Reconceptualizing Post-War Reconstruction Within Green Foreign and Security Policy: An Integrative Approach to Environmental Justice and Political Ecology

Green Foreign and Security Policy (GFSP) articulates ambitious commitments to ecological sustainability, peace, and justice, yet it remains conceptually thin when it comes to post-war reconstruction of environments and environmental infrastructure. This gap is consequential: reconstruction decisions concerning water, energy, land, and waste shape long-term patterns of insecurity, inequality, and political legitimacy, and therefore constitute a central but underexplored arena of GFSP. This paper advances an integrative approach that brings together environmental peacebuilding, political ecology, sustainable development, and feminist security studies to conceptualize post-war reconstruction as a site of critical problem-solving rather than technical recovery. While each field highlights distinct dimensions of power, participation, and ecological repair, their combined perspective allows for a more politically and environmentally grounded understanding of recovery processes. Using post-war reconstruction in Gaza as an illustrative case, the paper examines how environmental destruction, governance constraints, and asymmetric power relations complicate recovery, and discusses how a GFSP-informed synthesis can help move reconstruction beyond securitized and market-driven models toward more durable peace.