On (In-)Secure Grounds: How Military Forces Interact with Global Environmental Change

Abstract

Abstract Military forces contribute to, struggle with, and respond to global environmental change. This entangles them ambiguously with their ecological environment. This article reviews these entanglements in two steps. First, it develops a three-dimensional typology of ecologically relevant military activities by drawing on the environmental peace and conflict research streams of political ecology, decolonial studies, environmental conflicts, environmental peacebuilding, securitization, and climate human security. In a second step, this typology then guides the first literature review of studies on military –environment interactions. The review finds four different military roles: (1) Military forces are complicit in causing environmental harms through military conduct; (2) they are involved in Anthropocene geopolitics, for instance, in a melting Arctic; (3) they alleviate impacts through a range of mitigation and adaptation measures, including military disaster response; and, finally, (4) some military forces have been found involved in obstructing climate policy. The study argues that these different roles are indicative of the challenges that conventional security policies face when addressing the increasingly multipolar Anthropocene’s global security challenges.