What is...Green Militarism?

In this episode, we speak with Dr Esther Marijnen, Associate Professor and Political Ecologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Esther’s work explores the uneasy entanglements of nature, military conflict, and authority - from the militarisation of conservation efforts to the ecological and social impacts left by colonial violence. Drawing on over a decade of field research in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and more recent work in Uganda and Europe, Esther introduces her current project Wounded Landscapes funded by the Dutch Research Council. The project examines how slow violence and historical legacies of conflict reconfigure both environments and the communities that inhabit them. In conversation with host Polly Pallister-Wilkins, they discuss how international conservation organisations engage with these “wounded” spaces, and what their interventions reveal about broader understandings of nature, justice, and repair.

Dr Esther Marijnen

Ivan Mugyenzi Ashaba, Esther Marijnen, ‘We are soldiers now’: green militarism and (foreign-assisted) military training in conservation, International Affairs, Volume 101, Issue 2, March 2025, Pages 565–582, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae320

Marijnen, E. (2022). Eco-war tourism: Affective geographies, colonial durabilities and the militarization of conservation. Security Dialogue, 53(6), 550-566. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106221112215 (Original work published 2022)

Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Malini Ranganathan (2024): Geopolitical ecology for our times, Political Geography, Volume 112,103034. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.103034.

Rubaii, Kali (2023). This is why we protect the rivers, this is how we love the rivers. Critical Times, 6(2), 195–218.

Rubaii, K., & Griffiths, M. (2025). Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up. Human Organization, 84(1), 56–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/00187259.2024.2429998

Baverman, Irus (2023): Settling Nature. The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press.