Placing the environment in Middle East studies: beyond the single story

ABSTRACT

Crisis is a recurrent motif in discussions of the environment in the Middle East. Concerns about water scarcity, food insecurity, climate disasters, and resource degradation play into common associations of the region with conflict, malfunction, and despair. Yet this single story obscures as much as it illuminates. In this paper, I draw examples from my work on Nile water politics, climate change, and bread in Egypt to illustrate the power of this dominant narrative and its limitations. I reflect on the multiple stories that emerge when we shift our starting point or scale of analysis. I argue for the need to move beyond thinking about the environment just as a problem space to consider it as the space in which people are living their daily lives.

Acknowledgments

This paper is a revised version of the keynote talk that I presented at the British Society for Middle East Studies annual conference in Exeter in July 2023. I thank Kali Rubaii, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Caterina Scaramelli, Simone Popperl, Tessa Farmer, David Kneas, and Florence Miller for their feedback on drafts of the talk, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ ‘Climate Change Is Making the Arab World More Miserable’, The Economist, May 31, 2018.

² Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

³ Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Brian Larkin, ‘The Form of Crisis and the Affect of Modernization’, in African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility, eds. Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

⁴ See, for example, Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (London: Profile Books, 2008); Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011); Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sam White, Climate of Rebellion in Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jeannie Sowers, Environmental Politics in Egypt: Activists, Experts and the State (New York: Routledge, 2013); Emily McKee, Dwelling in Conflict: Negev Landscapes and the Boundaries of Belonging (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Nathalie Peutz, Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); Jennifer Derr, The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019); Gökçe Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); Faisal Husain, Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Caterina Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021); Karen Rignall, An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021); Tessa Farmer, Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023); Marwa Daoudy, The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Munira Khayyat, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

⁵ Alan Mikhail, ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Diana Davis and Edmund Burke, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011); and Umut Yıldırım, ed., War-Torn Ecologies, an-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023).

⁶ Diana Davis, ‘Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Midlde East: History, Policy, Power, and Practice’, in Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, eds. Diana Davis and Edmund Burke (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

⁷ See, for instance, Max Ajl, ‘Does the Arab Region Have an Agrarian Question?’, Journal of Peasant Studies 48, no. 955–983 (2020); Noura Alkhaliji, Muna Dajani, and Yahia Mahmoud, ‘The Enduring Coloniality of Ecological Modernization: Wind Energy Development in Occupied Western Sahara and the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights’, Political Geography 103, (2023): 102871; Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, eds., Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (London: Pluto Press, 2023); and Rami Zurayk, Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, (Charlottesville, VA: Just World Books, 2012).

⁸ This research includes a year of fieldwork based in a village in Fayoum Province in 2007–8 and eight subsequent fieldwork visits, during which I returned to Fayoum and conducted interviews with agricultural, irrigation, and food security experts in Cairo. This research received ethics approval from the Institutional Review Boards at Columbia University and the University of South Carolina (#IRBAAAC5428(Y1M00); #Pro00031133; and #Pro00044634).

⁹ I use pseudonyms throughout this paper.

¹⁰ Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), chap. 7.

¹¹ ‘Egypt’s Sisi Warns of Potential Conflict over Ethiopian Dam’, Reuters, April 7, 2021.

¹² ‘Egypt’s President Calls for Reaching Gerd Deal, Says Egypt Does Not Have Chance to Bear Water Shortage’, Egypt Today, March 13, 2023.

¹³ For further discussion of the dam and its political ramifications, see Ana Cascão and Alan Nicol, ‘Gerd: New Norms of Cooperation in the Nile Basin?’, Water International 41, no. 4 (2016): 550–73; and Wondwosen Seide and Emanuele Fantini, ‘Emotions in Water Diplomacy: Negotiations on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’, Water Alternatives 16, no. 3 (2023): 1–18.

¹⁴ Menna Farouk, ‘Egypt’s New Administrative Capital Getting Its Own “Nile”’, Al-Monitor, January 23, 2019.

¹⁵ Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

¹⁶ While modelling work has been ongoing since this 2011 meeting, the uncertainty over the impact of climate change on Nile flows remains. See, Mohammed Basheer, Victor Nechifor, Alvaro Calzadilla, et al. ‘Cooperative Adaptive Management of the Nile River with Climate and Socio-Economic Uncertainties’. Nature Climate Change 13(2023): 48–57.

¹⁷ Jeannie Sowers, Avner Vengosh, and Erika Weinthal, ‘Climate Change, Water Resources, and the Politics of Adaptation in the Middle East and North Africa’, Climatic Change 104(2011): 599–627.

¹⁸ Mohamed El-Din, Proposed Climate Change Adaptation Strategy for the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation in Egypt (Cairo: UNESCO, 2013).

¹⁹ For an illustration of how water scarcity can be used to further a political project, see Samer Alatout, ’“States” of Scarcity: Water, Space, and Identity Politics in Israel, 1948–59’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(2008): 959–82.

²⁰ For further demonstration of this dynamic at play, see Saker El Nour, ‘Grabbing from Below: A Study of Land Reclamation in Egypt’, Review of African Political Economy 46, no. 162 (2019): 549–66.

²¹ Interview, Fayoum Province, July 7, 2007.

²² Mike Hulme, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism’, Osiris 26(2011): 245–66.

²³ Jan Selby, Gabrielle Daoust, and Clemens Hoffman, Divided Environments: An International Political Ecology of Climate Change, Water and Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); and Daoudy, Origins of the Syrian Conflict.

²⁴ Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, eds., Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (London: Pluto Press, 2023).

²⁵ Larbi Sadiki, ‘Towards Arab Liberal Governance: From the Democracy of Bread to the Democracy of the Vote’, Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 127–48; and José Martínez, States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).

²⁶ Rachel Trego, ‘The Functioning of the Egyptian Food-Subsidy System During Food-Price Shocks’, Development in Practice 21, no. 4–5 (2011): 666–78.

²⁷ Moustafa Abdalla and Sherine Al-Shawarby, ‘The Tamween Food Subsidy System in Egypt: Evolution and Recent Implementation Reforms’, in The 1.5 Billion People Question: Food, Vouchers, or Cash Transfers?, eds. Harold Alderman, Ugo Gentilini, and Ruslan Yemstov (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2017).

²⁸ Jessica Barnes, Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).

²⁹ In doing so, the book speaks to the calls for more attention to how security and insecurity are being experienced in the region, laid out in Samer Abboud et al., ‘Towards a Beirut School of Critical Security Studies’, Critical Studies on Security 6, no. 3 (2018): 273–95.

³⁰ Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, The Danger of a Single Story, TEDGlobal Talk (July 2009).

³¹ Ola Westengen et al., ‘Safeguarding a Global Seed Heritage from Syria to Svalbard’, Nature Plants 6, November 2020 (2020): 1311–7.

³² Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland, chap. 5.

³³ Farmer, Well Connected, chap. 6.