The following text is the introduction of Ecehan Balta, to the discussion titled “Global rivalries and militarization”, held during the 33rd camp of Antinazi Zone / YRE (Youth Against Racism in Europe), the antifascist and antiracist campaign built around Xekinima (Greek section of ISp). The discussion was also introduced by Marinella Payiatsou from Cyprus and Sebastian Rave from Germany. We will publish their leadoffs also in the coming days.
Comrades, I am living in Ankara, the capital of Turkey where the NATO Summit took place in the beginning of July. Several days before the Summit they took into custody more than 200 people including writers, academicians, LGBTQ activists, and young people from their houses in the early morning. They made up an organization that nobody heard of before and blamed them for being a member of it. Still around hundred of them are in prison. That was not the only thing they did before and during the NATO Summit. They cleaned up the streets from animals. You know I mean, they killed them. For five days, the entire city was effectively placed under curfew. Government offices were closed, parking on the streets was banned, and anyone who tried to protest was detained. A new airport was opened for Trump’s plane. Large walls were erected in front of houses considered unsightly, in an attempt to hide poverty from view as well.
To cut a long story short, what came out of that NATO summit? Following the United States’ “strong” recommendation, NATO countries agreed to raise their defence spending to at least 5 percent of GDPs.
Perhaps the figure is higher in your countries, but in ours, the education and health budgets are also around 5 percent. Even where they are higher, we can be certain that they will now be reduced.
Wars continue everywhere. In Turkey, too, an undeclared war has been waged against the Kurdish people for the past forty years. But militarism does not simply mean war. When we talk about militarization, we often think first about armies, weapons, military bases, or rising defence budgets. But militarization is much broader than military spending.
It is a process through which military logic, security thinking, and preparation for war increasingly shape politics, economies, public institutions, and everyday life.
So I think we need to understand the militarization process that we are in, not simply as the strengthening of the military, but as a broader political and social transformation.
Militarization and the Economy
One of the clearest dimensions of militarization today is the growing transfer of public resources towards defence and security.
Governments often tell us that there is not enough money for healthcare, education, housing, social protection, care services, or climate action. At the same time, military budgets are increasing, arms industries are expanding, and enormous public resources are being transferred to defence technologies and military infrastructure.
This means that militarization is also about political choices.
A military budget is never simply a technical question. It tells us something about what a government considers important and whose security it prioritizes.
Every major increase in military spending has an opportunity cost. Resources invested in weapons cannot simultaneously be invested in public healthcare, education, ecological transformation, social housing, or care.
This is why we should ask not only, “How much do we spend on security?” but also: What kind of security are we financing, whose security, and at whose expense?
In this sense, militarization is closely connected to the broader political economy of neoliberalism.
While many public services have been privatized, weakened, or subjected to austerity, the military-security sector continues to receive massive state support.
Social spending is often presented as an economic burden. Military spending, however, is presented as necessary, strategic, and almost beyond political debate.
The Expansion of Security
A second important dimension is the expansion of the concept of security itself.
More and more areas of social and political life are being framed through the language of national security.
Migration becomes a security issue.
Energy becomes an energy-security issue.
Food becomes food security.
Climate change becomes climate security.
Critical minerals become strategic resources for arms.
Social movements may also be framed as threats to public order or national stability.
This process is often described as securitization.
When something is defined as a security threat, governments can justify exceptional policies that would otherwise be politically difficult to defend.
Migration is a very clear example. Instead of discussing migration through human rights, inequality, war, poverty, or climate displacement, migrants are increasingly discussed as threats to borders and national security.
Militarization Without War
Another important point is that militarization does not require an actual war.
A society can become highly militarized even when there is no formal war taking place.
Military industries can expand. Governments can increase defence budgets. New military technologies can be developed. Borders can be militarized. Surveillance systems can grow.
At the same time, societies can increasingly be organized around the expectation of future conflict. We see this on television every day. As you know, the supposed Russian threat is currently being used to legitimise increased military spending across Europe. They even give specific dates for when Russia is expected to attack.
Rather than acknowledging that, according to unofficial estimates, around 1.5 million people have been killed in the Russia-Ukraine war, that Russia’s military capacity is weakening day by day, and that there is already a major military imbalance between Russia and Europe, they prefer to fall back on Cold War myths and reproduce the image of an inherently aggressive Russia.
It is not limited to Russia. We are repeatedly told that there are new threats, new enemies, new geopolitical risks, new security challenges.
Some of these threats are, of course, could be real. Of course we are living under capitalism, which needs energy more than we people need, for profits.
But the political question is what happens when permanent preparation for conflict becomes the normal condition of politics.
The exceptional becomes ordinary.
War preparedness becomes permanent.
And military spending becomes increasingly difficult to question, because criticism can itself be portrayed as irresponsible or even dangerous.
Militarization and Democracy
This brings us to democracy.
Defence and security policies are traditionally among the least transparent areas of government.
Military operations, intelligence, arms contracts, defence procurement, and security policies often operate with limited democratic oversight.
When the sphere of “security” expands, the sphere protected from democratic scrutiny can expand with it, as we the inhabitants of Ankara have seen in the NATO Summit for 5 days, and can be seen elsewhere in different lengths.
Militarization can therefore strengthen executive power and weaken democratic control.
We also see this in the policing of social movements.Protests can be treated as security problems. Activists can be criminalized. Surveillance technologies developed for military or security purposes can gradually enter civilian life.
Today the boundary between military technologies and civilian surveillance technologies is becoming increasingly blurred.
Drones, facial recognition, biometric databases, artificial intelligence, predictive policing, and advanced border surveillance are examples of technologies that can move between military and civilian contexts.
So contemporary militarization is also technological militarization.
Militarization and Gender
A feminist perspective adds another essential dimension.
Militarization is deeply gendered.
Militarist cultures tend to reproduce particular forms of masculinity based on strength, discipline, hierarchy, obedience, aggression, heroism, and sacrifice.
Women, meanwhile, are frequently positioned as people who must be protected, as symbolic representatives of the nation, or as those who absorb the social consequences of war.
Feminist scholars and movements have long argued that war does not begin on the battlefield, and it does not end when the fighting stops.
Militarization transforms everyday life.
Military economies often increase unpaid care work. War and displacement increase women’s vulnerability to poverty and violence. Sexual and gender-based violence can intensify during conflicts. Let me give you an example. For the past six years, we in Turkey have been campaigning for a university student who disappeared. The campaign has a very simple name: “Where is Gülistan Doku?”
Gülistan was a young Kurdish woman studying in one of the Kurdish provinces. She disappeared one night and has never been found. This year, six years after her disappearance, we learned that she had allegedly been raped and then killed by the son of the governor who had been appointed by the state to replace the elected mayor. We also learned that members of the family, the police and public officials had mobilised to cover up the crime.
Because all the surveillance mechanisms were under their control, they also had the capacity to disable or manipulate them. Since the victim was a Kurdish woman who had allegedly been raped and murdered, her death could also be treated as another casualty of war.
There are currently 29 people under arrest, including the governor. Gülistan’s body, however, has still not been found.
This is why feminist antimilitarism asks a very simple but powerful question:
Whose security are we talking about?
Is security only the protection of borders?
Or is it being free from gender-based violence?
Living without fear of death, poverty or displacement?
Once we ask these questions, the meaning of security changes dramatically.
Militarization and Youth
Perhaps our European comrades would like to say more about this issue, but I would particularly like to emphasize the following regarding young people: as we discussed the other day, we are witnessing the penetration of militarism into schools. Television channels devoted exclusively to military films are being launched. In some European countries, the reintroduction of compulsory military service is being discussed.
Meanwhile, I already live in a country where those who have money do not have to serve in the military, meaning that conscription is effectively compulsory for the poor. At the same time, private armies and paid forms of military service increasingly encourage young people to see the military as a solution to shrinking employment opportunities. There is a bitter irony here: in order to survive, they are expected to be willing to risk losing their lives.
Militarization and the Ecological Crisis
The ecological dimension of militarization is equally important, but often much less visible. Military institutions, wars, arms production, military bases, and military logistics have enormous ecological impacts. Let me give you an example from the Gaza strip. UNEP reported that by the end of 2025, 97 percent of Gaza’s tree crops, 95 percent of its shrubland, and 82 percent of its annual crops had been destroyed. Which we call ecocide.
Modern armies depend heavily on fossil fuels and are responsible for 5.5% of the carbon emissions directly, Some studies suggest that it is indirectly responsible for approximately 40 percent of the total.. Wars destroy infrastructure, contaminate water and soil, generate toxic waste, and devastate ecosystems.
First, we need to state clearly that the prospect of war with Iraq, Iran and Venezuela, the interventions aimed at seizing Kurdish-held areas in Syria, and the threats of aggression against Greenland are all directly connected to oil reserves and mineral resources. But will the green transition really save us?
The global energy transition requires large quantities of minerals such as lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements.
These minerals are increasingly being described as strategic resources. As competition for them grows, the energy transition itself risks becoming part of a new geopolitical struggle.
This is why ecological transformation cannot be separated from questions of peace, democracy, and global justice.
A genuinely just transition must also challenge the militarized competition for resources.
Towards Another Understanding of Security
So what is the alternative?
Opposing militarization does not mean pretending that threats, conflicts, or insecurity do not exist.
Antimilitarism is not the rejection of security. It is a struggle over how security and safety is defined. We need the security and safety of the people and all inhuman entities of the world ecosystem.
A person is secure and safe when they have access to food, housing, healthcare, education, care, democratic rights, and a healthy environment.
A community is secure and safe when people can participate in decisions affecting their lives.
A society is secure and safe when people are protected from poverty, violence, displacement, ecological destruction, and authoritarianism.
From this perspective, the debate about security becomes a debate about social priorities.
What would happen if some of the resources devoted to militarization were redirected towards climate adaptation, public healthcare, social housing, care infrastructure, education, or ecological restoration?
What would security look like if we invested more in preventing social and ecological crises than in preparing militarily for their consequences?
Conclusion
Militarization, then, is much more than armies, weapons, and military budgets.
It is about how societies define threats.
It is about how public resources are distributed.
It is about democracy and political power.
It is about gender relations.
It is about technology, borders, migration, and surveillance.
And increasingly, it is about the ecological crisis and the global competition for resources.
The central question is therefore not simply whether states need security.
The real question is: What kind of security do we want to build, for whom, and at what social and ecological cost?
In this sense, peace is much more than the absence of war.
It is also about building societies in which resources are directed away from destruction and towards sustaining life.
