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About this talk

In recent years, the military has assumed an increasingly prominent role in environmental governance across diverse political regimes, with soldiers being deployed to fight forest fires, police illegal logging or guard conservation zones. Governments present these interventions as necessary responses to environmental emergency, civilian incapacity and national security. My research asks how environmental crises and green development claims legitimise, facilitate and cloak wider processes of militarisation and autocratisation. Comparing nationalist leaders with military backgrounds in two resource-rich democracies with legacies of military rule – Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Prabowo Subianto’s Indonesia – I develop the concept of “greenwashing militarisation”: the use of environmental protection, crisis management and sustainable development language to justify and normalise military expansion into civilian governance. In both cases, environmental governance served as a permissive venue to push forward wider projects of stealth militarisation and executive aggrandisement, albeit via distinctive discursive routes and political strategies. I use these cases to explore a broader question: when does the involvement of armed forces in responding to environmental crises become a vehicle for militarisation rather than simply an emergency policy response? I argue that the key issue lies not in military participation per se, but in how environmental crises can provide legitimacy, resources and institutional access for a more durable reconfiguration of civil–military boundaries, implications for ongoing debates on democratic backsliding, extractivism, and the civilian control of the armed forces. Karabekir Akkoyunlu is a scholar of comparative politics whose research examines democratisation, autocratisation and militarisation in the Global South, with a particular focus on Brazil, Turkey, Iran and Indonesia. He is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and was previously a Lecturer at SOAS University of London. He is also a Research Associate at OSGA, where he investigates how environmental crises are instrumentalised to advance militarisation and democratic erosion in Brazil and Indonesia. . He has also taught at FGV, USP, LSE and the universities of Graz and São Paulo. His recent publications include Contesting Autocratisation (2025), Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey (2024), and After the Stealth Intervention (2025). He holds a PhD from LSE, an MPhil from Cambridge and a BA from Brown University.

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