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War, Soil, and Freshwater Systems. Conference Prague, 15–17 October 2026
Post-Conference Book
Post-Conference Volume: From Case Studies to an Integrated Understanding of War-Related Environmental Change
The post-conference volume is conceived not as a conventional collection of conference proceedings, but as a structured scholarly work aimed at advancing an integrated understanding of the environmental and public health consequences of armed conflicts.
The conference itself brings together participants from different countries, disciplines, methodological traditions, and professional backgrounds. Such diversity is both necessary and valuable. Researchers working on soils, freshwater systems, landscape transformation, environmental monitoring, toxicology, epidemiology, remote sensing, ecological recovery, and public health often investigate different aspects of the same reality. The conference provides an opportunity for these perspectives to meet, interact, and exchange empirical knowledge.
At the same time, the existence of numerous case studies does not automatically lead to the emergence of cumulative scientific understanding. Environmental consequences of warfare are frequently investigated through geographically specific, temporally limited, and methodologically specialized studies. While such studies are indispensable, they often remain disconnected from broader conceptual frameworks capable of integrating individual findings into a coherent scientific perspective.
The post-conference volume is intended to address precisely this challenge.
The editorial objective is not merely to document environmental damage associated with military activities. Rather, the volume seeks to explore whether recurring patterns, processes, and organizational structures can be identified across different conflicts, environmental settings, and historical circumstances.
Particular attention will be devoted to the relationships between soil systems, freshwater systems, landscape transformation, ecosystem dynamics, environmental exposure, and human health. These dimensions are frequently investigated separately, yet they often represent interconnected components of larger environmental processes initiated or accelerated by warfare.
The volume adopts a strictly scientific and non-political perspective. Its primary concern is neither military strategy nor political interpretation. Instead, the focus lies on understanding how armed conflicts interact with environmental systems, how contamination and ecological disturbance propagate through natural and social environments, and how long-term environmental consequences emerge, persist, and transform over time.
The editorial framework is guided by the assumption that war-related environmental change should not be understood exclusively as a collection of isolated impacts. An alternative possibility is that military contamination, ecological degradation, landscape disturbance, and associated public health effects constitute interconnected manifestations of broader environmental processes. Identifying such processes requires moving beyond individual cases toward comparative analysis, conceptual integration, and theoretical synthesis.
Accordingly, the volume will seek to connect empirical observations with broader questions concerning environmental persistence, contamination pathways, landscape memory, ecosystem resilience, recovery trajectories, and the long-term relationships between warfare, environmental change, and human well-being.
The ultimate ambition of the project is not to provide a definitive account of war-related environmental impacts. Rather, it is to contribute to the development of a common intellectual framework capable of supporting future comparative research, international collaboration, and cumulative scientific understanding.
In this sense, the volume should be regarded not as the conclusion of the conference process, but as a step toward the formation of a broader research agenda for the years ahead.