Title Political Taboo and the Failure to Recognize Long Term Military Contamination
Author(s) Laboratory of Information Systems
Affiliation New Euro Vision: exhibitions, marketing, research s.r.o.
Country Czech Republic
Contribution type case study; empirical study; conceptual paper; methodological paper
Thematic area • Theory, Methodology, and Evidence
Conference framework connection • Analytical Track AT-01 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-02 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-03 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-04 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-05 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-06 — provisional title to be defined• Analytical Track AT-07 — provisional title to be defined
Abstract Research on war-related environmental contamination often produces extensive knowledge about individual substances, sites, diseases, infrastructures, or episodes while failing to constitute long-term military contamination as a continuous object of investigation. This paper examines that failure as a property of scientific organization rather than a simple absence of data or an ethical defect of individual researchers. It defines political taboo as a distributed, historically variable system regulating which questions, connections, temporal scales, and causal interpretations can acquire scientific legitimacy. The concept is broader than direct censorship and includes institutional incentives, disciplinary boundaries, funding priorities, professional risk, strategic secrecy, and internalized norms of political loyalty.
The analysis conceptually reconstructs recurrent relations among the production of observations, their fragmentation across disciplines and institutions, their recognition as evidence, and their conversion into decisions. It distinguishes four mechanisms. Temporal suspension defines investigation as premature during war and unnecessary after a politically sufficient account of responsibility has been established. Disciplinary fragmentation records manifestations without reconstructing the process connecting sources, transport, transformation, exposure, biological response, and delayed health effects. Selective acceleration directs research capacity toward knowledge of immediate operational value while long-term consequences remain deferred. Finally, causal inquiry is recoded as a test of loyalty, so investigating the environmental contribution of an action may be mistaken for assigning legal or moral equivalence among actors.
These mechanisms produce pathological uncertainty: uncertainty generated not only by the complexity of the object but also by arrangements that interrupt observation, separate environmental and health records, preserve incompatible data structures, and raise the burden of proof after early evidence has disappeared. Military contamination may thus be politically visible and extensively documented in fragments while remaining scientifically unrecognized as a long-term process. The paper proposes that analysis of scientific communities become part of the methodology of military-contamination research. It does not replace toxicological, ecological, epidemiological, archival, or geospatial investigation; it identifies the conditions under which their findings can, or cannot, form a coherent causal reconstruction.
Key points ● Political taboo operates not only through prohibition but through the regulation of legitimate questions, temporal scales, causal links, and standards of proof.● Long-term military contamination can remain unrecognized even when many of its manifestations have been measured and published.● Temporal suspension, disciplinary fragmentation, selective acceleration, and the recoding of causality as loyalty jointly obstruct process reconstruction.● Pathological uncertainty is institutionally produced uncertainty that later serves as justification for continued scientific and practical inaction.● Scientific explanation of environmental causality must remain distinct from legal, moral, and political attribution of responsibility.● The scientific community itself is therefore a necessary object of study within research on the long-term environmental and health consequences of war.
Keywords political taboo; scientific recognition; military contamination; scientific communities; pathological uncertainty; disciplinary fragmentation; long-term environmental change; responsibility
Main discussion question Under what conditions does a scientific community treat refusal to investigate a developing environmental process as a rational, professional, and responsible position?
OJS publication link https://pollution-diseases-ojs.org/index.php/pd/article/view/83
Note. Analytical TracksIn addition to the main thematic areas, the conference programme will include several cross-cutting analytical tracks. These tracks will be defined during the preparation of the programme, based on the submitted abstracts and the emerging links between presentations.At the preliminary stage, abstracts may be assigned to provisional analytical tracks marked as AT-01 to AT-07. Final track titles will be announced after the Scientific Committee has reviewed the submitted materials.