The Day After War: Environmental Reconstruction and Green Foreign Security Policy

Francesca Fassbender, Tel Aviv University (Germany/Italy)

Green Foreign and Security Policy (GFSP) advances strong normative commitments to sustainability, peace, and justice, yet it remains underdeveloped with regard to post-war reconstruction of environmental systems and infrastructure. This omission is consequential, as reconstruction decisions shape long-term ecological vulnerability, political legitimacy, and conflict dynamics. This paper conceptualizes post-war reconstruction as a core but neglected arena of GFSP. It develops an integrative framework that synthesizes insights from environmental peacebuilding, political ecology, sustainable development, and feminist security studies, showing how these literatures can jointly illuminate the power relations, governance challenges, and distributive effects embedded in recovery processes. Using Gaza as an illustrative case, the paper examines how environmental destruction and externally driven reconstruction models constrain peacebuilding and argues that a GFSP-informed synthesis can help move recovery beyond technocratic and securitized approaches toward more durable and just outcomes.