance of its native forests.

Global responses to deforestation are increasingly organized through securitizing frameworks that recast the forest as both a threatened object and a strategic asset to be safeguarded for planetary well-being. Thus, deforestation is produced as an imminent global risk, narrowing the range of acceptable practices to those aligned with dominant technocratic and managerial climate discourses. In the process, other ways of relating with the forest—grounded in sociality, reciprocity, and long-standing practices of care—are rendered illegible or reframed as incompatible with protection.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Chaco Province, Argentina, this paper argues that the securitization of the forest reorganizes relations among Indigenous communities, settlers, corporate actors, and the state by unevenly distributing risk, shaping which forms of being and becoming are prioritized, and leaving others to bear the social and ecological costs of climate change. In doing so, it calls into question the logic of trade-offs so dominant in climate advocacy, through which certain losses in the present are rendered acceptable in order to secure projected futures.

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This paper examines how Indigenous women’s collectives establish new forms of forest governance in a Mexican national park, enacting alternative logics of protection and securitization.

Paper long abstract

This contribution outlines the conceptual foundations of a first-year doctoral research project among forest defenders in a national park in Puebla, Mexico. It engages the framework of “Planetary Healing” to rethink security in forest landscapes under climate crisis. Accelerating droughts, wildfires, and the spread of bark beetle infestations − having destroyed up to 80% of trees in parts of the park − intersect with illegal logging and extractive pressure, reshaping rural life and intensifying conflicts over forest governance.

Disputes between local communities and state authorities over rehabilitation and management have framed the national park, and in some cases Indigenous communities, as spaces of insecurity and risk. This securitizing logic legitimizes new forms of surveillance and intervention, while marginalizing local ecological knowledge and practices of care. In response, new governance arrangements are emerging in which predominantly Indigenous women’s collectives assume responsibilities for reforestation, environmental education, and care work − often filling gaps left by state institutions.

Drawing from the notion of Planetary Healing as a conceptual lens, the research explores how land-based practices and multispecies relations enact alternative logics of protection grounded in reciprocity and repair rather than control and exclusion. I argue that the reinterpretation of security in this context operates not only as political resistance but also as a form of collective and ecological healing. By foregrounding Indigenous women’s forest practices, the paper contributes to debates on the securitization of ecologies and offers ethnographic insight into forests as contested terrains where security, care, and multispecies futures are actively reimagined.

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This paper examines how forest securitization in Turkey produces slow violence in forests, and how women and multispecies communities in Akbelen and among Sarıkeçililer transform securitization through everyday practices of care, coexistence, and repair.

Paper long abstract

In the context of the climate–security nexus, forests are increasingly governed as sites of security—spaces to be defended, stabilized, and rendered resilient through exceptional measures. While framed as protection, such securitization often produces forms of slow violence: cumulative dispossession, environmental degradation, and the redistribution of vulnerability across human and more-than-human lives. This paper examines how these dynamics unfold ethnographically in two forest struggles in Turkey: the resistance against lignite mining in Akbelen Forest and the ongoing securitization of Sarıkeçililer nomadic pastoralists under forestry and conservation regimes.

Drawing on feminist political ecology, I trace how forest securitization materializes not only through infrastructure, surveillance, and legal exclusion, but also through mundane disruptions of everyday forest relations—restricted mobility, criminalized livelihoods, and damaged interspecies ties. At the same time, the paper foregrounds how women in these contexts enact alternative forms of ecological security through slow, care-based practices such as herding, fire prevention, forest guardianship, and collective resistance. These practices do not deny conflict or harm; rather, they work within damaged landscapes to sustain livability, interdependence, and repair.

By juxtaposing slow violence with slow care, the paper argues for a feminist reconceptualization of ecological security as a relational, multispecies process shaped from below. It contributes to debates on forest securitization by showing how ecological security is not only imposed through militarized governance, but also reworked through embodied, gendered, and more-than-human practices of coexistence that challenge dominant logics of protection and control.

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This paper explores the relationship of Nepalese women refugees (arrived via the Balkan route) with the Trieste woodlands. In spite of life-threatening experiences in the highly securitized forests along the route, such relationship is life-affirming and integral to their home-making practices

Paper long abstract

This paper presents research conducted with Nepalese women refugees in the Italian border city of Trieste, a mid-sized city in the north-east of Italy. The research coproducers arrived in Trieste via the northern section of the so-called Balkan route: most of the route, including the very last section to Trieste, is traveled on foot through expansive forests, in what is a high risk attempt at reaching Western Europe. The Balkan forests are in fact a heavily securitized and militarized landscape, a diffused, multi-state border device, where the forest morphology and ecosystem are themselves weaponized. The woodland that encloses the city of Trieste lies at the westernmost extremity of the Balkan route.

This paper explores the research coproducers’ engagement with the forest in Trieste, including the urban and the peri-urban woodlands. It focuses on how their regular enjoyment of the forest helps develop their affinity with the city as well as their sense of place, and contributes to their home-making practices. This largely positive relationship with the forest in Trieste (mediated through their specific sociocultural life-worlds, including folk Nepalese beliefs and religious cosmologies) subverts a series of Eurocentric polarizations such as urban/wild, city/nature, human/more-than-human, as well as expectations around trauma and healing, representations of displacement and home, and understandings of security as defence instead of care. The theoretical framework (developed using grounded theory to center the research coproducers insights and experiences) combines, among others, Karen Barad’s new materialism with Erin Manning’s sensing body in movement and Doreen Massey concept of throwntogetherness.

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Based on ethnography in Barroso, Portugal, this paper analyzes the local resistance to a lithium mine framed by the EU as strategic for the region's sovereignty. It shows how "green securitization" accelerates extraction while displacing commons-based, multispecies logics of care and reciprocity.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines a seven-year socio-environmental conflict in Covas do Barroso (northern Portugal), where a rural community resists an open-pit lithium mine proposed by a UK company. Based on sustained ethnographic fieldwork, it traces how the EU’s framing of lithium as a “strategic” resource and the political instruments that support it recast upland commons and forested landscapes as sites of security and strategic control. I show how this reframing produces a paradoxical “green security”: the rhetoric of rapid decarbonization under pretenses of EU sovereignty accelerates extractive infrastructures while marginalizing local life ways and ecological relations. By focusing on the community’s defense of the baldios (historical commons) and everyday practices—communal irrigation, collective baking, shared farm labor—I argue that these practices enact a form of care-based citizenship (care-tizenship) and an ethics of refusal that contests extractivist logics. The dispute mobilizes memories of past contamination, unmet promises of infrastructure, divergent sustainability imaginaries and concerns about turning autonomous livelihoods into “zones of sacrifice.” Internal divisions within the village reveal plural and sometimes contradictory futures. This case exposes three core contradictions in contemporary “just transition” politics: the erasure of local temporalities, the technoscientific sidelining of embodied knowledge, and the violation of moral economies of reciprocity. I argue that these tensions are produced through processes of securitization that extend beyond military frames to include extractive governance, infrastructural violence, and the criminalization of dissent, recasting forested commons as strategic spaces while displacing multispecies, commons-based logics of protection and coexistence.