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 usewithan 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’.

See full text on AgroecologyNow