Climate change and the Syrian civil war, Part II: The Jazira's agrarian crisis. Issue 101 (May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Selby, Jan
• Is Part Of: Geoforum. Issue 101(2019)
• Page Start: 260
• Page End: 274
• Publication Date: 2019-05
• Subjects: Climate change -- Syrian civil war -- Drought -- Oil -- Frontiers -- Political ecology; Geography -- Periodicals; Human geography -- Periodicals; Regional planning -- Periodicals; Sciences de la terre -- Périodiques; Géographie -- Périodiques; Géographie humaine -- Périodiques; Aménagement du territoire -- Périodiques; Earth sciences; Geography; Human geography; Regional planning; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 304.205
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.06.010
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0016-7185

Abstract

Highlights: Syria's pre-civil war agrarian crisis was caused more by long-term structural factors than drought-induced scarcity. Nationally, this crisis was caused by the collapse of Syria's oil rent-led model of development. The crisis was especially severe in northeast Syria by virtue of being an ethnically contested borderland and frontier zone. The central causes of Syria's pre-civil war agrarian crisis were political and political-economic. The Syrian case supports political ecology as against environmental security readings of scarcity dynamics. Abstract: This article is the second in a series on the alleged links between climate change, drought and the onset of Syria's civil war. In a previous article it was argued that there is little merit to the Syria-climate conflict thesis, including no clear evidence that drought-related migration contributed to civil war onset. Building on this earlier work, the present article investigates an issue which was not fully analysed in the previous one: the nature and causes of the pre-civil war agrarian crisis in Syria's northeast Jazira region, and especially in the governorate of Hasakah. This crisis is usually represented as rooted essentially in a severe multi-year drought which, it is claimed, led to multiple crop failures and in turn large-scale migration. Here it is argued, by contrast, that the central causes of Hasakah's agrarian crisis were long-term and structural, involving three main factors: extreme water resource degradation; deepening rural poverty; and underpinning these, specific features of Syria's and Hasakah's politics and political economy. The article contends, most notably, that the exceptional severity of Hasakah's crisis was a function of the nationwide collapse of Syria's agrarian and rentier model of state-building and development, combined with Hasakah's distinctive political geography as an ethnically contested borderland and frontier zone. I thus conclude that rather than supporting narratives of environmental scarcity-induced conflict, the Syrian case actually confirms the opposite: namely, political ecologists' insistence on the centrality of the political, and of conflict, in causing environmental scarcities and insecurities.