In both the popular press and academic literature, the 2012 Syrian uprising became a symbol of the connection between climate change and conflict. After all, from 2006 until 2010 Syria was experiencing a consecutive drought that was a byproduct of climate change plaguing an already arid and water-stressed region of the world. According to this argument, the drought resulted in crop failure, poverty, internal migration, and displacement, which ultimately compelled people into the streets in social protest that resulted in political violence. In The Origins of The Syrian Conflict, Marwa Daoudy draws attention to the shortcomings and dangers of this climate-conflict thesis and introduces a new conceptual framework to explain the uprising. Her multidisciplinary framework is rooted in critical environmental security, human security, and political ideology of the ruling elite.
The climate-conflict thesis cannot fully explain the 2012 uprising, according to Daoudy, because social protests began in urban centers, instead of the drought-stricken Jazira/Hassake rural province that is Syria's breadbasket. Urban protesters denounced political repression and corruption–not lack of water or food. In addition to the shortcomings of the climate-conflict thesis to account for these facts, Daoudy draws attention to the potentially dangerous consequences of its deterministic nature. Political elite in the Global South can use the climate-conflict thesis as an excuse for inaction or oppression of society, rather than as a driving force to implement effective and sustainable environmental policy to help adapt to climate change. In other words, the climate-conflict argument can be used to absolve policymakers and political elite of any agency to respond to climate change by building adaptive capacity, increasing efficiency, and fostering resilience.
Drawing on field research in Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey along with both publicly available and classified documents, Daoudy seeks to explain the rural origins of the urban uprising and to thereby demonstrate that climate change was not the independent variable leading to conflict and political violence in Syria. While climate change contributed to the drought-induced water insecurity in Syria's arid regions, the problem of water scarcity is and has been a byproduct of long-term pressures and mismanagement.
Professor Daoudy explains the structural long-term unsustainable pressures on water and food security produced by political elites’ environmental ideology by providing a fuller understanding of the relationship between environmental security, human security, and political ideology. She does this by introducing the Human-Environment-Climate Security (HECS) framework, which can be applied to other cases across the world. The multidimensional framework combines an analysis of political factors, economic security, water and food security, and environmental security to demonstrate how they combine and interact to influence all aspects of human insecurity and population displacement. To better understand the influence on human insecurity, the framework also draws on three other factors: structural, vulnerability, and resilience.
Through a comparative analysis of two periods of droughts in Syria, 1998–2001 and 2006–2010, Daoudy effectively demonstrates that climate change was a “background condition,” whose impact could have been averted by effective policy. But poor government policies significantly contributed to the vulnerability and lack of resilience confronting the rural population.
The political ideology of Hafez al-Assad (initially Ba'athism and later liberalization) and Bashar al-Assad (social market economy) had a direct impact on resource availability and on the vulnerability and resilience of farmers in Syria's northeast and eastern territory. While the earlier reforms by Hafez al-Assad enhanced living conditions in the urban areas, they were inherently unsustainable in their excessive use of water resources, large-scale irrigation projects, and dam construction. The result was an increase in human insecurity because of groundwater depletion and soil degradation. As Bashar al-Assad embraced neoliberal economic policies, he cut food and fuel subsidies and removed social safety nets from farmers. These cuts coincided with drought-induced crop failure along with water and food insecurity, which resulted in high levels of economic and social vulnerability for farmers. These pressures combined with the urban population's lack of resilience against disruptions to their livelihoods, which included access to food, water, and land for farmers. A history of poor governance and weak institutions meant that resilience was already relatively weak in Syria. As a result, government policies turned the drought into a national crisis that threatened farmers’ food and water security along with their livelihoods. Under these conditions, Daoudy argues that popular protests and conflict were inevitable.
Concomitant with the structural pressures, vulnerabilities, and lack of resilience are the triggers that resulted in the uprising. For Daoudy, the triggers in the Syrian case included uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and Bashar al-Assad's security service's torture of schoolchildren in Deraa. Together, the structural factors and triggers provide a better account of the uprising.
This is a well-researched and well-written book by a seasoned expert on Syria's water politics, hydropolitics, and domestic politics. It represents an important contribution to our understanding of the environmental security origins of the 2012 uprising along with the political and policy decisions that led to the conflict. Drawing on new and previously unpublished socioeconomic, political, and environmental data from the decades leading up to the uprising, Professor Daoudy uses the HECS framework to launch an important critique of the existing environmental security literature and the climate-conflict thesis for failing to account for how politics, governance, and political ideology intertwine to impact human insecurity. In the process, she integrates a broad range of literature that has not been combined before to illustrate the HECS framework's ability to account for the uprising and to demonstrate how political factors were more important than climate change in explaining the uprising. This book is a must read for anyone interested in environmental security, water security, the Syrian uprising, hydropolitics, and Syrian water politics.
