Through reading a range of contemporary and historical texts, we hope to better understand past and present entanglements between the multispecies and the Military-Industrial Complex, and emerging realities in which the more-than-human increasingly features as a source of inspiration, resource, knowledge, workforce, and asset for military research and development. 

We mobilize our term of ‘multispecies militarism’ to mean four things:

1. The way in which the nonhuman is utilized by military units and defense contractors to carry out different tasks – e.g. to manage human populations, in the development and refinement of weapon systems and military technologies, for the gathering of data and information, and for securitization and territorial control.

2. The uptake of a language of war, conflict and violence to describe nonhuman behavior and social organization, alongside the use of the nonhuman to describe and value select (human) populations deemed problematic or ungovernable. In other words, the simultaneous collapsing of discursive and semantic categories between human and nonhuman, and their recreation as categories-in-conflict.

3. The way nonhumans/more-than-humans are dragged into political and cultural conflicts – particularly as symbols and as representations.

4. The epistemic purchase of multispecies beings in military knowledge-making, and military technologies and frameworks for ecological or environmental knowledge-making, as well as the knowledge and technology transfer which occurs between the respective fields.

We hope the reading group will bring together scholars interested in animal studies/histories/behavior an scholars working on histories of technoscience, politics, environment and health.