The Origins of the Syrian Conflict Climate Change and Human Security

Does climate change cause conflict? Did it cause the Syrian uprising? Some policymakers and academics have made this claim, but is it true? This study presents a new conceptual framework to evaluate this claim. Contributing to scholarship in the fields of critical security, environmental security, human security, and Arab politics, Marwa Daoudy prioritizes non-Western and marginalized perspectives to make sense of Syria's place in this international debate. Designing an innovative multidisciplinary framework and applying it to the Syrian case, Daoudy uses extensive field research and her own personal background as a Syrian scholar to present primary interviews with Syrian government officials and citizens, as well as the research of domestic Syrian experts, to provide a unique insight into Syria's environmental, economic and social vulnerabilities leading up to the 2011 uprising.

Part I. The Context: History, Geography, Security: 1. Climate change and the Syrian revolution; 2. The many faces of environmental security; 3. When geography rules history; Part II. Human-Environmental Climate Security: 4. Rules of ideology and policy: from Ba'athism to the liberal age; 5. Vulnerability and resilience: human-environmental climate security (HECS) in Syria; 6. Syria: a (hi)story of vulnerability, resistance, and resilience.

Marwa Daoudy is Assistant Professor in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. The co-organizer of a major climate change conference at Princeton University, she has been a policy advisor and consultant for government agencies including the UNESCO-World Water Assessment Program, and contributed to the establishment of the Oxford Water Network, a research-led project which focuses on improving water security across the globe. She is the author of The Water Divide between Syria, Turkey and Iraq: Negotiation, Security and Power Asymmetry (2005), which was awarded the Ernest Lémonon prize by the Académie Française.