Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Nico EdwardsORCiD
Full text is not currently available for this publication.
This thesis tends to the puzzle of present-day military climate governance and green transition projects among NATO and EU military sectors. I develop a geopolitical ecology analysis that juxtaposes military sectors’ narrative and practical emergence as socio-ecological stewards with the lifecycle harms of military-industrial and green-industrial power, capturing military sectors rather as socio-ecological predators. I find that military modes of socio-ecological governance are better understood in terms of militarism’s greening: a process by which military-industrial relations and rationalities are facilitated and normalised in the name of climate action, environmental sustainability and sustainable finance.Combining military climate policy analysis, military sector interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in military trade shows, I trace militarism’s greening across five dimensions: its narration; governance; technological making; financialisation; gendering and racialisation. Expanding extant critiques of military socio-ecological governance, I demonstrate how green militarism is rooted in strategic fictions that envision greener versions of NATO and EU armed forces and arms industries as guarantors and governors of security and sustainability amid global climate chaos. These fictions rest on green militarism’s foremost promise: that of growing while greening military capabilities through the lower-carbon enhancement of military power.Rather than mitigate social and ecological harms or prevent conflict, I argue that military climate and greening projects exacerbate socio-ecological collapse and turn socio-ecological care into a simultaneous battlefield and business opportunity; equating both security and sustainability with the production, practice and profiteering of imperially oriented military violence. As such, military socioecological governance reproduces the militarist, extractivist and masculinist subjects and conditions constitutive of today’s violent, imperial global order – at the expense of peace, people and planet. And yet, each site of harm found along militarism’s greening is also a site of continuous struggle, where peace, climate and justice movements prefigure feminist, anti-militarist and anti-imperial cosmologies of socio-ecological justice.
Author(s): Edwards N
Publication type: Authored Book
Publication status: Published
Year: 2026
Number of Pages: 251
Online publication date: 12/03/2026
Acceptance date: 12/03/2026
Publisher: University of Sussex
Place Published: Brighton
URL: https://hdl.handle.net/10779/uos.31681303
