Environmental security and NATO: Kosovo and Libya interventions

Environmental security is a concept that finds its place in the international relations literature in the changing security spectrum after the Cold War. Global environmental problems such as extreme weather conditions, sea level rise, flood risk, depletion of natural resources, food insecurity, geological hazards and pollution lead to humanitarian disasters, regional tensions and violence. The world's rapidly changing security threats have caused NATO to accelerate its environmental security and environmental protection efforts. The main purpose of this thesis is to maintain NATO's environmental protection policies. In the research conducted using qualitative research techniques, two military operations carried out by NATO (Kosovo-1999 and Libya-2011) were selected as cases. This thesis reveals the effects of two military operations on the environment. The reason for choosing these two cases is the strategic concepts published by NATO in 2003 and 2011. These two cases are very important as one of them occurred before the strategic concept adopted in 2003 and the other occurred after the 2011 strategic concept. As a result of the research, it was observed that the importance NATO attaches to environmental security has increased significantly since the 2000s.However, although NATO seems to be fulfilling its duty regarding the environment in the post-Cold War period, protecting the environment is not only about intervening after an environmental problem occurs, but also about not harming the environment in the first place. At this point, the principle of precaution becomes very important. Indeed, the destructive effects of wars on the environment are quite high even in the special phase of peacekeeping missions. In both operations, the environmental damage caused by NATO, despite its main aims as an international power to bring peace, eliminate chaos and maintain order, was revealed. Considering these damages as 'secondary', NATO could not prevent the damage caused to the environment in these two operations, even though it developed progressive directives and tools within the scope of environmental security.