Conflict,climate change and media: Special Issue Introduction

Rangelov and Kaldor (2012: 193–199) proposed that we live in an era of persistent conflict. More recently, in 2025, Freedman (2025) coined the phrase “forever wars”. Although Freedman specifically related his terminology to the West’s involvement in the generation of long counterinsurgency campaigns, in our view it is a concept much more broadly applicable to the contemporary world, where the boundaries of “peace” and “war” have become unmistakably blurred. We now live in an era characterised by enhanced Great Power competition, global instability, protracted hybrid threats and challenges, and where the roles of international, domestic and government actors are becoming increasingly blurred. Yet, recognising conflict and warfare as the norm, rather than as aberrations, remains difficult, especially for leading Western nations. The “legitimating ideology” for these states, as Ryan (2025: 102) points out, is based on a manufactured illusion of peace. This illusory peace, established at the end of the Second World War, allegedly saw the creation of the rules based on international order. The apparent legitimacy of that order down to the end of the Cold War (which was of course a hot war in many parts of the world) and the American hegemon that appeared following the collapse of the Soviet Union is now firmly questioned (Hakimi and Cogan, 2025). Perhaps permanently, perhaps only temporarily, but recent events internally and externally to the world’s leading powers have seen a marked return to an anarchic realist world where hard power and geopolitical spheres of influence clearly matter in Washinton, Beijing, and Moscow.

Academics across a range of disciplines have grappled with the implications, particularly temporal and spatial, of unending conflict (Foucault, 2004[1976]; Graham, 2010; Gregory, 2011; Keen, 2006; Parsons and Wilson, 2023). But these concerns are not confined to academic debates. They also surface in the strategic language deployed by government agencies, demonstrating that these are not intellectual abstractions, but lived realities shaping urgent national security agendas. “We are now operating in a space between peace and war,” Blaise Metreweli, the new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in the UK, stated in her first public speech (quoted in Gardner, 2025), demonstrating an acknowledgement of the illusory nature of the boundaries between war and peace in an era of perpetual conflict. Metreweli further acknowledges the dissolution of the spatial boundaries of conflict by observing that “the Frontline is everywhere” (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Secret Intelligence Service, 2025). In addition, the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review proposed a “whole-of-society approach” to defence, security and resilience (see UK Ministry of Defence, 2025).

The strategic taxonomy of “forever wars”, “space between peace and war”, “grey zone”, “frontline is everywhere” is also mirrored in broader assessments of global insecurity as reflected in the Doomsday Clock itself. Established in 1947 by scientists (including those involved in the development of the atomic bomb) concerned by the implications of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Doomsday Clock is intended to demonstrate how close the world is to catastrophe, symbolically midnight. In January 2026, the Clock was moved to 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to doomsday. The reasons given by the accompanying Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2026) include increasing competition between global powers, the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons, a lack of international action in response to climate change, and the threat of information warfare associated with a range of destabilizing technologies, including Artificial Intelligence. These threats can be extrapolated into three overarching domains—conflict, the climate crisis, and the complicity of media texts and technologies in both—due cause, if any more reasons were required, for this Special Edition of Media, War & Conflict.

The long history of destructive and pervasive warfare converges with accelerating transformations in climate systems and information technologies. The stresses of climate change are adding another layer of increasing complexity to ongoing insecurity. Maertens (2021) proposes that climate change has become a dominant perspective in international relations and that debates within the United Nations Security Council follow this trend, which makes a wider comment on the significant influence of climate change in world politics. Moreover, academics across a number of disciplines have noted the relationship between climate change and insecurity (Lewis, 2017) and the enhanced risk of armed conflict (Hakim, 2011; Mach et al., 2019). The nature of the challenge has led to some initial breaking down of siloed research, albeit it led by the scientific disciplines and community, such as the Security Science Journal established in 2020. This journal, Media, War & Conflict, represents a similar attempt to bridge disciplinary divides. Whatever the approach, we are now in age of adaptation not mitigation, and war and conflict are, as they always have been, visceral accelerants to that process. Cutting through all this is the role of the media as a dimension of conflict, between states and peoples in conflict, and between those who deny the possibly irreparable damage being done to our ecosystem.

Each of these domains has its own genealogy and has been extensively investigated individually and/or in various pairings. Scholars are examining the entanglements between armed conflict and the ecological systems within which it unfolds, with foundational contributions from Machlis and Hanson (2008) and from Tucker and Russell (2004). More focused analyses of specific conflicts demonstrate how environmental damage varies across historical and geopolitical contexts, including studies of the First World War (Tucker et al., 2018), the Second World War (Laakkonen et al., 2017), and more recent conflicts such as those in Iraq (Jaff, 2023). Alongside this environmental scholarship, a substantial body of work explores the relationship between conflict and media, ranging from journalism and public communication (Seib, 2005) to digital games (Halter, 2006; Hunteman and Payne, 2010), film (Chapman, 2008), and television history (Smither, 2004). This body of research illustrates how extensively each domain has been explored on its own terms, and occasionally in partial combination. What this fragmentation obscures, however, is the extent to which these forces intersect in practice. In reality, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists makes clear, they operate not as separate arenas but as a mutually reinforcing and volatile matrix of global insecurity. Yet, a comprehensive account of their convergence is still largely absent. This Special Edition is intended as a crucial first step in the creation of a critical space in which to confront conflict, climate change, and media as a single, escalating condition in our world of today, and, alas, tomorrow. Our goal is to identify and theorise a convergence that policy, media, and scholarship might acknowledge, but rarely consider in concert. We are, therefore, not merely “addressing a gap” in existing work but confronting the structural and systemic complexities that shape this crucial contemporary moment, and which demand that we rethink and reshape the very frameworks in which we operate.

We, the Editors of this Special Edition, make no apology for the lack of optimism. Instead, this edition of Media War & Conflict serves as a lament to the difficulties we face in attempting to dismantle those frameworks from within. We began thinking about this project in 2020, in the months just before a global pandemic (which many had feared but governments had refused to prepare for) tipped the world into lockdown. It has taken us over five years to bring this edition into the world. ¹ Some of this delay was due to unexpected crises, but the remainder is not unusual in academic publishing, which moves at its own glacial pace in the context of increasingly challenging time- and resource-strapped institutional environments through the process of issuing a call for papers, writing, submission, finding peer reviewers, reviewing, resubmission, finding the right timeslot for publication, and, finally, publication. Which means that responses from academic circles to urgent issues can be, at the very best, slow, and at the worst, far too late. To make matters worse, responses are often siloed into research fields, with scientists responding to climate change publishing in scientific journals, military and conflict specialists publishing in journals specialising in their areas, and media scholars in theirs. We are additionally acutely aware that this work—the important intervention of the articles—will largely only be visible within academic structures that allow access to this journal.

The tendency to approach these crises as separate fields is not, as some of the articles featured here will show, restricted to academia. Academics, policy makers, environmental activists and scientists, journalists and militaries, are all grappling with ways of thinking about how to compensate for, and strategise around or through, the barriers we face in addressing the complex and polysemic nature of the challenges facing all of us. As we do so, lives, both human and more-than-human, are being lost (and, we acknowledge, many have been lost since we conceived of this Special Edition) and ecosystems were irrevocably damaged as a result of these systemic failures. The challenges for editors and contributors in producing this Special Edition form a microcosm of the broader issues evident in all sectors of society, where efforts to respond to escalating security and environmental pressures tend to reproduce or deepen the very insecurities they attempt to resolve.

We identified a set of core themes in the ways in which the contributors to this Special Edition tackled some of the systemic pressures and issues briefly outlined above. The first theme running through the contributions, echoing Blaise Metreweli’s (2025) speech referenced earlier, is how there is no longer any definable frontline to conflict. By investigating how global conflict and concomitant climate issues are lived and experienced locally, the contributions here reveal some of the effects of the condition Metreweli identifies. The fact that strategic communication and controlling the narratives around conflict and climate change are critical to policy, strategy, operations and tactics for contemporary military industrial complexes is evident in the contributions of Gergely Lendvai and Mari Lee Mifsud, and of Can and Özge Cengiz. Lendvai and Mifsud bring together two very different regimes and national contexts to interrogate the use and impact of nationalist tropes in the communication of the environmental degradation caused by the Ukraine conflict in Hungary, and of the relationship between climate change and the Chamoli disaster in India. Similarly, Cengiz and Cengiz’s investigation of how prominent Turkish news outlets covered the Grain Corridor agreement of July 2022 (a response to the disruption of food supplies as a result of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia) similarly demonstrates how nationalist agendas and populist language shift attention from the complex interplay between conflict, climate change, and food shortages. Both articles demonstrate how various environmental impacts of conflict are co-opted at local levels to serve the strategic goals of the governments of India and Hungary. Noha Mellor’s article, in turn, extends the theme of uneven geographical impact by revealing how, in Arab media outlets, political narratives also overshadow environmental issues, this time associated with migration.

While the frontline may be everywhere, global conflicts and their environmental consequences are felt unevenly across the world, introducing our second theme: the asymmetrical distribution of harm and responsibility in global crises. The intensity of the frontline is often greatest in regions that shoulder disproportionate impacts relative to their power to shape the global systems driving these crises, making it especially important to foreground these experiences and the knowledge emerging from them. Sneha Mehendale’s article ‘Climate, Conflict and Crafting Solutions: A Case of the “Climate Brides” Podcast’ illustrates that it is often at local levels that the most effective solutions can be generated. Mehendale demonstrates the significance of local and cultural knowledge in addressing the ramifications, especially for women and girls, of climate issues arising as a result of global conflicts. Mehendale’s contribution is a critical reminder of the ways in which the issues arising from global conflict and climate change amplify pre-existing hierarchies of gender, race, class, and geography, and the urgent necessity of an intersectional analytical lens.

Mehendale’s close examination of a podcast additionally reveals what sources outside of mainstream news media can contribute, which leads to our third theme: the siloed structures of traditional news organisations that are based on out-dated and out-moded information systems and ideologies that are contributing to the false separations between issues, and are struggling to account for the polysemic and complex nature of the relationship between conflict and the climate crisis. If this sounds familiar, it is because Simon Cottle (2023) articulates this very issue. Given its prescience, Cottle’s argument is worth repeating: “with few exceptions, [mainstream journalism] is proving slow to recognize, contextualize and represent the severity and compound nature of existential crises now confronting human society and the planet” (p.8). We propose it is much more than that. Contributions here demonstrate how political, cultural, and structural pressures are actively diverting attention away from the polysemic complexities of the relationship between conflict and climate change. As mentioned previously, Mellor’s article exposes the impact of these pressures on individual science journalists, with the result that environmental crises and the knowledge needed to understand them are sidelined, and political agendas emphasised. But Mellor’s work also reveals, at a granular and empirical level, how struggles to situate climate change reporting in the siloed structures of mainstream news—whether as science journalism, political journalism or conflict reporting—generate tensions between individual journalists and media institutions, and ultimately determine what is included in coverage, and what is systematically omitted. Mario Leto’s investigation into the news coverage of the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022 similarly takes account of institutional pressures for what counts as “newsworthiness” in mainstream journalism and, like Mellor, Leto scrutinises how the idea of what imagined publics might want to hear inflects narratives around conflict and climate change.

The contributions mentioned thus far vividly demonstrate how the dominant logics used to narrate climate change (nationalism, competition, militarisation) are fundamentally at odds with the cooperative, relational approaches required to address it. But it is not only the stories we tell, or do not tell, about climate change and conflict that matter. How we tell them, and through which media, also matters—which forms our fourth theme. Both Leto and Matteo Stocchetti emphasise the significance of metaphor and discourse in encoding dominant logics, and additionally highlight at a macro level the structural conditions that others in the edition, such as Mellor and Mehendale, interrogate at micro level. More specifically, while Stocchetti tackles the entanglements between neoliberalism and the existential threat of climate change, Leto challenges the valuation through market logics of the environment and its non-human inhabitants. Both emphasise how the metaphors and discourse that are deployed in mediated narratives of climate change and conflict thus do not simply describe the crises; they delineate the possibilities for action, often in ways that reinforce the very structures that are producing the crises in the first place. Aldaberto Fernandes’s article on the contradictions and tensions evident in retrogaming demonstrates that it is crucial that we attend not only to the content of media, but also to media technologies, as they have their own impacts on the environment through both manufacture and operation. Fernandes is the only contributor to consider the impact of non-fictional media narratives on the understanding of conflict and climate change. What emerges from all contributions is the profound influence of mediated storytelling not only in shaping the frameworks through which climate change and conflict are made intelligible, but also in creating the conditions through which we respond to them. Media narratives and technologies are not passive reflectors of current crises. They are entangled participants, contributing to how those crises are made manifest, understood and navigated.

Despite the international and conceptual breadth of the contributions gathered here, we are sharply aware that we have only just begun to engage the complex, polysemic crises emerging from the nexus of conflict, climate change, and media. This edition is intended to provoke vital dialogue across disciplines, and initiate new research collaborations and pathways for investigation. These might lead to more sustained interrogations of powerful media industries outside of journalism that shape cultural imaginaries through fictional accounts of the crises, including the striking reluctance of Hollywood and the video game industry to confront climate change directly and meaningfully. Although the increased risk of gender-based violence during and after disasters and emergencies has been a topic of focused research since the 1990s (Masson, 2022), much more work is needed in understanding how the confluence of conflict and climate change is generating mediated narratives that not only shift attention away from the impact of crises on women, girls, and LGBTQ+ communities and individuals, but are also intensifying gender inequalities, reinforcing pre-existing gender biases and therefore exacerbating gender-based violence in the context of climate change and conflict. The fact that only one contributor here addressed this issue in any depth (Mehendale) is perhaps indicative of that broader tendency to overlook the intersectional nature of the current crises, and of the siloed nature of responses.

Similarly, while Leto emphasises the urgency of identifying how anthropocentric perspectives are erasing the impact on anything other than the human in mediated narratives of climate change and conflict, interrogations of the anthropocentric slant in such representations is an urgent area for future research. More work also needs to be done in investigating how conflict occurs not only between humans, but between humans and more-than-humans, and between humans and ecologies, and in how these conflicts are represented (or not) in various forms of media. There is also very little work that addresses the media strategies adopted by militaries around the world, whose communicative power is increasingly shaping the notion of climate-related insecurity.

These issues, and more, demonstrate the urgency of dissolving entrenched disciplinary siloes. The challenges, both material and epistemic, posed by the intersections of climate change, conflict and media, cannot be addressed by any single field. Despite the emphasis placed on interdisciplinarity by many UK institutions (including the editors’ own), practical barriers between disciplines persist, and research is still often siloed in how it is funded and published. The multidimensional crises created through the convergence of climate change, conflict, and media demand forms of enquiry and innovative approaches that move across environmental humanities, media studies, security studies, and beyond.

With so much unanswered, and so much yet to be done, we end with not so much a question, but a potential call to action:

If this is such a multifaceted and complex problem, where does this leave us and, much more importantly, what difference can we, in terms of the editors, authors, and readers of this special edition, make?