Presentation short abstract

This paper builds on the necropolitical ecology literature and draws on emerging evidence of mass socio-ecological destruction from siege warfare in the 2020–22 Tigray war, and argues that Tigray served as a laboratory for ecocide elsewhere.

Presentation long abstract

The 2020–20 Tigray war in Ethiopia was as much an ecological catastrophe as it was a humanitarian one. The siege, a key feature of this war—to paraphrase Mbembe (2003)—facilitated “the subjugation of life to the power of death.” It cut off lifelines (food, medicine) for civilians, unleashed hunger as a weapon (Teklehaymanot and Birhan, 2025), and contributed to ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide (Ibreck and de Waal 2022). Less visible is the war’s environmental destruction in rural Tigray (TGIC 2025), a region once recognised for agroecological restoration (Aster and Emiru, 2023). Drawing on available evidence of environmental destruction in Tigray (CITG, 2025; Liya et al., 2024) and engaging with necropolitical ecology literature (e.g. Cavanagh and Himmelfarb, 2014), we conduct an autopsy of the deadly socio-ecological effects of siege warfare in Tigray and conclude that siege practices enabled the violent, systematic destruction of lives and landscapes. Considering Mbembe and Sarr’s (2023) claim that “Africa is the place where part of the planet’s future is currently playing itself out,” we also deliberate whether the Tigrayan case served as a “laboratory” for subsequent siege warfare (Teklehaymanot, 2025), not only enforcing crimes against humanity (in this “new age of genocide,” see Shaw, 2025) but also enabling ecocide elsewhere (El Fasher, Gaza, Ukraine). Driven by domestic and regional military coalitions and international arms suppliers, the war condemned Tigray to a dystopian trajectory that renders an emancipatory future difficult to imagine (Bluwstein and De Rosa, 2024) without transitional justice accounting for both human and ecological losses.