Amela Skiljan, Angelika Hilbeck and Brian Wynne participated in the conference “Towards a just and habitable world: exploring the role of technology” from 2-5 June 2026 at University of Lausanne. Please find the context of their workshop as well as their presentations below.
An area that is often neglected (or intentionally excluded) as a contributing factor to some of our crucial challenges, such as combating the consequences of climate change, are weapons – arguably the most damaging technologies – and as an extension, the military and armed conflict. One the most obvious examples is the exclusion of military emissions from the binding reduction targets enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol, although the US army, for instance, emits more CO2 annually than some states, including industrialized states such as Sweden or Switzerland.
Threats posed by weapons and armed conflict exceed those of CO2 emissions. For example, the deployment of mines, which are labelled by the International Committee of the Red Cross as “a perverse use of technology,”[i] hinders the safe use of land for agriculture or grazing livestock,[ii] and endangers lives of civilians even after hostilities have terminated, sometimes for decades. Damage to the natural environment during armed conflict is unfortunately very common, not only resulting from the use of weapons, but also by the employment of certain means and methods of warfare, such as the use of herbicides to damage crop fields.
Risks stemming from weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons, are even more wearisome. The use of nuclear weapons is predicted to result in apocalyptic humanitarian and ecological consequences, which, as the International Court of Justice observed in 1996, “cannot be contained in either time or space”[iii] and from which future generations are not spared either.
Not only that the use of weapons is tied to terrible consequences, they also require resources (and produce waste) for development, production and maintenance. Further resources are required to re-build what has been destroyed, if it can be re-built at all. This entire circle is in marked contrast with a just and habitable world, and it arguably deepens the gap between the global north and the global south even further. As such it needs to be subject of discussion, breaking the systematic negligence that seems to be attached to it.
International law has developed various ways to prohibit or limit certain categories of weapon systems or technologies based on their damaging effects.
[i] Louis Maresca and Stuart Casey-Maslen, The banning of anti-personnel landmines: The legal contribution of the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1. publ Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000, p. 257.
[ii] Stuart Casey-Maslen, The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and in their Destruction in Eric P J Myjer and Thilo Marauhn (eds), Research handbook on international arms control law, Research handbooks in international law series, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA, USA, 2022, p. 347.
[iii] ICJ, Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, ICJ Reports 1996, p. 66, ICJ Advisory Opinion, 08 July 1996, para. 35.