The NATO military area of Capo Teulada is located in the southwestern region of Sardinia, about 50 km from the city of Cagliari. The area includes EU protected wetlands and sand dunes, seasonal water sources and long-standing agro-pastoral practices, as well as archaeological traces. Thus, it is not simply a military installation but a complex socio-ecological and political living system shaped by overlapping regimes of power, extraction, and control.
The militarization of Sardinia – as well as Sicily – must be situated within a longer genealogy of colonization, understood not only as formal occupation but as an ongoing process of spatial abstraction and subordination. From Roman imperial expansion to contemporary geopolitical strategies, Sardinia has repeatedly been constructed as peripheral and inhabited by a subaltern population, an empty surface to be appropriated despite its dense ecological and cultural histories[1].
In the post-World War II period, this logic was rearticulated through military agreements between Italy and the United States within the NATO framework, concerned about the expansion of communism in Italy. The 1952 Mutual Security Agreement and the 1954 Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement, between Italy and the US, formalized the establishment of military installations, including Capo Teulada, consolidating Sardinia’s role as a military platform in the Mediterranean.
Today, Sardinia hosts around 60/65 % of permanent property of the Italian Ministry of Defense, making it one of the most militarized regions in Europe. This militarization, however, does not operate solely through enclosed bases. It extends through a diffuse system of “servitù militari” (private or public lands that are subject to temporary and unilateral restrictions for military purposes). These areas can be intermittently closed, occupied, or used for exercises, producing a fluctuating geography of access and exclusion.
This system generates what is officially described as “co-use”: a condition in which military forces and local populations, particularly shepherds, are said to share the same land. In practice, however, this co-use is structurally asymmetrical. While pastoral communities depend on continuity of access, ecological stability, and long-term inhabitation, military use is intermittent, intensive, and oriented toward the simulation of destruction. The result is not a balanced coexistence but a regime of uneven exposure, in which human and non-human life are subjected to environmental risks, such as soil contamination and unexploded ordnance, without equivalent control over land use [2].
This spatial regime can be interpreted as an expression of governmentality, where the management of territory is inseparable from the management of life [3]. Military presence is framed through a securitarian and paternalistic logic (protection, defense, collective wealth), yet it produces zones where ecological integrity and public health are compromised. In this sense, the landscape can be understood as a sacrifice zone, where certain territories are rendered expendable in the name of broader geopolitical objectives [4].
The spatial logic of the military base is characterized by enclosure, zoning, and discontinuity. Land is fragmented into operational sectors, activated and deactivated according to training schedules, and structured around high-intensity technological interventions. This produces a territory governed by exception, where access is contingent and temporality is dictated by military needs rather than ecological or social rhythms.
Yet the area of Capo Teulada is not a closed or fully controlled system. It is also shaped by practices that exceed and challenge its imposed order. Shepherds continue to traverse these lands, maintaining pastoral activities that challenge militarization [5]. Their presence introduces a different spatial logic, based on continuity, care, and ecological interdependence, into a territory organized around control and disruption.
However, it is crucial to underline that this territory is not an empty surface [6]. Capo Teulada emerges as a contested living infrastructure: a socio-ecological system where human and non-human lives intersect, where competing territorial rationalities coexist and conflict: a vertical, state-centered sovereignty that imposes control and segmentation, and a horizontal, lived spatiality rooted in long-term ecological relations.
[1] Davis, M. (2012). Dead cities and other tales. The New Press.
[2] Esu, A. (2024). Violare gli spazi. Militarizzazione in tempo di pace e resistenza locale. Ombre Corte.
[3] Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Palgrave Macmillan.
[4] Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
[5] Khazanov, A. M. (1994). Nomads and the outside world. University of Wisconsin Press.
[6] Henni, S. (2022). Deserts are not empty. Columbia University Press
