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Armed conflict has played an increasingly important role in the transformation of key social and environmental systems at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Accelerated resource flows and environmental change dynamics intersect with conflict processes in ways that are substantial and yet inadequately understood. Drawing on research along the Pakistani border in eastern Afghanistan’s embattled province of Nangarhar, we employ a coupled systems approach for understanding the ways in which social-ecological processes shape and are shaped by armed conflict. Based on field surveys, geospatial analysis of land and forest change, and participatory research among local communities, government agencies and military actors, we identify several causal processes linking conflict and dynamics of social-ecological change in the context of multiscalar geopolitical processes. We focus attention on four inter …