The Paradigm of the Military Ecotone

Abstract

War does not merely damage an existing landscape. It can create a new natural–anthropogenic system with functions, relations, boundaries, and transformation trajectories that did not exist before the territory entered a military regime. This paper defines that object as the military ecotone and separates it from the theory used to describe it. The theory begins with war as a change of regime. Peaceful functions undergo functional inversion, while the logic of territorial development collides with the logic of military effect. Consequences may remain passive, latent, or trigger-sensitive. Their boundaries depend on carriers and change through space and time. Military contamination forms only one part of this object. Depopulation, fear, interrupted maintenance, altered land use, reactivation of earlier pollution, and new exposure pathways may transform a territory without a new chemical release. The paper proposes military-induced rupture, contamination stratigraphy, fingerprint of war, relict military ecotone, state configuration, transformation trajectory, profile, problem centre, and research contour as working concepts. It rejects reduction of the object to a contaminated landscape or ecological succession. The theory is fallibilist, versioned, and developed through an expert–AI system that preserves questions, rejected terms, and paths of reasoning.