In this long-read Michel Pimbert Emeritus Professor of Agroecology and Food Politics at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience examines how militarism shapes contemporary food systems, influencing technologies, institutions, and ecological outcomes. He shows how overcoming these dynamics requires building cultures of peace grounded in cooperation, care, and democratic control of food systems. Such cultures demand deep organisational learning: the ability to unlearn militarised habits of hierarchy and control, and to cultivate practices of listening, co-creation, and non-violent transformation. By highlighting agroecology and food sovereignty as pathways toward these shifts, he invites organisations and movements to actively embody the peaceful futures they seek to advance. This is the first in a series of posts on agroecology and militarism.
Reports and livestreamed images from countries like Myanmar, Palestine, Sudan, and Ukraine leave us in no doubt about the scale of death, human suffering, and destruction caused by today’s wars and violent conflicts. For example, unimaginable numbers of women and children have been killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza. Ecocide, – as a military strategy of unliveability – , has targeted farmland, wells, olive tree orchards, and coastal fishing in Gaza resulting in countless deaths through famine and malnutrition that will be felt for generations.
The culture of militarism is all pervasive today and deeply impacts food, agriculture and land use. How might agroecology and food sovereignty advocates explicitly reject overt and more subtle forms of militarism in their own organisations and everyday work? What roles can agroecology and food sovereignty organisations play in systemic transformations for peace – if any?
After briefly describing the business of war and its impacts on food systems, I identify some of the cultural values of agroecology and food sovereignty that challenge militarism and can help build cultures of peace. Next, I reflect on how these values – and the practices they give rise to – could be further strengthened through processes of popular education, professional reorientation, and organisational transformation within institutions and movements advancing agroecology and food sovereignty.
Militarism and war undermine food systems
Everywhere, war and armed conflicts directly disrupt food production, distribution, and access as farms, markets, and transport networks are destroyed. Agricultural land is often contaminated or made unusable for years – war literally trashes the environment and leaves a toxic legacy. Conflict-induced displacement increases food insecurity as displaced populations usually struggle to access adequate food and water.
The ecology of food systems has also been significantly damaged by inputs from the weapons industry, including nerve gases used as insecticides and ammonium stocks converted from making bombs to producing commercial nitrogen fertilisers after World War 2. As agriculture and the military become more closely entangled, new agricultural technologies are derived from weapons of mass destruction and cyber-security, – including military drones used to spray toxic herbicides in precision farming, AI powered surveillance used to monitor and control farm workers, and agro-chemical companies such as Bayer producing agricultural pesticides as well as white phosphorus for Israel’s military use in Gaza. Defence companies and military personnel are actively diversifying into the agri-tech sector as part of a growing ‘agro-military complex’. In turn, this civilian use in food and agriculture significantly contributes to the continuous improvement and refinement of military technology.
Food systems are increasingly disrupted by the large-scale environmental impacts of militarism. The production and use of weapons, including AI powered systems, significantly contribute to climate change, biodiversity loss, and the overshoot of safe planetary boundaries for agricultural production and the survival of human and non-human-nature. For example, military greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are responsible for an estimated 5.5% to global emissions. If counted as a single nation, global militaries would rank as the fourth-largest carbon emitter worldwide. Systemically, militarism depends on the relentless exploitation of nature for minerals, rare earth metals, oil and gas, land and water, generating massive environmental destruction and pollution.
But the business of war is thriving today: all this death and destruction is a huge bonanza for the military-industrial complex and its shareholders. For example, data shows Britain’s defence companies have outperformed other sectors, even their peers in the US, particularly during the ongoing Ukraine war and Israel’s war on Gaza. In the USA, the top five weapons makers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman– received over US$116 billion in Pentagon contracts while paying their top two dozen executives a total of US $287 million, according to the most recent data available. Universities are being weaponised as new funding closely links academia and defence to provide research expertise for military technology and strategy.
Militarism is creating scarcity out of abundance – draining the public purse while creating deserts and perpetual wars. There are more active conflicts today than any time since World War II – bankrolled and supplied by a military industrial complex aligned with agri-tech. According to the world’s top 10 investment management companies that control a huge part of global wealth (close to USD 50 trillion), financing the military-industrial-academic complex is the most profitable and lucrative activity today. Unprecedented amounts of public and private funds are now being used for militarisation, – the process by which societies organize themselves for military conflict and violence (preparations for war, war itself, and post-conflict reconstruction). The ideology of militarism which legitimates and glorifies war and violence is also being promoted through lavish funding. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated global military expenditure at USD 2,443 billion in 2024. This is the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI and the steepest year-on-year increase since 2009.
Divestments in weapons manufacturers as well as boycotts and criminal sanctions on states and individuals responsible for genocide and war crimes are increasingly being called for by youth and elders for peace. Defunding the military-industrial-academic complex and redirecting finance to socially useful and environmentally sustainable production is indeed an idea gaining ground, – and this is key for building cultures of peace.
However, militarism cannot be “cured” by only reducing the production and use of weapons. Militarism is closely entangled with colonial and imperial history as well as the frontier mentality of capitalism and toxic masculinities. The development and use of military power were essential for the aggressive expansion, acquisition, and maintenance of colonial empires. Militarism is crucially important in justifying and therefore enabling the global plunder of material resources (fossil fuels, minerals, rare earth metals, biomass….) which is projected to increase by almost 60% from 2020 levels by 2060, from 100 to 160 billion tons.
Whilst essential, disarmament is therefore not enough in and of itself. One must also change the political economy and cultural mindset that produces war and violent conflict which destroys the lives and life-giving ecologies of so many for the enrichment of the few. This calls for a holistic transformation of structures, cultures, institutions, and production throughout society to build peaceful social systems.
What roles can agroecology and food sovereignty organisations and practitioners play in this systemic transformation for peace – if any?
Cultivating decolonial and non-patriarchal values
Militarism is a discourse that glorifies war and violence, and justifies its means by portraying a righteous battle for civilisation over barbarism, with narratives that connect colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and the dehumanisation of others. The cultural hegemony of militarism permeates most of today’s institutions and organisations – including many of those related to food, agriculture and land use.
Agroecology practitioners and food sovereignty advocates can consciously call out and reject the values and practices that favour militarism and domination. Attitudes, behaviours, knowledges, and values that actively support peace can be nurtured in everyday practices and ways of working in universities, farmer-led trainings, social movements, and territories of life. Two areas stand out here:
1 – Uprooting patriarchal values and toxic masculinities
The all-pervasive ideology of militarism can insidiously encourage patriarchal practices in food, farming and land use. For example, the toxic masculinities that fuel militarism often associate masculine identity with aggression, dominance, strength, authority, and power. These attitudes and behaviours can end up excluding more empathetic and collaborative approaches, which are seen as less “masculine”. In turn, this can contribute to cultures of gender-based violence and sexual assault – especially when power dynamics are reinforced through dominance and aggression.
Image: patriarchal values and toxic masculinities
The urgent need to uproot patriarchal values and toxic masculinities is openly recognised by the agroecology and food sovereignty movement. “If we do not eradicate violence towards women within the movement, we will not advance in our struggles, and if we do not create new gender relations, we will not be able to build a new society” (La Vía Campesina 2008). Discussions in the food sovereignty movement increasingly focus on the attitudes, behaviours, and practices needed to foster a more diverse, nonviolent, and inclusive countryside, and to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, and queer persons in rural areas so as to ensure a more inclusive, nonbinary approach to sex- and gender-based discrimination.
Similarly, many activist scholars seek to deracinate male privilege in their own workplaces by mobilising against the following forms of silent violence:
- Women as well as black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) often experience all kinds of micro-aggressions and discriminations in university research and teaching as well as in non-governmental organisations that work on agroecology and food sovereignty.
- The salaries and chances of progression of women and BIPOC are usually significantly lower than those of white male colleagues doing similar jobs. And despite some notable exceptions, there is a conspicuous absence of women leaders in research and training institutes on agroecology and food sovereignty – the more so if women are also BIPOC.
- Islamophobic and racist masculinities which marginalise and exclude BIPOC and Muslims by othering them as ‘barbaric’, ‘irrational, or as ‘threats’ to Western civilisation.
- Agroecology and food sovereignty scholars and popular educators have not yet adopted an explicit gender approach that can problematise social relations in patriarchal contexts – despite some critical perspectives. Nor does research and teaching adequately value the role(s) of peasant women, or make more visible the relationship between women’s and care work with socio-environmental sustainability.
Reversing these discriminations against women and different ethnic groups can help challenge militarism and help build cultures of peace. Women in positions of leadership can often reduce the likelihood of violent conflict as well as increase the prospects for peaceful resolution of existing conflicts. And they can also bring different perspectives on what peace and planetary-healing mean in practice.
2 – Nurturing values for cognitive justice and decolonisation
Agroecological and food sovereignty solutions are not delivered as top down assumptions of superiority. They are developed through respectful intercultural dialogues and they build on peoples’ knowledge, priorities, and capacity to innovate. People engaged in co-enquiry are viewed as knowledgeable and active actors with the ability to produce and validate knowledge. In practice this means that when agroecological scientists co-create knowledge with indigenous and peasant farmers, they aim to shift from a transfer of technology model of R&D that seeks to replace one way of knowing with another, to a decentralized, bottom up, and participatory process that values knowledge co-creation tailored to unique local contexts.
Agroecology and food sovereignty practices are thus grounded in ideas of cognitive justice: they recognize different knowledge systems and their fundamental right to exist along with the ecologies and territories they depend on for their renewal. The emphasis is on enabling respectful dialogue between plural knowledges, rather than negating or advancing one knowledge system over the other.
However, many professional attitudes and behaviour learnt by researchers and powerful outsiders can often damage the co-creation of knowledge with indigenous and peasant farmers.
For example, cognitive justice is routinely undermined by dominant and superior behaviour, colonial and racist attitudes, sexism and gender discrimination, upper to upper bias, taking without giving, rushing, and being extractive. Subtle and not-so-subtle Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples as well as the dehumanisation of indigenous ‘others’ by land grabbing European settler colonial projects and States (Australia, Israel, North America, and New Zealand) further destroy the possibility of cognitive justice between different knowledge systems. Moreover, various forms of ‘environmental orientalism’ and neo-Malthusian crisis narratives continue to portray the environment of African, Arab, and Asian worlds as degraded by ‘ignorant locals’ and ‘ecological savages’ who are incapable of caring for the land, or that the land itself is empty. In these colonial logics, the knowledges of women and other sexualities and genders are usually doubly erased.
All too often, viable peasant agroecologies and food systems are also misunderstood and neglected because scientists and other professionals believe that peoples’ knowledge associated with them is childish and irrational. This is particularly true where food provisioning and land care is based on a sophisticated kin-centric ecology in which indigenous peoples view both themselves and nature as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins. Indigenous communities sustain and secure their foods through culturally specific interactions with their kin — that include plants, animals, water, and all the natural elements of an ecosystem. Polarizing white supremacist value judgments usually ‘rubbish’ these knowledge-based cosmovisions that have allowed indigenous ‘architects of abundance’ to sustain highly complex and biodiversity-rich agroecologies in forests, grasslands, wetlands, and semi-arid regions.
Image: architecture of abundance
To different degrees, these enduring colonial and racist values are part of the dominant culture of organisations that work on environment and development, – they are infused in the presumptions of superiority of environmentalism and developmentalism.
In this context, agroecology practitioners and food sovereignty advocates are constantly challenged to nurture empathy, respect, and solidarity in their work and organisations as well as in their relations with fellow human beings and non-human nature. These are important pre-requisites for cognitive justice. Moreover, without these enabling values, enduring prejudice will not only continue to undermine the possibility of seeing ordinary people as knowledgeable actors who are capable of solving complex problems. It will keep on destroying the mutual respect and trust needed to build durable peace.
Transforming organisations and learning for change
How might decolonial and non-patriarchal values be encouraged more in agroecology and food sovereignty organisations? What can be done to unlearn attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs that feed on tropes and fear of an ‘irrational other’ to sustain militarism and undermine cultures of peace? How can these cultural changes amplify the wider structural transformations advocated by agroecology and food sovereignty movements?
Changing attitudes and ingrained patterns of behaviour involves to firstly recognise and acknowledge, and then abandon ingrained behaviours and ways of working that have become routine and habitual (unlearning). This often requires large scale and recurring professional re-orientation and training that focus on experiential learning and the importance of values, ways of being, and relating with empathy and respect.
In practice, this means building the capacity of leaders, technical and scientific staff in the participatory skills, attitudes and behaviour needed to learn from, – and work with -, people (mutual listening, respect, gender sensitivity, cooperation, empathy etc.), decolonize research methodologies, and engage in self-organizing horizontal processes rooted in cognitive justice.
Image : imagine peace (credits: Zaur-ibrahimov)
Examples of learning processes that change attitudes and behaviour include:
- Undoing patriarchal mentalities in men. Women’s liberation movements in Kurdish society emphasise the need to re-educate men. Going beyond simple calls for more equality, Kurdish women in liberated Kurdistan regularly organise educational experiences for men that focus on 5,000 years of male hegemony. Classes are facilitated for weeks, or even months, for those serious about ‘killing and transforming the dominant man’.
- Hands on training in participatory learning and action methods, with an emphasis on changing the dominant attitudes and behaviours of scientists and other professionals.
- Popular education programs on dismantling racism (including anti-Black, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-indigeneity) that are designed to ensure the transfer of inter-generational knowledge and strengthen food sovereignty movements.
- Place-based and transformational experiential learning in participatory action research (PAR), participatory video, and respectful intercultural dialogues between indigenous peoples and scientists.
More generally, the experience and insights of radical humanistic psychology also offer approaches and methods to deal with the difficult – and often taboo – questions of change in individual life orientation, attitudes and behaviour as well as growth in empathic understanding and concern for others.
However, professional re-orientation and training must be seen as part of a much broader process of transformation in which organisations examine and re-shape all or most aspects of their programmes and procedures to actively contribute to building cultures of peace. This is necessary for at least two reasons.
First, vertical structures can be seen as a root of militarism and war because they facilitate the maintenance of elite power and suppress non-hierarchical and self-reliant forms of human interaction. In many ways, the military is indeed a model bureaucracy.
Second, many constraints undermine equity and caring relations in organisations, – including in universities, government departments, peasant federations, and non-governmental organisations. For example, women as well as BIPOC often find that the rules of the game are heavily biased against them in bureaucracies because they have been historically structured around the physical needs, capabilities and the political interests of men who designed them in the first place.
Fostering non-patriarchal and decolonial values along with people-friendly attitudes and behaviours thus often implies fundamental changes in the operational procedures, reward and incentive systems, culture, career patterns, and use of time and space within organisations promoting agroecology and food sovereignty. This includes changes in:
- Leadership and management styles: from verticalist and efficiency-led to consultative and “nurturing”. Promoting leadership and management styles that are participatory rather than hierarchical, masculinist, and based on command and control as well as cultures of blame. Ensuring that senior and middle-management positions are occupied by competent facilitators of organizational change with the vision, commitment and ability to reverse discriminatory biases in the ideologies, disciplines and practices of the organization.
- Organisational culture and value systems: from target-oriented and competitive to quality-oriented and co-operative. Emphasise organisational cultures and values that reverse colonial attitudes, racism, gender discriminations, and neo-Malthusian environmental crisis narratives in the ideologies and disciplines animating organizations and their projects.
- Organisational structures: encourage shifts from hierarchical and rigidly bureaucratic structures to ‘flat’, self-organizing, flexible, and responsive organizations.
- Practical arrangements and the use of space and time. Redesign the workplace to meet the diverse needs of women, men, BIPOC, disabled people, and older staff and to also help them fulfil their obligations to work with empathy and more closely with peasant farmers and other citizens (timetables, career paths, working hours, provision of paternity and maternity leave, dining room and lavatories, childcare provisions, mini sabbaticals, promotion criteria etc.).
- Incentive and accountability systems: establish incentive and accountability systems that are equitable for women and men, and do not discriminate against race, ethnicity, age, disability or sexual orientation.
- Governance: diversify the governance and the membership of budget allocation committees to include representatives of diverse citizen groups and axes of difference (age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation etc.) in organisations promoting agroecology and food sovereignty.
The wider context of systemic transformation
Countering the dominant agri-food regime and its violence is already an aim of emancipatory and transformative agroecology as well as food sovereignty movements with a strong anti-colonial and feminist dimension. But by mobilising to consciously and explicitly reject the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist values of militarism in their own work-places, agroecology practitioners and food sovereignty movements could contribute much more to building cultures of peace (Box 1).
| Box 1. Building durable peace through agroecology and food sovereignty practices Organisational cultures and practices that systematically challenge the values of militarism can greatly expand the peace-building potential of agroecology and food sovereignty. They can take the following to a radically new level: Cognitive, gender and intersectional justice: developing and deepening ways of knowing, pedagogies, new knowledge, organisations, institutions, policies, and practices that can further challenge and reverse intersecting coloniality, homophobia, patriarchy, environmental orientalism, and racism. Ecologies for planetary healing: reorganizing the material basis of agri-food systems in the image of nature to reflect ecological processes, keeping within planetary limits through degrowth in the consumption of material resources (fossil fuels, metals…) in production and supply chains, and regenerating biodiversity (genetic, species, ecological), resilience, and sustainability—from farm plots to landscapes. Economies of care: adopting plural forms of economic exchange (for instance, markets with and without money, guaranteed citizen income) to ensure care for human and non-human nature, material security, sustainable livelihoods, solidarity, and well-being in re-localized agri-food systems within territories in which economics is re-embedded in society. Democratic governance: expanding people’s direct participation, voice and agency in the governance of agri-food systems. Actively supporting gender and ethnically diverse deliberative processes and governance architectures that work bottom-up to put people at the centre of decision-making and institutional choices – from local to global levels. |
However, the large-scale organisational changes and training programs proposed here will require substantially new funding. Agroecology and food sovereignty continue to be massively under-financed – despite an abundance of money available. Accessing this finance will involve (i) redirecting finance, subsidies, and research away from industrial agri-food systems that receive most funding (ii) using taxation to access hitherto untapped resources – including taxing global wealth and corporate windfall profits, abolishing tax havens and other tax loopholes, reducing military spending, and cancelling debts of low-income countries.
Past and present struggles that seek to convert military production to peaceful ends can inspire a new generation of agroecology and food sovereignty activists. For example, the Lucas Aerospace worker’s plan for socially useful production is an emblematic example of how employees have tried to uproot militarism in their workplaces by reclaiming control over the production of knowledge and their ways of working. The underlying ideas of the Lucas plan for socially useful production are still relevant today for building cultures of peace.
Inevitably, organisational transformations and efforts that subvert militarism, pyramids of power, and the war economy will be met with considerable resistance. Meaningful changes will depend on agroecology practitioners and food sovereignty advocates developing wider alliances and countervailing power against plutocracies.
Building peace now!
Alliances of citizens, peasant organisations, researchers, and educators are well placed to develop powerful counter-narratives to the war economy and militarism. Activist scholars, peasant farmers, youth, and social movements struggling for agroecology and food sovereignty can choose to intentionally cultivate and mobilise values for peace in their own organisations and ways of working. In many ways, this is about walking the talk of empathy, radical love, and solidarity with human and non-human nature. “Peace must be built; webs of togetherness must be woven, humanizing where there has been dehumanization, and depolarizing where there has been polarization” (Galtung, 2011).
References
Galtung, J., 2011. Peace and Conflict Studies as Political Activity. In: Matyók, T., J. Senehi, and S. Byrne (Eds). Critical Issues in Peace and Conflict Studies. Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy. New York: Lexington books.
La Via Campesina, 2008. Declaration of the III Assembly of the Women of La Via Campesina. Maputo, October 17–18.
Author
Michel Pimbert
Emeritus Professor of Agroecology and Food Politics
Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience
Coventry University, UK
E-mails: ae4430@coventry.ac.uk and michelpimbert@mac.com
