Warfare, National Sovereignty, and the Environment

Abstract

Not only the direct effects of wars harm the planet. Also devastating can be the covert, indirect and often legitimized, actions of nations in securing their national sovereignty — silent-war actions ranging from secret nuclear installations, storage of chemical and biological weapons, militarized economic policy, biases in development expenditures, and ranging up to ethnocide and genocide. New ways of looking at warfare, national sovereignty, and the environment, take on urgency if only because the relationship between war-proneness, nation-building, and national sovereignty, appears to be an enduring one.