Military Contamination and Regimes of Scientific Recognition: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

This article develops a conceptual framework for analyzing military contamination as a long-term, distributed, and often under-recognized process. Rather than focusing on the moral classification of individual scientists, it examines the institutional and cognitive organization of scientific knowledge in contexts where state, military, and industrial activities produce environmental harm. The article introduces the concept of a regime of scientific recognition: a historically situated configuration of evidentiary rules, institutional dependencies, disciplinary practices, and forms of responsibility that determines what counts as contamination, how fragmented evidence is interpreted, and what consequences follow from uncertainty. Three ideal-typical regimes are distinguished: accompanying science, which enables, regulates, or normalizes military and state objectives; warning science, which treats incomplete but converging evidence as sufficient grounds for precaution; and critical reconstruction, which investigates both environmental harm and the conditions that delayed or obscured its recognition. The article argues that military contamination requires analysis not only through environmental science, toxicology, medicine, and geography, but also through the sociology of scientific knowledge, the history of expertise, political ecology, and theories of institutional responsibility. The proposed framework shifts attention from isolated pollutants to the organization of knowledge that makes long-term contamination visible or invisible within scientific and political communities alike.