Description
Amid proliferating and intensifying social, ecological and armed disasters, Europe is militarising at pace. While states across the continent gut spending on public services and fall chronically short on climate mitigation, arms factories and military training and testing sites expand at triple speed – expanding as well the life-cycle harms and geopolitical ecologies of “defence readiness.” Despite the vast socioecological costs of arms production, trade and use, military-industrial expansion is legitimised through the circulation of what I call the “arms = peace = sustainability” narrative. This narrative represents arms production as a precondition not only for peace and democracy, but also social and environmental sustainability; indeed, for “a stable and sustainable future” (European Defence Agency 2023). Through the concept of “weaponised sustainability”, this paper captures how European arms networks are rewriting ethical finance frameworks and intensifying their green- and social-washing campaigns: putting “sustainability in action,” as suggested by BAE Systems. In effect, the narrative and material conflation of sustainability with military-industrial growth is enabling increased public and private investments in arms, while diverting resources from people and planetary wellbeing and silencing public critique of arms production and profiteering. I argue for rethinking sustainability altogether by foregrounding anti-imperial and anti-militarist approaches to socioecological harm reduction.
