Santiago Gorostiza

Santiago Gorostiza is a historian working on the relationship between war and the environment. He is a researcher at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), where he leads the Formas Career Grant project “From military to civil crime: An environmental history of ecocide”. This project examines debates about the impact of war on the environment, with special attention to the origins and development of the concept of ecocide from 1970 to the end of the 20th century.

Santiago’s research has primarily focused on the environmental history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist dictatorship. He has explored water infrastructure and urban warfare in besieged Madrid, the collectivisation of water supply in Barcelona, and the role of urban agriculture during times of conflict. His work also examines the dictatorship’s autarkic political project as an environmental project, focusing on the intertwined mobilisation of nation and nature. He has studied the militarisation of the Pyrenean border during the 1940s as well as guerrilla resistance against the regime. Other areas of study include dam disasters and conservation policies during the Franco’s regime.

At the crossroads of political ecology and the history of science, Santiago’s research extends to the environmental history of rivers. He has published extensively on the relationship between potash mining and water salinisation in the Llobregat River basin (Barcelona). During his postdoctoral research at the Centre for History at Sciences Po, he was part of the Shifting Shores project, which examined the environmental history of the Po (Italy), Rhône (France) and Ebro (Spain) river basins with particular attention to the sediments transported by rivers to deltas.

More recently, Santiago has developed a research line in climate history and human responses to extreme climate events. His studies include responses to drought during the 17th century, particularly the codification of urban water knowledge, and ongoing work that examines connections between climate and conflict. 

Before joining LUCSUS, Santiago completed his PhD at the Centro de Estudos Sociais of the Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal) as a Marie Curie ITN fellow of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE). He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence of the Institute for Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and at the Centre for History at Sciences Po (CHSP, Paris). Later, he became a María Zambrano fellow at the Geography Department of UAB and a researcher at the ERC project CLIMASAT, hosted by the Institute for the History of Science (IHC-UAB).
Santiago serves as the Spanish representative at the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). He is also a member of the board of the Ecología Política journal and of the Undisciplined Environments platform.