Search results
This book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In doing so, it focuses on the evolving and profoundly historical relationship between war, militarization, and the environment. The book treats militarized environments as simultaneously material and cultural sites that have been partially or fully mobilized to achieve military aims. It focuses on the environmental history of sites in rural and metropolitan France that the French and other militaries have directly mobilized to prepare for, and to wage, war. They include such sites as army camps, weapons testing facilities, and air bases, as well as battlefields and other combat zones, but not maritime militarized environments, which arguably deserve their own book. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments. And although the book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism. By focusing on the French case, the author aims to encourage reflection and discussion on the global issue of military control and use of the environment.
Brovès are still 312 Epilogue E.1 Ruins of Hurlus village, Suippes Camp visible from the road that traverses Canjuers Camp. Like the ruined villages of Tyneham and Imber on army training grounds in southern England, they stand as a vivid reminder of civilian displacement during the establishment of militarized environments.7 But Larzac is the most prominent site of civilian opposition to 313 Mobilizing nature E.2 Memorial to Ripont village, Suippes Camp militarization as the influence of the anti-base campaign lingers on. From 1981 onwards activists
hostilities mean for civilian displacement and insecurity? On the one hand ceasefires have brought respite from the more blatant fears and destabilization associated with direct hostilities – importantly the civilian population is no longer the ‘battleground’ of competing militaries – and have allowed space for the re-emergence of community-based organizations ( South, 2004
the French environment. First World War cemeteries and the memorial landscapes of the D-Day beaches remain places of international importance and serve as reminders of the transnational character of many French militarized environments.6 And although this book focuses on the environmental history of militaraization within metropolitan France, moving between national, regional, and local scales, it speaks to issues that mark militarized environments across the globe, such as civilian displacement, anti-base protests, and military environmentalism.7 This is certainly
Then referring to the unprecedentedly large-scale and disastrous population movement that began in the Russian Empire in July–August 1915, he added, ‘the tragedy and horror [of the refugee movement] is impossible to convey … The enormous crowds of refugees walk through dirt roads, like a solid wall, covering those roads with corpses.’ 64 The German advance in spring and summer 1915 had resulted in tremendous losses for Russian troops, in the fall of Warsaw in July, and in an ‘enormous wave of civilian displacement’. 65 Describing the influx of hundreds of thousands
-invented civilian displacement as a military training opportunity. A 1937 publication noted the ‘tactically useful’ ruined hamlets. Notice relative aux camps de Coëtquidan et Gaël (Rennes: Imprimerie de l’Ouest-Eclair, 1937), 5–6. 41 ‘L’école des sous-officiers au camp d’Avord’, L’Avenir militaire, 400, 6 January 1877, 1. 42 Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 1871–1991: Politique étrangère de la France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992 [1987]), 34–5, 55–6, 94; Douglas Porch, The March to the Marne: The French Army, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge
these movements represented the most significant demographic episode in the Balkans during the First World War. As this mass civilian displacement was taking place aside from the war fronts in Macedonia and Dobrudja, and in many respects completely unrelated to it, the experience of Bulgarian refugees during 1914–18 seemed like a parallel world, which did not immediately invite comparisons with the rest of Europe. v 279 v Nikolai Vukov However, it provides an alternative picture to what the rest of the continent experienced in terms of human displacement. The second
provision of safe corridors for the civilian population to escape the fighting in Grozny in the Chechen conflict was an example of the most humanitarian course of action in such circumstances. 82 Defendants charged with this offence may also exploit the fact that only the ‘ordering’ of civilian displacement is criminalised. 83 Therefore, as Roch and Carey suggest, the ‘voluntary’ displacement of civilians because of human rights abuses committed against them by the armed forces could not amount to this offence, although other offences would
exhibition took visitors on a journey through conflicts from the First World War to the present day depicted in five children’s novels, three of which were devoted to the Second World War. The exhibition was organised thematically and made use of expert interpretation and examples of relevant objects from particular conflicts. There was a particular focus on children’s experiences of civilian displacement and exile (two of the five themes were separation and survival). However, the Holocaust was absent from the spaces and texts devoted to the Second World War. This
official schemes. The exodus of May 1940 was in fact a vast évacuation away from actual and anticipated ground combat zones, part official, but mostly unofficial. This mass civilian displacement was always called ‘the evacuation’ by the people I interviewed from the département of the Nord. Defeat and armistice changed everything, however, and henceforth evacuation evolved with the evolution of bomb targets. Vichy’s policy on evacuation was slow and reactive. In November 1941, a government circular instructed prefects of coastal departments v 147 v Experiencing bombing