
How are anti-war and climate justice struggles connected? And can we expand these connections to build a global peace movement ready to meet the challenges of our time and prefigure a better world in the here and now? In mapping the violence of capitalism and the resulting struggles, Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki provide an extended introduction to BG’s 2025 text series “Pluriverse of Peace.”
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We and many others see the environmental crisis as (partly irreparable) damage caused by the rapacious excesses and increasingly intractable contradictions of capitalism. At the same time, we see it as the materialization of an adversary that capitalism has created. Ecosystems that are devastated and thus rebel return the aggression to which they have been and are subjected, for example in the form of extreme weather events and pandemics. Or they simply go on strike, refusing to regenerate and thus blocking endless extractivism. Here we build on indigenous, post-Soviet, and postmodern ecological thought, with contributions from Ailton Krenak (2020) to Oxana Timofeeva (2022) and William E. Connolly (2011), who ascribe varying degrees of agency to other-than-human life. Both perspectives – damage and adversary – imply that if we are to deal with the environmental crisis, we must get to the root cause: the capitalist system.
In other words, we understand the environmental crisis both as a product of the dominant global mode of organizing the economy, social relations and life as a whole, and as an expression of a revolting agency that challenges the rules of the capitalist world-system: Climate disasters and pandemics make the rules of the capitalist game more violent and unjust, so that the game itself can only be maintained by authoritarian, (proto-)fascist, and bellicist state action, in other words: war. As Rosa Luxemburg (1913) suggested, war is an expression and intensification of capitalism. War is capitalism with gloves off, because it exposes capitalism’s barbarism, runaway expansionism, and calculated collateral damage. At the same time, war is a crude way of trying to solve the crisis of capitalism, of which environmental issues are among the most conspicuous indicators, a pretense of agency. For our discussion it is crucial to understand war as an attempt to regain or maintain control by attacking the revolting environment itself: the ‘evil spirits’ unleashed by capitalism. Obviously, the metaphor of a war against ‘runaway nature’ echoes the colonial battle of ‘civilization versus wilderness,’ updated for an era of ‘man-made nature,’ as exemplified by climate disasters and pandemics. But while the metaphor may make sense of a thoroughly nonsensical ‘crisis management’ (and its underlying failure to meaningfully approach the agency of ecosystems), it does not necessarily make it easier to grasp the precise political implications. With this in mind, we propose to shift the perspective a little and rethink what environmental war is in our time.
The BG 2025 project proposes to understand environmental war not only as 1) a military strategy aimed at destroying habitats and what constitutes them as spheres of life, but also as 2) a systemic effect of ‘civilian’ colonial-capitalist expansionism, which thrives on the appropriation of everything for the endless accumulation of capital, causing environmental degradation and pollution. These dimensions of violence are two sides of waging class war by subjecting spheres of life to the violence of capital, thus destroying life as such, or at least making the reproduction of life difficult, if not impossible. For Vilma Almendra (2018), a Nasa Indigenous land defender, all of this is accompanied by “ideological subjugation in order to colonize the territory of the imagination… so as to guarantee and legitimize the economic model of capitalism at the service of the transnationals.” In the process, the revolutionary agency and resistance of the disenfranchised, oppressed, and exploited is (supposedly) reduced to virtually zero. The interests of the ruling (or would-be ruling) classes (supposedly) become the only concern. But does this class-struggle calculus from above really work?
We must begin by acknowledging the following: Today, environmental war is becoming a planetary condition – enforced by the deepening contradictions of the capitalist world-system, the intensifying race for resources, and the global resurgence of militarization and the arms industry (Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, 2023). The challenge of confronting and overcoming this situation is of the utmost urgency. There are many struggles and movements around the world that are already doing this – from anti-mining activists and land defenders protecting ecosystems, to socialization activists reclaiming energy systems for the common good, to activists fighting for public transportation and car-free cities. Our challenge is to make them more visible, to connect them with each other, and to build bridges to the ‘silent majority’ of people who reject the horrific results of capitalism, but refrain from challenging it as such.
The ‘race for the future’
After the official end of the Cold War, many commentators believed that a ‘time of peace’ had dawned. Yet it was only under these auspices that some of the most brutal raids of capitalism took place. One example was the shock therapy privatization of the ‘socialist world’: many experienced it as as violent and traumatic as war. At the same time, there were strange reinterpretations of the military apparatus that had been heavily armed during the Cold War. The task of the ‘bosses with guns’ was to find new uses for the excessive military infrastructure that had been installed around the world, wasting resources and energy and producing a lot of emissions, and in so doing to give the army a new, preferably green, image.
It was during this period that an “environmental military-industrial complex” emerged, as Andrew Ross (1996) notes: “New acquisition regulations for weapon systems are being geared to ‘integrating environmental considerations’ into assessments of their ‘life-cycles.’ […] The military’s mighty surveillance networks are being revamped as ecological early-warning systems. What next?” The author sees it coming: “free-market environmentalism.” But was this, or something like it, actually the result?
It is well-known that military applications often prototype and forge civilian applications (e.g., the Internet). Thus, not surprisingly – though often overlooked – the emergence of the environmental military-industrial complex provides the historical context in which the ‘civilian’ ‘green economy’ has incubated. After the ‘dotcom crash’ (2000), however, it seemed unlikely that this model would be launched at all, as the panicked response to the economic crisis by then U.S. President George W. Bush was to withdraw from climate-related commitments to ‘protect the domestic economy.’ The financial crisis of 2007-08 then seemed so devastating, however, that the options for endless capital accumulation were reconsidered. This is where the ‘green economy’ came into play. Initiated after a major breakdown of the capitalist system – not in the wake of a fossil fuel-induced ‘natural disaster’ – it was clear from the outset that introducing the ‘green economy’ was not the result of a rethink in the interest of the environment, but rather the result of a search for a new business model. Meanwhile, its incubation context – the environmental military-industrial complex – points to the underlying self-understanding of this new option for capital to become a new universal currency, imposed by ecological reason rather than military force. That, at least, was the proclaimed ideal. The subtext was that the West, especially the U.S., which had built its hegemonic position on fossil capitalism, wanted to prolong and extend its dominance by forbidding this ‘dirty development’ to the rest of the world and dictating the conditions for it anew with a moral imperative (‘clean development’) – as the world market leader for ‘clean energies.’ This was also intended as a way of disciplining ‘emerging economies’ such as China. But things have turned out somewhat differently.
That the ‘green economy’ was coined as a universal currency in a supposedly unipolar era needs to be reassessed in an increasingly multipolar world. The ideology of the ‘green economy’ (or green capitalism) is hotly contested. There is China, which is leading what some ruling class fractions in the U.S. see as the ‘race for the future’ by “strategically harnessing the capitalist market dynamics of ‘creative-destruction’ to advance their transformative green ambitions through green growth” (Elizabeth Thurbon et al., 2023). There are a large number of state actors, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, etc., who are openly fighting to prolong fossil capitalism. And then there’s the fossil capital elite in the U.S., the country that initially proclaimed the ‘green economy,’ fighting for the same goals, and benefiting not least from the fact that U.S. global power is more fragile than ever, challenged by (would-be) representatives of a multipolar world.
Figures from the Carbon Majors Database present clear indications of this trend: “Although governments pledged in Paris [in 2016] to cut greenhouse gases, the analysis reveals that most mega-producers increased their output of fossil fuels and related emissions in the seven years after that climate agreement, compared with the seven years before. In the database of 122 of the world’s biggest historical climate polluters, the researchers found that 65% of state entities and 55% of private-sector companies had scaled up production.” (Jonathan Watts, 2024) In short, the database shows: In the midst of the worsening climate crisis, largely caused by the actors of fossil capitalism, these same actors are becoming increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of profit accumulation at the expense of the environment. They fuel not only (ostensibly ‘green’) armies and the arms industry, but all kinds of other ‘civilian’ sectors.
To be sure, the ‘economic war’ between ‘green’ capital and fossil capital is not only about whether a new ‘green’ capitalist class will replace the fossil capitalist class as the supplier of the world’s energy needs. It is also, as Tatjana Söding (2023) argues, about whether the fossil capitalist class will succeed in conquering the emerging markets of the ‘green’ economies with its own ‘green’ companies. Thus, once this corporate transformation is complete and the driving force of our world is no longer nominally fossil capital, because the surplus value generated no longer comes from burning fossil fuels, the negative effects of fossil capitalism – e.g., as a force shaping the class structure of a society, instilling desires, and shaping its relationship with nature – will continue to cause major problems in a world of renewable energies, should fossil capital defend its dominance of global energy markets.
But whichever capitalist class prevails en route to the ‘market of the future,’ we should not forget that ‘green’ capitalism – regardless of who runs it – is not the appropriate answer to the questions posed by the environmental crisis because, like any form of capitalism, it reinforces the endless accumulation of capital by promoting new forms of destructive appropriation of nature and labor. It now does so under the guise of ‘sustainability,’ while often relying on the infrastructure of fossil capital. In other words, if we resist overemphasizing the differences between fossil and ‘green’ capitalists, we can focus on the fact that the two have important things in common, especially the neglect of human and other-than-human life that underlies the endless accumulation of capital. This neglect is increasingly becoming a negation: a war against the planet as a sphere of life, a war on Earth.
Take the case of the automobile. Today we are asked to ignore the fact that the car, as a symbol of what Cara Daggett (2018) calls “petro-masculinity,” is one of our greatest obstacles to adapting to climate change, because only a massive shift to public transportation would do the job. We are also being asked to ignore that the auto industry – one of the largest industries on the planet – has always played a crucial role in the military, producing war vehicles and other products essential to (a specific) war. In short, we are being asked to forget that the automobile is the very tool, the very weapon, of a colonial-capitalist expansionism, which is the main cause of an unprecedented global poly-crisis, as evidenced by increasing militarization and wars, and an unfolding climate catastrophe.
The appeals to look the other way and to ensure individual survival are complemented and reinforced by the aggressive promotion of the car as the representative of ‘the people.’ Supported by industry, politics, and the mass media, these calls would have us believe that if you attack the car, you are attacking the body of ‘the people.’ Or, more specifically, if you replace the internal combustion engine with an electric one, or restrict car use by imposing speed limits, for example – the latter a small but effective intervention to achieve climate goals – you are harming the body of ‘the people.’ The fusion of the individual body with the body of the nation in the object of the car ultimately enables the rise of a right-wing car populism (The Zetkin Collective, 2024) compatible with liberal ideals that prioritize individual freedom.
All of this not only legitimizes but fuels the general demand for cars. ‘Green’ government and economic programs in turn fuel demand (for electric cars), not least through ‘world-saving narratives’ and subsidies. What is presented as a ‘green’ solution “perpetuates the worst of car-centrism” (Amelia Diehl, 2024) and adds “fuel to the fire” (Kathrin Hartman, 2024) by creating additional sources of CO2 emissions. To give an example, in the case of electric vehicles, it is not the commuters who drive to work that are the problem, but the embodied emissions – not the consumption, but the production emissions (e.g. the origin, sourcing and use of electricity and materials) (John Szabo, 2023). In short, the consequence of competition between the combustion engine and electric motor industries: The result: more cars in the world! And that means: more energy- and resource-intensive production, more emissions, etc. More environmental damage, more global warming, etc.
In view of this, would it be too much to say that the automobile is an instrument and a secret symbol of the war on Earth? Can we not see fruitful approaches to the struggle against this war in movements for car-free cities, in alliances between public transport unions and climate activists, in initiatives for the socialization of car company-dominated cities like Wolfsburg, in occupying car factories, such as the ex-GKN in Florence, and in striking workers who, like the VW workers council, say that it is unreasonable to build more cars – whether electric or diesel – and instead produce useful things like public transport? Can we not learn from the struggles of black workers in the U.S. auto industry at the intersection of environmental justice and labor rights, such as those initiated in 1969 by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, who rebelled against exposure to toxic chemicals in unbearably accelerated work cycles, and from the struggles of auto workers in Italy, such as those in the FIAT paint shops, which took place at roughly the same time: they turned the question of a healthy environment – both in the factory and in the surrounding neighborhoods – into a political question about the social purpose of industrial production.
In these times of escalating environmental and military violence, we must draw inspiration from such struggles in the centers of capital. And then we must confront a particular kind of world war – the war on Earth – and work together to find ways out of this dire situation. The “Pluriverse of Peace” project aims to contribute to this effort by placing the war on Earth in a larger context, examining it from different perspectives. In particular, we propose to focus on three different dimensions of this war – and struggles against it. These are described below in sections I, II, III, followed by our suggestions for what can be done.
I. Ecological costs of war
Today, turning an environment into a “death-world” (Achille Mbembe, 2019) can take various forms, such as using chemical weapons, including those that poison crops and groundwater, extensively deploying land mines, strategically instrumentalizing nuclear contamination, the large-scale destruction of ecosystems through bombing, etc. What is often overlooked, however, is that environmental war also manifests itself through fossil fuel emissions caused by armies and military apparatuses – more so in times of declared war, of course, but also in times of ‘peace.’ In other words, it’s not just about how wars can destroy the environment and how bad wars are for the environment. It’s also about the huge environmental impact of the military (not least nuclear) infrastructures that are created and maintained to deter enemies and potentially wage war, as Neta Crawford (2022) reminds us when she writes about the U.S. Army, which, despite or perhaps because of its proclaimed greening imperatives, is one of the best-studied ‘bad objects’ in this context.
For several years now, however, the media’s focus has been less on the U.S. Army and more on Russia’s military apparatus. This is hardly surprising. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the accompanying intensification and recalibration of capitalist warfare, including the emergence of climate change-related “hot cold wars” (Florin Poenaru, 2022), we see more clearly than ever that the expansion of militarization and the increase in (possible) wars lead to an increase in environmental damage caused by armies and the military-industrial complex.
Russia’s war has highlighted the environmental dimension of geo-economic and geopolitical interdependence. To keep their industries running as ‘engines of growth,’ countries like Germany – previously dependent on gas and oil from Russia – are reorganizing supply chains and securing new sources of energy and raw materials. New alliances are being forged. Regimes previously considered ‘incompatible with European standards’ (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Qatar) are declared ‘legitimate suppliers of energy and raw materials’ and thus rehabilitated as ‘compatible partners.’ Deals with new proto-colonies such as Serbia and with former colonies in Africa are touted as ‘partnerships of equals,’ contrary to the facts. The declared goal of these measures, to be secured by rearmament, is ‘energy sovereignty,’ which will stop at nothing, neither the ultra-nationalism and imperialism (soft and hard) it fuels, nor the ecological devastation it causes.
The insatiable urge for ‘energy sovereignty,’ often proclaimed as progress in the ‘green’ energy transition and cloaked in environmental rhetoric, extends even to the rehabilitation of nuclear energy as ‘clean’ because it can be labeled ‘non-fossil.’ The ‘greenwashing’ of nuclear power obscures (1) the danger of military use, (2) the myriad ecological problems associated with maintaining the nuclear infrastructure (according to Ursula Schönberger (2024), even in Germany, the model nuclear phase-out country, inadequate ‘solutions’ for temporary storage of nuclear waste become permanent arrangements due to a lack of state initiative and the irresponsibility of the private sector), and (3) the colonial context. What Navajo activists denounce as ‘radioactive colonialism’ or activists in ‘uranium-rich’ Africa criticize as ‘nuclear imperialism’ (Gabrielle Hecht, 2012) is painted in an innocent, morally sublime ‘green.’
But the call for ‘energy sovereignty’ also means ‘de-globalization’ in a very specific sense: It means recalibrating national economic interests according to the doctrine that ‘we must manage our interdependence with the world on our own terms.’ This doctrine shows that nation-states are increasingly unable to realize their national and/or imperial ambitions through forms of political mediation such as economic warfare; instead, they subject other countries, especially cities as critical nodes of power, to military attack (Vesna Bojičić-Dželilović; Volodymyr Ishchenko; Andreas Malm, 2024). This development is accompanied by the huge increase in global military spending – led by NATO (TNI, 2024) and eagerly followed by others. This has several environmental implications, two of which we would like to highlight.
First, the exorbitant increase in military spending is accompanied by the emergence of “a kind of war economy, financed by austerity measures that amount to an economic war” (Benoît Bréville, 2024) against the unemployed and pensioners, against refugees, migrant workers, and precarious workers in general, as well as against public sector workers. It occurs at the expense of public services. In short, the field of social reproduction is systematically neglected, reducing individual and collective capacities to care for each other and the environment – and provoking both widespread fatigue and resistance. Second, the increase in military spending goes hand in hand with a decrease in ‘ecological investment’ and a deprioritization of environmental and climate goals, radically reducing funding for adaptation to climate change. At the same time, international cooperation in this area, which is seen as the basis for a minimum of accountability and commitment to managing the global commons, is being pushed down the list of priorities. This means, among other things, that climate adaptation goals will be neglected.
A symptomatic and particularly thought-provoking example is the Arctic, the so-called ‘frontline of climate change’: Today, the Arctic is warming many times faster than the rest of the planet. Rising temperatures are thawing permafrost and melting sea ice. The phenomenon known as Arctic amplification occurs when white sea ice thins or disappears, allowing darker ocean or land surfaces to absorb more of the sun’s heat and release that energy back into the atmosphere: a feedback loop that not only accelerates the Arctic melting process but has global implications, because the Arctic affects the jet stream and causes extreme weather patterns around the world. Given that we have lost 75% of the volume of Arctic sea ice since the 1970s and the process is continuing, experts paint a picture of the devastating consequences of complete melting: Sea levels will rise to the point where entire island nations, coastal areas, and port cities will be flooded, global weather systems will change even more drastically, numerous ecosystems will be destroyed, etc.
The ecological escalation in the Arctic and its global consequences are part of the post-2022 program of intensified geo-economic and geopolitical competition. This is demonstrated not only by the unabatedly harmful activities of the worst climate polluters – the big corporations, powerful states, and military alliances – but also by the fact that they have the audacity to intensify their imperial activities in the Arctic itself. Not only do they deny their responsibility for the melting of the Arctic, they deliberately intensify it. They are pushing ahead with ruthlessly aggressive ‘protection of sovereignty’ in the maritime zones that make up the Arctic; they are advancing the energy- and resource-intensive competition for mineral resources deep under the ice and the rush to extract value from the seabed of the North Pole; and, finally, by melting the Arctic ice sheet and aggressively pursuing territorial claims, they are accelerating the creation of new sea lanes that will allow them to speed up global trade. In short, what is in fact a global common (the Arctic technically belongs to no nation-state or corporation) and thus could be a space of international cooperation, has been turned by capitalists and their armies into a zone of fierce rivalries and predatory expansion. Given the serious consequences and implications, we cannot help but call this an open war on Earth.
As the direct or indirect ecological costs of maintaining and activating military infrastructures increase and multiply, environmental war becomes a planetary condition. Scholars and activists are challenged to recalibrate anti-war and environmentalist strategies (Charlotte Cooper, 2024) – and the relationship among them. How do environmental justice movements and anti-war initiatives join forces? And how might they broaden this alliance? What can they learn from one another? How can nuclear power once again become a common denominator for peace activists and environmentalists? How can environmental justice movements and anti-war initiatives converge with existing struggles against austerity, which aims to defund our capacity to care for each other and the environment, and which in turn funds the militarization of our societies? How can we make the environmental struggles of indigenous peoples and international NGOs in the Arctic (and other ‘sacrifice zones’) more visible and link them to struggles in the urban centers of capital, connecting workers in the spheres of reproduction and production?
II. The killing of cities
Our attention to ‘a world at war’ should not be entirely consumed by the doings of would-be hegemons and imperial powers such as the U.S., China, Russia, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Iran, and the EU. That’s because on the peripheries of the orders imposed by these actors, wars have always been neglected in all their different facets, such as the breakdown of state order in cities as diverse as Beirut, Goma, Port-au-Prince, Bamako, Gaza City and Marioupol. Last but not least, it is a neglect of the total environmental violence first widely noticed by critical observers in the urban centers of the Balkans during the Yugoslav wars (1991-2001). In other words, a certain quality and scale of war is crucial to today’s definition of urbicide: the deliberate destruction of a city that involves the destruction of the entire infrastructure of capital and life that makes up a metropolis. This means the obliteration of everything that has made a city habitable as a social space and viable as a node in the global economy: from the poisoning of water and air, to the eradication and displacement of social life forms, to the deactivation of all supplies of essential goods. Witnessing the unfolding urbicide in Beirut, Mona Harb (2024) says: “The extent of the damage is large and spread in ways that also destroy the socioeconomic life, the social infrastructure, the economic infrastructure, civilian facilities, markets, gardens, parks, whatever makes up the fabric of that city. […] At the same time, it erases all the memories inhabitants have associated with all these sites.”
It is worth noting that urbicide is not limited to conventional war (also read: capitalism with gloves off) and that it cannot be reduced to an urban version of “necrocapitalism” (Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, 2008) that merely profits from the death and destruction caused by conventional war. Rather, the necrocapitalist effects of urbicide are also part of the normality of the dominant political-economic order, the everyday violence of capitalism with gloves on in places that are not officially at war. But that there is in fact war under the guise of peace is demonstrated by urban restructuring (and destruction) in the guise of aggressive neoliberal redevelopment, whose impact on urban social experience can be measured in varying degrees of urbicide: the destruction of communities, including the demolition of social space, social histories, solidarity infrastructures, and, often as a consequence of the former, individual lives. In other words, urbicide also occurs when capitalism with gloves on, under whatever pretext, eradicates the social infrastructure of life in order to build exclusive infrastructures of capital on top of them. This is often discussed in terms of gentrification and the like, but it should be seen in a larger context as urbicide, as a new capital city is built on the ruins of a city that was still semi-social, e.g., tearing down social housing inhabited by the poor and racialized and building houses for the market instead.
Cases often discussed in this context are the ‘Ghetto Plan’ in Copenhagen and the restructuring of the Bronx in New York. However, we would like to draw attention to the top-down ‘war’ on the Noailles district of Marseille (Charlotte Malterre-Barthes et al., 2020) and the bottom-up resistance to it. The city council simply let it fall into disrepair and then began to make cosmetic changes to the surface: beautifying the facades and ‘cleaning up’ the squares, preparing the ground for tourist shopping. And disaster. Because they did not do what was necessary (i.e., structural improvements, conservation and maintenance of the architectural substance, etc.) and instead carried out low-level attacks against the largely racialized residents (e.g. destruction of shared public spaces), resistance flared up in 2018. The city experienced one of the most intense social mobilizations in its history. In response, fortifications were erected to ensure that the superficial improvements would continue. Around the same time, a building whose structure had not been maintained collapsed, killing several people. Instead of reconsidering the situation, the city administration intensified its strategy, using the collapse to legitimize ‘security measures’ in the form of mass evictions that decimated (and weakened) the resisting residents and allowed the commercialization of the dilapidated fabric to expand. Resistance to these urbicidal processes is still alive. At the same time, the neighborhood has become an object of ‘speculation with all kinds of risks.’
Another dimension of city-killing with gloves on comes in the form of deliberate destruction by indirect means: with the help of ‘natural’ disasters. For example, in New Orleans and Gaziantep (hit by a hurricane in 2005 and an earthquake in 2023, respectively), capital-corrupted urban planning prepared the ground for large-scale destruction and – since the interests and power structures of capital remained unchallenged – then completed the necrocapitalist job. The latter reminds us that recovery plans for cities should not be left to capitalists, but rather should be addressed from the bottom up from within anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles. In this context, it is worth noting that ‘natural’ disasters are also instrumentalized when capitalists are increasingly worried about profits in a sector where for some time they have been able to make good business out of the climate crisis: the insurance sector. In the U.S., for example, the country’s largest insurer, State Farm, has not written a single new homeowners policy in a year. 72,000 policies have been canceled. The reason: the rapidly rising risk of catastrophe. This shows that the climate crisis is affecting more and more areas of the world, not only as a destructive force unleashed by capitalism, but also as a ‘crisis response’ by capitalism withdrawing its ‘recovery services’ where insurance is no longer profitable. As a result, cities in countries not only such as Tuvalu, Angola, and Bangladesh, but also Australia, Spain, Greece, and Italy, are becoming potential victims of profit-driven, ‘natural’ disaster-aided urbicide.
In short, cities, as the infrastructures of life for more than half of the world’s population, are increasingly collapsing under the immense pressure of extreme weather events induced by climate change: floods, hurricanes, heat waves, etc. We are forced to worry about our individual (rather than collective) existence and asked not to look more closely at the causes of these environmental pressures, which would reveal that they are caused by colonial-capitalist globalization, as the planetary environment increasingly returns the violence to which it has been subjected for centuries. We are being made complicit in the capitalists’ neglect of the causes of our crises and their business-as-usual dogmatism. Meanwhile, this neglect and business-as-usual dogmatism are leading to both 1) an increasingly intense open war against cities and 2) a gradual, low-intensity urbicide: the slow violence that kills cities. The latter goes hand in hand with lethal violence against women, racialized communities, and the urban poor in general (Françoise Vergès, 2022). This shows that the often fluid boundaries between ‘gloves off’ and ‘gloves on’ capitalism are becoming more porous. At the same time, the boundaries between using direct and indirect means to deliberately destroy the urban infrastructures of human and other-than-human life are further blurred.
Emancipatory struggles are increasingly challenged to approach (former) urban space as ground zero. Under these conditions, all processes of collective action are slowed down and complicated, because those affected are initially preoccupied for years, if not decades, with rebuilding a livable urban environment. The question of what potentially enables interwoven forms of social, spatial, economic, and ecological justice, and thus could give rise to just urban ecologies, challenges us to confront the most basic human and other-than-human needs and reclaim them from the grip of capital. How can we develop common strategies to deal with the damage caused by capitalism with gloves off and capitalism with gloves on? In other words: Is there a ‘holistic’ approach to dealing with destruction in contexts as different as the Bronx and Marioupol? What does it mean to design and build an eco-feminist and eco-socialist city on the ruins of capitalism? What (not yet destroyed and still) existing structures can be mobilized or repurposed to build an environment for human and other-than-human life? How can we reinvent organizational forms and processes so that ‘recovery’ and ‘reconstruction’ are not lost to the usual suspects, the ruling class, and are centered around the most vulnerable of the remaining local populations as well as the displaced, and are realized from the bottom up? How can urban struggles confront and disarm the machineries of colonial-capitalist environmental war and prefigure ways of living in peace with other-than-human life?
III. Environmental war disguised as environmentalism
Destroying or fundamentally altering an environment while claiming to save it can be called environmental war disguised as environmentalism. This approach perhaps most perfidiously reflects the mindset after 1989, the period when the environmental military-industrial complex emerged and the idea of the universal currency of free-market environmentalism was coined. The latter has been conceived, to reiterate, as a new universal currency imposed by ecological reason rather than military force. If this is the proclaimed ideal, the reality is somewhat different, as even a quick look back at the previously mentioned PR blather referenced by Andrew Ross reveals. It included not only the aforementioned ‘greening of weapons systems’ and the ‘redesign of military surveillance networks as ecological early warning systems,’ but also the promise to return religious and sacred sites occupied by the military to indigenous peoples. Part of the greenwashing campaign to reinvent the image of the U.S. Army for a post-Cold War era, this promise helped to erase from public consciousness the fact that the much-vaunted post-Cold War recalibration of warfare has done nothing to change the ongoing violence against indigenous peoples and their lands, as Deborah Cowen (2017) reminds us.
Today, military or police force is being used more and more aggressively to claim land and steal it from the people who have lived in symbiosis with it (Harsha Walia, 2023). This state-sanctioned or state-organized violence can take the form of occupation, eviction, expulsion, murder, and sometimes a combination of these – violence that is often linked to and reproduces colonial-capitalist power structures. For example, assassinations of environmental activists in general, and land defenders in particular (Eliana Otta, 2022), have increased significantly in the last two decades around the world; a large number of them have been committed in Latin America, disproportionately affecting indigenous people. Were there no resistance and no documentation by NGOs such as Global Witness and projects like Luto Verde, these murders would be covered up. Were there no such opposition, only the official propaganda would go down in history; catchy slogans like ‘saving the land from environmental destruction’ and ‘saving the climate’ would go unchecked, smoothly reproducing the claim that ecosystems can be saved by appropriating them for capitalist exploitation and use. Such slogans are used to legitimize the introduction of far-reaching interventions in ecosystems. Examples include the eradication of biodiversity for monocultures, such as tree planting (Aïda Delpuech, 2024), or “green grabbing” (Catherine Corson, 2012), often in the name of ‘energy transition’ in the Global North or in the name of ‘conservation.’
To give an example of the former: The gradual escalation of the conflict between Morocco and Algeria over Western Sahara, which supposedly ‘calls for a military solution,’ and which has led to an economic and resource war in Europe involving France and Spain, among others, has overshadowed the more or less silent appropriation of land and resources for ostensibly ecological purposes. In the occupied territories of Western Sahara, so-called renewable energy projects (solar and wind energy) are being pushed forward without much international attention, though they are being carried out against the Sahrawi people and on their occupied land. As Hamza Hamouchene (2022) notes: “There are three operational wind farms in occupied Western Sahara. A fourth is under construction in Boujdour, while several are in the planning stage. These wind farms are part of the portfolio of Nareva, the wind energy company that belongs to the holding company of the Moroccan royal family. 95% of the energy that the Moroccan state-owned phosphate company OCP needs to exploit Western Sahara’s non-renewable phosphate reserves in Bou Craa are made from windmills. […] It is clear that these renewable projects are being used to entrench the occupation by deepening Morocco’s ties to the occupied territories, with the obvious complicity of foreign capital and companies.”
This state-sanctioned or state-organized violence has taken on a new quality since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The invasion has created the basis for legitimizing the declaration of ‘energy sovereignty’ – often cloaked in environmental rhetoric – as having no alternative, something to be achieved at all costs. The case of Western Sahara clearly shows these costs: The race for ‘energy sovereignty’ fuels the predatory imperialism of European states and their partners in the Global South. But this race also fuels ‘internal imperialism.’ As Shiri Pasternak and Jessica Dempsey (2022) warn us, ‘onshoring’ initiatives to secure critical minerals domestically for North America’s ‘green transition’ intensify the violence against indigenous peoples and their lands – green grabbing in the name of ‘energy sovereignty,’ and ‘saving the planet.’
Other proclaimed goals of green grabbing, such as ‘conservation,’ are in turn promoted as ‘solutions’ to combat biodiversity loss and climate change. Currently, 30 percent of the globe is being turned into ‘protected areas’ and managed under so-called ‘nature-based solutions.’ The consequences are devastating. Evidence shows that indigenous people understand and manage their environment better than anyone else. Eighty percent of the world’s biodiversity is found in tribal territories (Baher Kamal, 2017), and when indigenous peoples have secure rights over their land, they achieve at least equal, if not better, conservation results, at a fraction of the cost of conventional conservation programs. But in Africa and Asia, governments, corporations, and NGOs are stealing vast tracts of land from tribal peoples and local communities under the false pretense that the land is necessary for ‘conservation.’
Take ‘wildlife conservation’ in Africa: The colonial Kenyan state appropriated indigenous land beginning in 1904 to make it available to Europeans for agriculture and big-game hunting. In the post-colonial period, beginning in the 1960s, the use of the land for lucrative wildlife tourism became increasingly popular. In the course of this, the Maasai’s nomadic pastoralism was drastically curtailed: There have been forced relocations, attempts to settle the Maasai, and restrictions on grazing rights and access to water sources. The Maasai have resisted this existential threat to their livelihoods by illegally expanding grazing areas and killing rhinos and elephants. Although not a major factor in the region’s wildlife loss, international ‘conservation’ organizations have portrayed Maasai population growth as a threat to wildlife. In doing so, they legitimized the coercive and sometimes violent means by which the Kenyan government enforced a ‘conservation’ strategy inherited from colonialism, perpetuating post-colonial capitalism and green colonialism (Miriam Lang et al., 2024).
Ultimately, displacing those who have cared for the land means both depriving them of their livelihoods and preventing sustainable forms of land stewardship. Josefa Sanchez Contreras (2023), member of the Zoque People of San Miguel Chimalapa, Oaxaca, Mexico, states: “As peoples, we have lived on and cared for these lands and rivers for thousands of years. We have defended the communal and collective nature of land tenure against privatization and colonial policies. For this reason, and in light of the climate emergency, we believe that to be able to discuss conservation and energy transition, one needs to put at its center dispossession, violence, and violations of human rights, of Indigenous rights, of communal territories, and life – and the devastation of biodiverse areas in our territories perpetuated by wind companies in the name of mitigating climate change.”
So we have to ask: What can we learn from indigenous peoples in general and land defenders in particular about how to oppose forms of environmentalism that are advanced as green colonialism and green grabbing? What does it mean to fight them as forms of the war on Earth? How can those who are directly affected by this war and those who are more indirectly affected, e.g., in capitalist centers, join forces?
What can be done?
Overcoming environmental war as a planetary condition – in short: a war on Earth – will require a lot of work in the areas of research, awareness, and education on the one hand, and movement and alliance building and organizing on the other. Yes, we need a new global peace movement. And the basic mindset is apparently already in place. According to the Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024, large parts of the world’s population are open to climate protection (and demand it from politicians) – in Germany 67%, in the U.S. and Russia 66%, in China 73%, in Brazil 85%, in Iran 88%. At the same time, 86% worldwide call for an end to wars and geopolitical rivalries and for cooperation on climate protection (Sarah Bel, 2024).
But this ‘international grassroots consensus’ is overshadowed by a number of things. First, there are also large majorities that want to cling to the habits and modes of production shaped by colonial-capitalist modernity, and thus remain loyal to or complicit with those forces that caused war and ecological collapse, and prevent peacebuilding and adaptation to climate change. Second, there is rising nationalism, including ‘liberation nationalism,’ and the right-wing, reactionary, and religious instrumentalization of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism (Saltanat Shoshanova and Marina Solntseva, 2024), all of which thrive not least on inequalities in the global division of labor and the unevenly distributed access to the infrastructures of life including ecological commons: fresh air, fresh water, etc. As if this were not enough of a challenge for emancipatory politics, there is the resurgence of campism on the left (Dan La Botz, 2022) and the failure to practice solidarity with the victims of the war on Earth, regardless of which side of the competing ruling classes they are subsumed under as ‘national subjects,’ e.g., the failure of so many on the left to politically co-articulate critiques of anti-Semitism and racism and instead contribute to pitting the victims of violence against each other, which we believe is one of the key factors enabling genocidal politics. What can be done?
To be clear, the participants in the discussion we have initiated are not primarily those most affected by war and climate collapse (often objectified as ‘victims’), but a wide range of ‘implicated subjects’ – from those active in anti-capitalist movements to those raising their voices among the otherwise ‘silent majority.’ All share the conviction that the causes of our dire planetary predicament are systemic, that war, climate collapse and the cost-of-living crisis are not simply anthropogenic, but due to capitalism. If this is the common denominator, then the question remains how our implication in the system of social relations called capitalism can itself be challenged and overcome, how in the process we can align ourselves with those most affected by this system, how we as ‘implicated subjects’ can center our micro-politics around the struggles and anti-capitalist agency of those who exist, resist, and create, even though their lives have been completely disrupted and shattered by the war on Earth.
“Implicated subjects,“ as Michael Rothberg (2019) explains, “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. Less “actively” involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the “passive” bystander, either. Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators. In other words, implicated subjects help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present; apparently direct forms of violence turn out to rely on indirection. Modes of implication – entanglement in historical and present-day injustices – are complex, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory, but are nonetheless essential to confront in the pursuit of justice.”
Given that ‘implicated subjects’ constitute a significant portion of the world’s population, we need to ask what specific forms of political action result from this, especially in terms of alliance politics. And since we are dealing with a situation of planetary interdependence, we need to sharpen this question in internationalist terms: How can we resist the logic of the 24/7 real-time media and not fall prey, as they want, to the spectacularization of a single crisis hotspot at the expense of all the other ‘hot’ conflicts? If we are, as Fred Moten (2023) suggests, “capable of having a kind of complex vision of the issues at hand, and [if] that vision must allow us to look at something very specific in a particular local context, but also globally,” then how can we focus our attention and energies on local escalations without neglecting the translocal, transregional, and transnational contexts? How can we do justice to one urgency without neglecting all the others? How can we take a concurrently systemic, internationalist, and situational approach and organize active solidarity with victims of war in a way that does not exclude other victims of violence? What does it mean to act in solidarity and form coalitions beyond the individual and group divisions that capitalism enforces and perpetuates – ultimately pitting the victims of capitalist violence against each other? How can we confront the environmental war of the ruling classes across national borders as well as across identitarian, gender, and ethnic lines? How can we intervene in the roots of capitalist structures and relations from within situational entanglements?
Editor’s note: The bibliography of the article is listed here.