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Paper short abstract:

Based on Chris Pearson's review of the concept of militarized environments, and a historiographical analysis of military environmental history, I propose the idea of ​​insurgent environments, which seeks to analyze the territorial appropriation strategies of guerrillas in the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

Environmental war history is a field that has been developing for some years in the Anglophone world and focuses its efforts on understanding socio-environmental relations in violent contexts, particularly in periods of “traditional” warfare. Another element of study is what Chris Pearson calls “the militarization of the environment”, a process in which various actors configure the environment for war purposes. However, Latin America remains far from this debate with some exceptions.

In this sense, the present proposal is based on a historiographical balance on the historical environmental production of war, where the land factor is essential to understand the origin and development of armed conflicts. One of the conclusions of this exercise is that, although there are important conceptual proposals such as the militarization of Pearson's environment, there are still horizons to explore and different contexts to problematize.

For this reason, the objective of this research is to propose a theoretical apparatus that responds to the needs of war environmental history in contexts of the Global South, specifically Latin America. In this sense, three concepts that have a power relationship with each other are presented: insurgent environments, counterinsurgent environments, narco environments. I will focus on insurgent environments, an idea that can be summarized in the relationship that subaltern groups -many of them leftist guerrillas- have with the environments they inhabit, such as combat strategies, construction of bases of support and other counter-hegemonic forms of life.