Presentation short abstract

This paper interrogates European armed forces' and arms companies' perversion of biodiversity protection into narrative and practical tools for legitimating military-industrial relations and masculinist rationalities amid socioecological collapse.

Presentation long abstract

As Europe's largest landowners, militaries have a long history of environmental stewardship that “balances” military capability development with biodiversity protection. As part of this stewardship armed forces and arms companies argue that they are successfully integrating the national security concerns of conservation and militarisation: protecting woodlarks, orchids and damselflies while trialling hypersonic missiles and directed energy weapons.

This paper draws on in-depth analysis of European military climate governance strategies to map armed forces' and arms companies' perversion of biodiversity protection into narrative and practical tools for legitimating military-industrial relations and rationalities. I demonstrate how the normalisation of natural conservation as a commonsensical military activity relies on the careful erasure of the socioecological before-, mid- and aftermaths of military power to present sources of ecological degradation as solutions.

By legitimating European militaries and weapons manufacturers as forces for good amid socioecological collapse, the intensifying practice of khaki conservation (Woodward 2001) in Europe further empowers the particular subjects with most social, narrative and material clout within the European geographies of the global arms trade: military business masculinities steeped in a culture that privileges war, weapons, wealth and whiteness, while prizing or despising womxn for their un/desirability. I demonstrate how military ecological stewardship is rooted in and reproduces the militarised, extractive and hypermasculine both subjects and socioecological conditions constitutive of a violent, imperial global order – at the expense of people and planet. In contrast, conservation imaginaries rooted in feminist, anti-militarist and anti-imperial struggles prefigure just forms of socioecological regeneration.