Degrowth as De-escalation
Building peace beyond growth
The war in Iran has done something brutally clarifying. It has forced the global economy to reveal the infrastructure of its own dependence. For decades, growth ideology has presented more production, throughput, energy use, trade, and speed as the ordinary metabolism of modern life. Then missiles fly, a choke-point tightens, insurers panic, ships stall, and suddenly the hidden architecture steps into view. The Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows, becomes a reminder that the everyday functioning of our growth-based society depends on a narrow, militarized corridor that can--at any moment--become a battlefield.
Degrowth scholarship has made powerful contributions to climate, justice, and wellbeing, but its de-escalatory implications remain comparatively underdeveloped. This matters because a growth-dependent world does not only generate ecological breakdown. It also generates the strategic pressures, choke-point dependencies, and militarized protections that make war more likely. What this conflict between the US/Israel and Iran--centering on the strait of Hormuz--shows is that degrowth also belongs to the politics of de-escalation. A world organized around permanent expansion creates permanent strategic pressure. The result is a system in which interruptions to energy flows are treated as existential threats rather than manageable disruptions. When so much social reproduction has been built on high levels of material and energy throughput, the defense of that throughput becomes a matter of state doctrine.
Growth-oriented societies create choke-point dependence because they require immense and continuous volumes of energy and materials to preserve the systemic integrity of the global political economy. The closure or effective blockade of a passage like Hormuz threatens fuel supply, freight, food prices, inflation, and the confidence structures of financialised economies. That is why states mobilize fleets, invoke “energy security,” pressure allies, court petro-states, and prepare for escalation. The system is engineered in such a way that de-escalation often appears, from within the ruling imagination, as a greater risk than confrontation.
For parties and movements that oppose war but remain committed to growth, the problem is deeper than foreign policy posture. So long as economies depend on expanding throughput, choke-points, extraction frontiers, and militarized trade protection remain built into normal functioning. A serious anti-war politics therefore requires more than protest against particular cases of aggression. It requires a program for reducing the material dependencies that repeatedly make aggression appear necessary.
Degrowth offers an alternative to that trap. It asks a more serious question than how to secure enough fuel to keep growth going. It asks how much throughput is actually necessary for a dignified and flourishing life, and how much is merely the metabolic demand of accumulation. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report gave demand-side mitigation a central place for the first time and concluded that demand-side changes could cut global greenhouse gas emissions in end-use sectors by 40 to 70 percent by 2050 while maintaining or improving wellbeing. In simple terms, it means the IPCC is no longer only asking how to power the same way of life more cleanly, but also whether we can build ways of living that need less energy to begin with. That means lower throughput is not synonymous with deprivation. It points toward a reorganization of housing, mobility, provisioning, and infrastructure around sufficiency rather than endless expansion.
A lower-throughput society requires less energy in total, and Research in Nature Communications found that inequality can dramatically increase the energy required to secure decent living standards for everyone, effectively doubling the energy requirement in some modeled conditions. In other words, elite excess is a major driver of total system demand. Jets, oversized homes, luxury data use, built-in obsolescence, wasteful freight, and prestige consumption all expand the strategic burden on energy systems and trade corridors. A politics of sufficiency and redistribution therefore reduces the geopolitical pressure generated by the consumption patterns of affluence.
That matters immensely in a world of fossil choke-points. Conventional energy security thinking has long been tied to military protection of flows, especially the protection of tanker routes and strategic passages. Once that framing takes hold, sanctions, proxy wars, and coercive diplomacy begin to appear as ordinary tools of economic management. Degrowth changes the terrain by weakening the compulsion behind that whole apparatus. Lower throughput (of all materials) means less dependence on distant extraction zones. Greater localization of provisioning means fewer catastrophic knock-on effects when trade routes get blocked. Investment in public transit, insulation, repair systems, and democratic energy reduces the tendency to treat shipping disruptions as civilizational emergencies.
As the Strait of Hormuz tightened, Gulf producers rushed to reroute exports through pipelines and alternative ports. Import-dependent states turned to emergency diversification. Strategic reserves were released. Analysts raised price forecasts. LNG buyers looked for non-Middle Eastern supply. Demonstrating that the system treats dependence as a logistical problem to be managed rather than a structural condition to be transformed.
The logic of degrowth offers a different strategic horizon. It loosens the background compulsion that drives escalation. Lower energy dependence, stronger public goods, and shorter supply chains reduce the likelihood that distant disruptions are translated into domestic existential crises.
Degrowth cannot, by itself, dissolve hegemonic projects rooted in supremacy, chosenness, civilizational entitlement, or sacred territorial destiny. A lower-throughput economy does not automatically undo settler myth, racial hierarchy, or expansionist identity. But degrowth still matters here, because it contests the deeper social logic that treats land, energy, labor, and life as substrates for endless appropriation. In that sense, degrowth is part of a wider struggle over desire, legitimacy, and the stories societies tell about what they are owed. In contexts shaped by settler colonialism and ethnonational expansion, degrowth only becomes fully de-escalatory when joined with decolonial struggle. Without that, material contraction could coexist perfectly well with fortified exclusion, sacrificial zones, and a politics of permanent siege.
There is also a moral unveiling here that should not be ignored. Wars around oil and gas are often discussed using the language of stability, deterrence, and national interest, which conveniently sanitizes what is really happening. High-throughput societies are held together by coercive access to distant labor, land, fuel, and sea lanes. Their normality rests on the successful management of violence elsewhere. Choke-point crises tear that veil. They reveal that what is called “prosperity” often depends on a global architecture of force. Degrowth makes that structure harder to hide because it asks whether any form of wellbeing worth defending should require this level of militarized extraction in the first place.
None of this implies that degrowth offers an immediate solution to the war in Iran. It does, however, help us identify the systemic conditions that make conflicts like this more explosive and more globally consequential than they would otherwise be. It tells us that the route to a less war-prone world runs through the metabolism of the economy itself. As long as states remain trapped in the need to secure ever-expanding flows of energy and materials, they will continue to militarize choke-points, externalize risk, and gamble with planetary stability. As that compulsion weakens, so does one of the deepest structural drivers of escalation.
The current US/Israel-Iran war highlights the need for degrowth. It does so by revealing the choke-points of growth-oriented society with almost theatrical cruelty. Hormuz is a window into the true design of the system. Degrowth becomes, in that light, a project of de-escalation. A way of reducing the material stakes that turn trade corridors into battle lines, of shrinking the strategic importance of fossil flows, and of building social ecologies that do not require the world to be continuously secured at gunpoint.
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Thanks for this, Pieter. You pointed to a real challenge - voluntary elite degrowth is structurally near-impossible without changing the payoff structure itself. That change would require political power that elites are strongly incentivized to prevent others from accumulating. It's a recursive trap.
And even though personal degrowth tactics free up resources that will just get absorbed elsewhere under the current model, possibly through continued elite consumption where the floor is set by positional competition, I still advocate for it. The entire architecture of modern consumer capitalism banks on debt, low savings rates, overall financial precarity. Consuming less allows regular people to build reserves, resist manipulation and avoid debt. That is people power, the power of sufficiency!
This is indeed a beneficial angle to degrowth I hadn’t thought of.
I also like the caution over the different ways degrowth can manifest - solutions are rarely singular or simple. I would add the need for slowing down and building in redundancy to the anti-colonial approach as just two of the pool of antidotes to the peril of global trade and a runaway capitalist economy you could mention.