Presentation short abstract

In this exploratory paper, the F-35 fighter jet programme is read from a perspective of the earth, or the extractive and contaminating processes at the base of the world’s largest weapons project.

Presentation long abstract

Each F-35 is made with ~15,000 tonnes of aluminium, steel, and titanium, as well as multiple rare earth and technology-critical elements that are crucial to its military capacities. Beryllium, tantalum, gallium, and other elements—the F-35 has been labelled a “flying periodic table” (Abraham 2015, 168)—make higher altitudes and speeds possible, they increase stealth and navigational capacities, and they power advanced targeting and precision software. They also connect the hardwares and capacities of advanced militaries with a dispersed geography of extraction and minerals processing (see Rubaii et al. 2025). From here, raw materials further disperse into networks of manufacturing, comprised weapons companies and their various subsidiaries, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors. In this exploratory paper, the F-35 fighter jet programme is read from a perspective of the earth, or the extractive and contaminating processes at the base of the world’s largest weapons project. By tracing lines of supply and complicity, the paper makes connections between war’s effects on environments and public health at sites of extraction (e.g., the DRC) and sites of deployment (e.g., Gaza).

Presentation short abstract

This paper conceptualizes the beforemaths and aftermaths of war staging through a case study of California's former Fort Ord Army Base. We show that the geographies of war and production of multiple sacrifice zones extend to include the toxic legacy of military bases and domestic training grounds.

Presentation long abstract

California’s iconic and singular central coast was dominated by the Fort Ord Army Base from 1933 until its decommissioning in 1991. In 1990, it was designated a federal Superfund site following decades of war staging for military theaters abroad, from the South Pacific to Korea to Vietnam. In this paper, we conceptualize the environmental remediation triggered by base closure as a critical moment linking the beforemaths and aftermaths of war staging. ‘Before’ is constituted by the toxic activities of the military base, such as improper storage and disposal of toxic waste and artillery and munitions testing. ‘After’ is constituted by ongoing environmental harms, including a cancer cluster among former soldiers and their families, unexploded ordnance, and toxic blight in abandoned military infrastructure. Here, remediation accounts for but does not fully resolve these toxic legacies, aiming instead for acceptable threshold levels of pollution. While over 60% of the former base is classified for biodiversity conservation and open lands recreation – having effectively turned Fort Ord from a testing ground to a camp ground – it remains an active Superfund site. This case, we argue, contributes novel insights into the geopolitical ecologies of war. We show that the geographies of war and production of multiple sacrifice zones extend to the beforemaths and aftermaths of war staging, including military bases and domestic training grounds.

Presentation short abstract

The wildlife of southern Angola and Namibia’s Caprivi Strip were lively political commodities enrolled into a geopolitical war, serving as active co-producers of conflict. Today, Eastern Caprivi’s political animals are co-producing their lively commodification in the capitalist political economy.

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates the intimate role wildlife of southern Angola and Caprivi (Zambezi Region), Namibia played in the Namibian War of Independence (South African Border War). The wildlife of this region was simultaneously enrolled into a geopolitical conflict and the capitalist political economy. Previous inquiries into the role of nature in this conflict frames nature/wildlife as inert, utilized to further an objective or subject to over exploitation. However, the role of wildlife in this war as active political actors with agency and influence has not been explored. Theoretically drawing from lively commodity theory, influenced by Marxism and Latourian ANT, and the typology of nature commodification, this paper will present a lively geopolitical ecology of wildlife in Namibia’s War of Independence. It will also demonstrate wildlife’s deep entanglement with the capitalist political economy resulting in a hierarchy of species exploitation. This paper will draw from empirical data collected via semi-structured interviews during my PhD fieldwork in Eastern Zambezi, Namibia (2024), published first-hand accounts, archival official government commission report (1996), and desktop research. The paper will argue that various wildlife species were active political actors and simultaneously lively and fleshy political commodities of a geopolitical war. It will also demonstrate the effects on the region’s wildlife populations caused by this war-wildlife entanglement remains today. This paper will expand on the understanding of nature’s role in the war and how a geopolitical institution, South African Defense Forces, used their power to over exploit the wildlife in a variety of ways.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the joint US-Vietnam and Japan-Vietnam efforts to address Agent Orange legacy in Vietnam. It investigates how technical and humanitarian projects to address war contamination and health consequences shape geopolitical and diplomatic relations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Presentation long abstract

During the Vietnam-American War, the US military and its allies employed millions of litres of chemical defoliants in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to strategically destroy vegetation that provided shelter for the Vietnamese communist guerilla forces. The most well-known of these chemicals, Agent Orange, contains a high dose of the toxic dioxin, resulting in long-lasting ecological damages and intergenerational health consequences for both local populations and military personnel. After the war ended in 1975, many national and international efforts, run by both governmental and non-governmental agencies, have been established to address the ecological and public health impacts of Agent Orange. In this paper, I examine two of these efforts, namely the bilateral US-Vietnam projects to remediate dioxin hotspots in former US military airbases and provide support for people with disabilities linked to Agent Orange, and Japan’s humanitarian and technical aid to Vietnam to address Agent Orange legacy. Drawing on project reports, governmental publications, and news media coverage, I investigate how these projects are mobilised by the various governments to shape, enhance, and reconfigure geopolitical and people-to-people diplomatic relations among Vietnam, Japan, and the US. While these projects are aimed at fostering some forms of reparative justice and countering US imperialist legacies in the region, I show that they can at times generate and perpetuate a geopolitical order centred around technological and humanitarianism dependency.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes the datafication of demining in the former Yugoslavia, showing how remote sensing reshapes post-conflict landscapes and how datafication privileges what becomes pixel-visible, algorithmically stable, and institutionally legible.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the datafication of humanitarian demining in the former Yugoslavia—specifically Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo—by exploring how digital technologies, such as remote sensing, reshape post-conflict landscapes. Mine action in the region is beginning to orient toward digital tools such as satellite imagery, UAV-mounted sensors, machine-learning classification, and GIS-based hazard models that promise scalable and auditable assessments of contaminated terrain. Yet these systems are embedded in extractive and geopolitical relations. All-the-while residents of rural areas must continue to live with the risk of harm due to aging, hidden weapons such as landmines.

Thus, unexploded ordinance (UXO) contamination remains simultaneously a decades-long material residue of conflict and a dynamic ecological process shaped by vegetation change, soil moisture, erosion, land use, and climate variability. Datafied detection translates these shifting terrains into standardized risk categories that organize land release and donor priorities. Meanwhile, the sensors producing these digital landscapes—thermal arrays, hyperspectral cameras, and AI-ready imaging systems—depend on global extractive chains. The tools used to locate war’s residues are thus materially entangled with the extractive economies that sustain contemporary military systems. Despite the hype around digital technologies, deminers’ embodied expertise remains crucial in complex terrain. These frictions illustrate how datafication begins to coexist with other modes of sensing, highlighting how post-conflict landscapes are governed and remade. Drawing on preliminary results from fieldwork with deminers, policy actors, and document analysis of remote-sensing initiatives, the paper argues that datafication reconfigures environmental governance by privileging what (and who) can be rendered pixel-visible and institutionally legible.

Presentation short abstract

Combining political ecology, peace geographies, and Deleuzian ideas of the tree and rhizome, this presentation analyzes war as a generative socio-ecological system. It highlights how humans and nonhumans co-produce assemblages which shape postwar ecologies, power relations, and everyday life.

Presentation long abstract

The violent legacies of war are not residual: they are generative. This is exemplified in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s mined landscapes, where wartime logics and ecologies continue to shape human and nonhuman ways of living, moving, and surviving. Such dynamics reveal deeper questions that demand explanation: Why does violence persist after war’s formal conclusion? What are the human and more-than-human forces which sustain it across time? And, in such contexts, what does “peace” become when violence refuses to end?

Through ethnographic research conducted in Bosnia on landmine clearance and postwar reconstruction, this presentation examines the socio-ecological assemblages produced by war, tracing how they transform lives and landscapes for generations after war’s formal end. Combining political ecology, peace geographies, and Deleuzian concepts of the tree and rhizome, I illustrate how war creates both deeply rooted, path-dependent structures of living and unpredictable, diffuse socio-ecological entanglements. The resultant web of relations challenges linear narratives of “postwar transition” by showing how violence persists through dynamic interactions among humans, nonhumans, and institutions. I trace how these assemblages shape ecologies, power relations, and everyday life.

In doing so, I move beyond dominant resource-oriented approaches to political ecology and toward a framework that accounts for the full system of war: its pre-existing vulnerabilities, its wartime arrangements, and the legacies embedded in its aftermath. Practically, this work argues that we must integrate environmental concerns into the core of peacebuilding rather than allow them to remain at the periphery, as recovery is inseparable from the landscapes through which violence persists.

Presentation short abstract

This paper addresses the multiplicity, duration, and complexity of wartime ecological and health-related harms through the lens of affective injustice. It draws on interview testimony with civilians living and working on the front lines of ecocide and toxic war ecologies in Palestine and Iraq.

Presentation long abstract

This paper addresses the multiplicity, duration, and complexity of wartime harm, focusing on ecologies of war and their intertwined impacts on the natural environment and human health. Methodologically, we draw on interview testimony with civilians living and working on the front lines of ecocide and toxic war ecologies in Palestine and Iraq. We argue that the measurement and quantification of harm by various actors in recent decades has been a necessary but insufficient step toward understanding the scope, scale and spatialities of diverse ecological harms. We employ the lens of epistemic injustice to help identify how wartime experiences, evidence, and testimony of those harmed is repeatedly depreciated, and marginalized, revealing nonaccidental connections military powers and the patterns of harm they produce and license. Building on this work, we introduce and amplify the concept of ‘affective injustice,’ that is the burden of having to negotiate not only the marginalization of one’s knowledge, but also the devaluation and manipulation of the emotional state of knowing and experiencing ones’ harm which is rendered inadmissible except in the disjunctive terms of ‘appropriate’ affect. This is a ‘double bind’ of injustice that overly burdens as it means that those who seek to articulate harm, are forced to expend the efforts to register in an epistemic and affective structure which negates through relations and terms that diminishes their capacity, authority, and possibility to do so.

Presentation short abstract

This paper traces how forested landscapes in the Global South were shaped by different forms of warfare both in European colonial centres, and the colonies. We show how these legacies continue to inform contemporary conservation efforts led by the Global North to manage the remnants of these forests

Presentation long abstract

Recent scholarship in geopolitical ecology productively engages with how geopolitical actors sit at the intersection of capitalist political economies and environmental reshaping. Yet, it still sparsely directly engages with war, militarization and warfare - and its socio-environmental impacts, from the past to the present. Specifically focusing on forested landscapes, this paper traces colonial histories through which European demand for resources for WWI &II in the West shaped forests in their overseas territories, and how colonial counter-insurgency logics contributed to the creation of forest reserves in other places.

Based on a combination of secondary sources, oral histories, ethnographic and archival research we examine how forests in Suriname and Uganda were shaped by different forms of warfare both in European colonial centres, and in the colonies. We show how these legacies continue to inform contemporary conservation efforts led by the Global North to manage and map the remnants of these forests. Theoretically, this paper combines geopolitical ecology, terraforming, and attention to volume. By doing so, it aims to challenge dominant perspectives on war within international relations by problematizing neat separations between scales.

By siting parts of the economies of war in the periphery, the paper identifies the ecological changes that took place in support of the war effort and war-making. In so doing, it avoids the trap of focussing on “natural resources” in relation to war, which replicates the colonial gaze. Instead, it approaches war and colonization as fundamental destructive of different ways of life.

Presentation short abstract

Biomimicry, the imitation of biological forms and behaviors, has emerged as the underlying logic of contemporary military innovation. This paper argues that biomimicry in weapons systems operates as a modality of ontological warfare, recasting nature as a terrain of ambient and permanent violence.

Presentation long abstract

Biomimicry, the imitation of biological forms and behaviors in technological design, has emerged as the underlying logic of contemporary military innovation. Far from a benign aesthetic choice or efficiency strategy, biomimetic design in weapons systems functions as a form of ontological warfare. This paper argues these forms of militarized biomimicry operate as modalities of perpetual counterinsurgency, recasting nature itself as a terrain of ambient surveillance and lethality.

By blurring distinctions between civilian and combatant, life and death, organism and machine, biomimetic drones are more than mere technologies embedded in environments; they become indistinguishable from them. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the deterritorializing war machine alongside a genealogy of counterinsurgency as prevailing U.S. military doctrine, this paper argues that biomimicry represents the production of a militarized nature that has intensified under the Global War on Terror. Weapons modeled after nature extend this logic into a new ecological register, creating an environment of perceptual instability where every being is enrolled in an all-pervasive war that no longer needs to be declared.

This paper sketches a conceptual and material history of militarized biomimicry through the close reading of documents and media surrounding two Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded biomimetic drone programs: OFFSET and Manta Ray. These cases illustrate how biomimetic weapons perform governance while shrouding machines of war in the aesthetics of ecological harmony. Under this paradigm, biomimetic drones enact an ontological reconfiguration of nature into a cyborg ecology of permanent militarization, where violence is constitutive rather than exceptional.

Presentation short abstract

Combining archival, media and secondary sources, this study traces the European becoming of strategic resources after the World War era by studying security as a material formation and ideological-fix in the management of the ecological contradiction of capital accumulation.

Presentation long abstract

The paradigm of Green Transition has rendered subterranean minerals to the center stage of Europe's economic, security and sustainability efforts. As the criticism of social and ecological consequences and technical feasibility of the extractive regime transition abound, the becoming of the critical minerals as such has thus far escaped sustained attention. Albeit the social construction of 'criticality' is questioned and histories of strategic resources in the United States attempted, the broader historically overdetermined socio-material specification, within which a notion of critical minerals emerges in its particular European intelligibilities, has not been scrutinized. This paper attempts to trace the emergence of strategic resources in Europe by studying security as an ideological formation that manages ecological and economic contradictions by claiming privilege on the future. Here, security is understood as an ideological-fix in managing the internal contradiction between capital accumulation and sustained socio-ecological metabolisms. Combining archival material, newspaper articles and secondary literature, the proposed research attempts to investigate the historically specific material situation in the direct aftermath of World War era by focusing on the ideological formation that inscribes some ecological affordances as resources while rejecting others. In so doing, the study presents one of the four episodes of my broader PhD monograph thesis on the resourcifying logic of security. In sum, the paper argues that as a material formation, security apparatus, apart from its intended economic, political and social outcomes, must attend to the reproduction of its own material basis, which simultaneously discloses alternative ecological futures in the name of security.