By Barbara Van Dyck and Danya Nadar
This blog post is a modified version of a panel paper we presented at a researchers’ day at the Université Libre de Bruxelles revolving around “Planetary Boundaries and Geopolitical Fractures” and was first published at AgroecologyNow.
During a research seminar at our university late 2025, we spoke about our concerns regarding the current relationships being fostered between the world of agricultural research and the European Union’s race to arms – the topic of which is connected to our research on agriculture and the digital transformation.
As we bear witness to the interconnected polycrises of ongoing genocide and destruction of living environments for future generations, war, climate derailing, the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, austerity measures, the monitoring, surveillance, and imprisonment of racialized bodies, we asked ourselves what role does our university play in feeding this machine?
Below we argue that Belgian universities encountering debilitating austerity measures are seeking new opportunities in collaborations with the defense industry as an (ironic) safe-haven. Such collaborations are certainly not new, but this latest push has been seized as an opportunity by both the defense industry and the university to shift the discourse of creating weapons to transforming military technologies for civilian use and vice versa – called dual-use. This deepening partnership works to legitimize the presence of the defense industry on our campuses, more generally normalizing collaborations between public institutions and the military industrial complex.
In this piece we argue that public support for creating dual-use technologies promotes militarisation. It normalizes the embedded logics of elimination and surveillance in the technologies themselves, being optimized through civilian use of these technologies that feeds back into the military industry, while opportunistically working to expand the military’s economies of scale using direct and indirect government subsidies.
Publicly financed EU military research
In Europe we are hearing the drumbeats of war loud and clear – member states have pledged to expand their military spending to 1.5%, a choice that average people feel has weakened public services and the welfare state. As part of this militarisation program, the European Commission has proposed in April 2025 a radical change in its research policy to shift its Horizon research & innovation programs to allow military use with an emphasis to expand financing in dual-use projects. This, as Valentina Carraro tells us in her piece tracing the evolution and hesitations that have shifted public research financing into the arms industry today, “marks a striking change of course for the EU”.
It is too early to conclude what consequences this will have on the specific allocation of research money. But the political decision for Horizon Europe that sets securing Europe’s borders from boogiemen as its top priority will inevitably come at the expense of expanding research in agroecology, biodiversity or social justice issues – what we consider necessary knowledge creation to face some of the crises we outlined above. Instead, the EU has pledged those resources will be diverted to boost research spending for military purposes, including AI, biotechnology and autonomous systems, inevitably increasing direct and indirect collaborations between universities and defense industry.
The university is an ideal ecosystem for the arms industry. Entire units are already dedicated to cutting-edge technologies research as well as funneling students and PhD researchers to pursue careers in the military complex. Additionally, in Belgium like in much of Europe, researchers, departments, and staff are already publicly or externally financed. Meaning in addition to the public financing the military industry is receiving, much of their research costs become additionally subsidized through research activities inside public institutions.
These elements have worked to normalize the presence of the military industrial complex on our campuses and their involvement in our daily lives, all the while providing the arms industry social legitimacy for collaborating with civilian institutions to produce dual-use technologies to ‘support society’s needs’.
Facts on the ground
Looking at what already exists on the campus where we work might give a sense of how the presence of the defense industry is already normalized. For example, Belgium’s Belspo’s Defence related Research Action page shows that researchers and laboratories of the Université Libre de Bruxelles have been involved in things like the development of 5G networks for naval applications, coordinating a project that studies the ballistic impact on space material, and work on underwater communications for drone swarms.
These collaborations were initiated before the current and frantic calls for rearmament and militarism, which begs the question: what is to come? We believe this isn’t about the often touted ‘academic freedom’, but a fundamental political and ethical question that touches researchers in general. However, the arguments of dual-use – the idea that technologies can be used both for military and civilian purposes – confuses the debate.
Agricultural technology & military dual-use
In our research at friction we focus on technological trajectories made in agriculture.
A common example of a military technology that has been transformed into civilian use and back into warfare is the usage of pesticides. Beginning as a byproduct in the Second World War, it was later transformed to serve in expansive industrialised agriculture. During the decades long Vietnam War, the U.S. military sprayed at the least 41 million liters of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese in the 1960s. More recently, since 2014 Israel has been spraying herbicides onto Palestinian agriculture lands in the buffer area separating itself from the Gaza Strip, creating deadzones in formerly arable lands.
Pesticides’ poisonous effects continue to impact agriculture, farmers and lands today. As our colleague Larissa Bombardi’s work shows how the pesticide industry is directly responsible for innumerable health problems outsourced to the global south while upholding global trading systems that amount to chemical colonialism.
What the pesticides example shows is how the military logic of elimination becomes part of the technology itself – herbicides are used to control the environment and eliminate any ‘unwanted’ plants or so-called weeds.
Yet it is not an exception.
It is clear that military machines today have less to do with planes, tanks and artillery, but largely rely on complex AI-driven automated systems. These technologies have fed into or been tested in a climate of an unfolding genocide, with Big Tech being crucial to contemporary computerized warfare such as the use Microsoft AI technologies and cloud services that facilitate the killing of Palestinians.
These are the same Big Tech companies that meanwhile also consumed marriages with agricultural machinery and chemical industry. Together they transformed agriculture into spaces of data gathering, micro-control and automation with promises of environmental and economic sustainability. How then does the alliance between Big Tech, the military and agriculture technologies translate onto farm fields and barns, transforming our landscapes and our food ?
Shared logics and infrastructures
Dual-use is not a linear process whereby technologies are developed in parallel for military and civilian use. Neither is it about simple translations from military to civilian use, or vice versa. Instead, it is about complex interconnected processes and shared technological infrastructures.
We are seeing signs of this intermeshing in the way cow collars spatially control cattle. Our research with Belgian dairy farmers has drawn our attention to the ways Israeli surveillance technologies continuously monitor cows. For example, the use of Afimilk hoof sensors to closely observe cow’s mating cycles or SCR technology that tracks cow rumination. These two technologies show the ways AI technologies, often marketed in agricultural circles as tools for efficiency and cow well-being are produced with the military logic of population control. Embedded within these AI-powered systems are spying technologies that get extended to remote-control installation of fences to spatially control a cow’s movement while reducing the number of workers needed to manage more cows. In doing so, livestock farms also function as real-world testing environments to help improve monitoring algorithms for use in policing and other contexts.
Netafim, an irrigation drip irrigation technology sold as an environmental solution for farmers to a changing climate, has partnered with mPrest Systems to build its smart system derived from making use of Israeli defense related precision technologies, the Iron Dome. These technologies are lauded to have been ‘field tested’ to create NetBeatTM – the ‘first irrigation system with a brain’ through mPrests Systems’ “air awareness, target classification, and the calculated and controlled launch and interception processes”. “The brain is a smart irrigation management platform that allows farmers to monitor, analyze and control irrigation technologies in a closed-loop platform, providing customized daily irrigation strategies and providing real-time data”. As Who Profits puts it, these tests are conducted not for the benefit of farmers but created, managed and interconnected to the technologies that enable the occupation and ongoing siege of the Palestinian people.
Another technology that is widely promoted – even if not (yet) widely present in Belgian agriculture – is the use of drones. At a demonstration day for agroecology, the Flemish research institute for agriculture and fisheries (ILVO) for example exhibited the use of drones for accomplishing tasks such as spraying of bio-stimulants and irrigation; the whitening of greenhouses; or sowing without the need for humans walking the fields or heavy tractors to further compact soils. At other agricultural fairs, ILVO promotes the use of drones for monitoring, mapping and pesticide spraying.
The promotion and use of drones in agriculture contributes to turning military technology into harmless objects and normalises its constant monitoring of movement and conditions or the performing of tasks using remote-controlled devices. It also further expands the market for technologies that are directly driving warfare and playing into the hands of authoritarian political regimes.
The widescale use of drones in a number of civilian sectors, including agriculture, enables the testing and scaling of these technologies which are then further used for military purposes, as we have seen in Ukraine. Or the European Union’s research support to the Israeli drone start-up Xtend shows how the development of drones for civilian use eventually leads to the development of aircraft warfare technology.
The wider political context
The argument commonly made is that virtually all technologies could have dual-use implications. But we do not believe modern technologies emerge in a political vacuum. The technologies we highlighted emerged in a moment of climate crises, deeply racist societies and world orders, militarisation and genocide. The rising military spending in the EU, fuelled by war rhetoric and US alignment, reflects the consolidation of deeply interlinked EU institutions and member states with defence firms and Big Tech. The EU’s white paper, as TNI’s analysis shows, drives the prioritisation of AI, autonomous systems, surveillance and other large computational infrastructures, framing militarisation as innovation and competitiveness.
To summarize, the university’s research collaborations into these technologies and all the things they might offer to farmers (or others) cannot be understood without also highlighting how they work to:
- Legitimise and normalise the production of military technologies for civilian purposes: dual-use technologies and collaborations normalise the integration of militarisation into our society, offering the military a platform to whitewash/greenwash their technologies while offering young talented people an opportunity to participate in creating these technologies;
- Normalise and expand military logics of control and elimination within the technology itself: we see this increasingly used in crowd control, or remote-control surveillance, and how it gets translated onto the agriculture;
- Expand the markets of the military-industrial complex: public and private spending in dual-use technology research creates what some may see as ‘business potential’. It creates economies of scale and market expansion by reworking the technology itself – from killing machines to providing a civic service;
- Feedback civilian use of these technologies to bolster the military industry: there is growing evidence that when military technologies get adopted in the public sphere they provide data to defence companies that later improves their weapons. This is seen in the use of adapted civilian drones in Ukraine as shown above, demonstrating how, as the head of NATO research observed, we are facing a reversal from the 1970s research that was driven by big military research programs such as DARPA to military innovation driven by civilian ecosystems. This lays bare how civilian drones are instrumental in the quick, scaling up and cheap expansion for future military capabilities.
Addressing the university from within
In the current climate of rearmament, we believe it is crucial for each of us in our capacities as researchers, as colleagues, as members of departments and faculties, to object and be vocal about the university’s roles in militarisation and militarism. We should hold accountable ethical committees to organize for a university that is life-promoting instead of death-dealing. This can be done through the naming of militarisation rather than obscuring it through technical language and innovation frames, documenting the university’s role through op-eds, blogposts and what not, and mapping university defense collaborations. We can learn from the 2024 student encampments for anti-war solidarity movement building. We can be inspired by the cultivation of an ethics of refusal among researchers during earlier moments of university complicity in the development of military technology.
This also highlights once again the importance of grounding agroecology debates politically and in firmly anti-colonial, re-peasantisation and food sovereignty agendas. An increasing number of activities that frame digital technologies in the light of its potentials and barriers for agroecology risk mostly paying lip service to the larger digital security imperative. As we have argued above, we cannot disentangle the climate crisis, from genocide, from ostensibly agroecological solutions provided by Big Tech, and from the role our public universities play in driving these solutions. This includes universities’ power to shape how young people imagine their roles in the world, as well as to guide agricultural trajectories toward meeting peasant needs rather than those of Agri-Tech and Big-Tech.
