Many Wars, One Planet: A Sociology of War and Ecology

The world is being attacked on two fronts: warmongering nations and the 'climate war'. While warfare involving mass destruction is still ongoing in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Sudan, and lately suspended in Iran, the global climate is heating at a horrendous pace. From Moscow to Jerusalem, Washington to Beijing, authoritarian leaders and resurgent imperialisms threaten new fronts. Moreover, the legacy of previous conflicts is still affecting the lives of millions of people and 'non-humans' (the Korean DMZ, Agent Orange in Vietnam, depleted uranium in Iraq...). If environmental change as a trigger of armed conflicts has been well studied (mostly by IR scholars), the reverse is not true: there is scant research on the impact of war on ecology, and on ecology and sovereignty or on how to address the dual challenges of warfare and the climate emergency. The weaponization of environments, ecocide, the ecological 'bootprint' of military apparatuses, and the way capitalism, security and sovereignty reshape energy and resource politics in a time of militarized geopolitics and ecological breakdown: all demand new sociological attention. Rather than offering a litany of disasters, this session aims to stimulate a provocative dialogue among sociological subfields that remain distant or indifferent to one another despite an obvious and necessary convergence: environmental sociology, the sociology of war and violence, civil-military relations, the sociology of risk and international sociology. We therefore welcome papers analyzing the relations between warfare and ecology across diverse geopolitical and historical settings, paying attention to their material and discursive dimensions.