Format/Structure

Standard Panel

Long Abstract

Traditionally political ecology scholarship has focussed on localised dynamics of (violent) conflict over the redistribution, or access to, natural resources. Recent work in geopolitical ecology, however, has started to make warfare, militarization and militarism – more central within the field. Geopolitical ecology traces and examines the role of large geopolitical institutions, like the US military, in environmental change. In general, it can be seen as focused on examining how those institutions “weaponiz(e) nature”. Whilst critical research on the capitalist political economies of war – is vital in this in this moment of increasing military conflicts – historicising contemporary ecologies of war remains a crucial component in efforts to understand and frame presently unfolding events.

Warfare and aligned processes of militarization – create multiple “sacrifice zones” – both in the before, and aftermaths of war. Often, these zones of extraction and destruction – are embroiled in longer historical processes of racialized violence and environmental destruction, linked to (settler)colonisation.

We aim to bring insights from work in political geography, environmental history and anthropology on warfare – to historize geopolitical ecologies of war. We aim also to understand the links between the legacies of war that remain in an environment alongside peoples’ and more-than-human beings’ quotidian experiences in those spaces.

Thus, this panel is interested in papers that examine the following topics:

· Regimes of resource extraction by defence industries in the Global South

· Capitalism’s shaping or reshaping through military spending and resource extraction

· Conceptual lenses for analysing the historical remnants of war in colonized places

· Technological developments and their material impacts on the environment in previous wars

· Imperialism, conflict and their environmental legacies

· Political ecologies of memory: Remembering past wars

· Green pacification: Colonial and contemporary counter-insurgency logics through environmental interventionism

· More-than-human aspects of conflict