What is it all about?
The war in Ukraine, ongoing since 2022, has led to a fundamentally altered security situation in Europe. The resulting necessity to enhance European defence preparedness requires entirely new forms of collaboration among a diverse range of actors from the military, industry, and civil society, currently discussed under the term “New Defence.”
The war in Ukraine, ongoing since 2022, has led to a fundamentally altered security situation in Europe. The resulting necessity to enhance European defence preparedness requires entirely new forms of collaboration among a diverse range of actors from the military, industry, and civil society, currently discussed under the term “New Defence.”
What is the connection to Human Geography?
At its core, the “New Defence” approach builds upon concepts such as “Total Defence,” but shifts its focus much more strongly towards cross-sectoral, governance-related, and spatial transformation processes, thereby creating close linkages with current debates in human geography. From a disciplinary perspective, cross-sectoral collaboration is particularly relevant with regard to, for example:
- the partial or complete conversion of firms to the production of military goods,
- the emergence of new supply and value-added networks,
- the establishment and restructuring of regional cluster structures,
- the role of collective learning processes in the generation of military innovations,
- the safeguarding of critical infrastructure,
- the utilisation of dual-use infrastructure and
- the establishment of new and the reactivation of existing protective infrastructure.
Although these and other developments are currently unfolding at high speed, have far-reaching consequences for the economy, civil society, and politics, and bring about entirely new spatial arrangements and challenges, they have only rarely been the subject of human-geographical analyses so far.
What is the Workshop about?
Against this background, the workshop aims to discuss the spatial dimension of “New Defence” in depth and to systematically consolidate relevant findings. It primarily addresses human geographers, regional economists, and planners dealing with issues of resilience and preparedness, spatial governance, military geography/security studies, regional innovation systems, and industrial transformation. We specifically invite presentations with economic-geographical, regional-economic, and/or planning-related relevance concerning the following aspects:
- conceptual perspectives of human geography on “New Defence” (e.g. dynamics of value-added networks, cluster structures, governance forms, the regionalisation of security thinking, or critical geographies of the military-industrial complex);
- international, regional, and sector-specific case studies that focus on the empirical analysis of spatial constellations of “New Defence” or specific challenges in urban and regional planning (e.g. changes in land-use and development planning resulting from new military spatial claims);
- methodological approaches for capturing the spatial dynamics of “New Defence”;
- ethical challenges of research into “New Defence.”
The workshop will take place in SCALA Jena, Jena, Germany, on 24–25 June 2027.
We seek to publish the contributions in a peer-reviewed journal (e.g. ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography).