War, relationality and social-ecological systems: An analysis of human-bird interactions

The study of war is changing. Anthropocentric approaches are increasingly being challenged, and there are now many studies exploring the environmental impacts of war. Although extremely important, such research can potentially reinforce human / nature binaries, by epistemologically compartmentalising and separating harms done to the environment from harms done to ‘us.’ What is needed are more integrated analyses examining the multiple ways that war affects the connectivities and relationalities between human and more-than-human worlds. It is striking, moreover, that such analyses remain largely absent from environmental sociology, which has given little attention to war. This interdisciplinary article aims to address these gaps, thereby making a novel contribution to war scholarship and to environmental sociology, by foregrounding the multi-layered relational dynamics of war through a specific focus on human-bird relations – and asking what war does to them. It also aims to make an original contribution to research on social-ecological systems (SES). By discussing how war – a neglected phenomenon within SES research – both disrupts and strengthens human-bird relations, including acoustically, and by framing these relations as one of the many layers of connectivity that constitute SES, the article offers a different way of exploring relationality within these systems.