Militarized landscapes: Overview and introduction to the special issue

As militarized landscapes proliferate globally, it is timely to ask: what exactly constitutes a militarized landscape, and how might we intervene in the scholarship on military-environment relations to better understand their key features. In this introduction to the special theme issue on Militarized Landscapes, we invite readers into these questions. We first define militarized landscapes as socio-ecological landscapes that contribute to or are transformed by political hostilities, preparation for conflict, and outright war, as well as those that are militarized for explicitly environmental ends. To make sense of the vast and growing literature on military-environment relations, we then outline what we see as its six major themes: environmental harm caused by military activity, environmental security and resource conflicts, green militarization and green wars, nature's militarization and weaponization, ecological militarization or military environmentalism, and finally ecological restoration. Building from here, we turn to the contributions of the special issue, showing how they chart novel insights across these themes. These come together around the distinct and expanding spaces of militarized landscapes, the diverse slate of actors building and maintaining them, how people and nature survive and resist these landscapes, their afterlives, and finally questions of methods, or how to study and chronicle militarized terrains.