Announcing the New Issue of Middle East Report (MER 296): Nature & Politics

Announcing the New Issue of Middle East Report (MER 296): Nature & Politics

Announcing the New Issue of Middle East Report (MER 296): Nature & Politics

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Middle East Report
No. 296

Nature & Politics


The coronavirus pandemic vividly highlights the fundamental links between people, health and the environment. From theories of the virus’ animal origins and evidence that animal-human disease transmission is tied to habitat destruction, to emerging studies that indicate a link between air pollution and the risk of COVID-19 infections and deaths, the current moment underscores just how deeply entwined we are with the natural worlds in which we live.

This issue of Middle East Report on nature and politics probes the co-constituted relationships between people and their environments in the Middle East. Previous issues of Middle East Report provide insightful reflection on a range of environment-related concerns across the region, such as resource crises (Fuel and Water: The Coming Crises, Summer 2014), water scarcity (Running Dry, Spring 2010), intersections of gender, population and the environment (Gender, Population, Environment: The Middle East Beyond the Cairo Conference, September/October 1994) and food provisioning (Food and the Future, September/October 1990). In titling this issue “Nature and Politics” we build on these earlier works while also signaling a broader conceptualization of the environment as an important zone of political contestation and social life in the region. The articles in this issue encourage new ways of thinking beyond narratives of environment in the Middle East that frame nature merely as a source of resources around which conflicts emerge. They push for a reconsideration of questions of citizenship, infrastructure and futurity, while foregrounding the agentive and sometimes toxic qualities of ecological worlds. 

The issue offers new takes on much-discussed issues of energy and water. An article by Zeynep Oguz looks at how oil in Turkey, a limited resource concentrated in the Kurdish-populated southeast, has been a medium through which both Turks and Kurds seek to stake their claims. Moulay Ahmed el Amrani, Atman Aoui and Karen Rignall’s analysis of solar power development in Morocco challenges the idea that renewable energy is inherently progressive by showing how this megaproject has buttressed exclusionary political regimes. Naoual Belakhdar’s article examines how anti-fracking protests in Algeria in 2014–2015 were entwined with larger questions of equality, social justice and citizenship and prepared the ground for the protest movement known as the Hirak, which began in 2019 and is ongoing. Kenan Bezhat Sharpe interviews filmmaker Can Candan about Turkey’s longstanding ambitions to develop nuclear power, despite growing opposition, and his ongoing film project, Nuclear alla Turca. A primer by Jessica Barnes offers an introduction to the key issue of water in the Middle East, laid out with graphics and downloadable as a PDF, which is designed to be of use to educators and students.

A related set of articles looks at how energy and water concerns in the region are being shaped by climate change, both in terms of changing temperature and precipitation patterns and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Jan Selby dismantles the simplistic argument that the Syrian civil war was partly caused by climate change induced drought, demonstrating how this trope obscures a deeper and long-term structural agrarian crisis in Syria and regime politics. Gökçe Günel reflects on the ways Masdar City, an eco-city in Abu Dhabi, has changed since 2006, when work initially began, and since 2010–2011, when she was conducting fieldwork there. 

A third cluster of articles centers on questions of land. Kali Rubaii probes the toxic legacies of war in Iraq by examining how cascades of environmental degradation are tragically rendered visible in birth defects. Tessa Farmer interviews Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins about her new book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2020), which investigates waste management in the absence of a state. A photo essay by Simone Popperl focuses on sinkholes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel and Jordan, questioning what happens when the terra part of the terra nullis foundation of settler colonialism becomes unstable. 

Finally, whereas many accounts frame the environment purely as an arena of problems—pollution, landscape degradation, climate change—the word nature reminds us that the natural world can also be a source of wonder and pleasure. Bridget Guarasci opens up the world of bird markets and pigeon breeding in Jordan. Caterina Scaramelli explores the Turkish state’s efforts to conserve wetlands, showing how these interventions are linked to histories of wetland drainage and development and have not always served the interests of those whose homes and livelihoods are anchored in these diverse ecosystems.

Through these contributions, “Nature and Politics” offers a timely take on how various populations in the Middle East are interacting with the natural world and the multifaceted political and social dynamics surrounding those interactions. It sheds light, also, on the ways in which elements within the natural world—be they rivers, animals, sinkholes or toxins—act back upon society. In this sense, both “natural” and “political” worlds are transformed through their mutual engagements and entanglements.

Table of Contents


Nature and Politics by The Editors of Issue #296

Water in the Middle East: A Primer by Jessica Barnes

On Blaming Climate Change for the Syrian Civil War by Jan Selby

Gobal Aspirations of Local Realities of Solar Energy in Morocco by Atman Aoui, Moulay Ahmed el Amrani, and Karen Rignall

Birth Defects and the Toxic Legacy of War in Iraq by Kali Rubaii

Bird Markets, Artisanal Pigeons and CLass Relations in the Middle East by Bridget Guarasci

The Unintended Consequences of Turkey's Quest for Oil by Zeynep Oguz

Terra Infirma - Dead Sea Sinkholes - A Photo Essay by Simone Popperl

The Lost Wetlands of Turkey by Caterina Scaramelli

"Algeria is not for Sale!" Mobilizing Against Fracking in the Sahara by Naoual Belakhdar

An Interview with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins by Tessa Farmer

"Turkey Wants to be Part of the Nuclear Club" An Interview with Can Candan by Kenan Behzat Sharpe

Masdar City 2020 by Gökçe Günel

Subscribe to Middle East Report or order individual copies here


Middle East Report 
is published by the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), a progressive, independent organization based in Washington, DC. Since 1971 MERIP has provided critical analysis of the Middle East, focusing on political economy, popular struggles, and the implications of US and international policy for the region. The editors of issue 296, “Nature and Politics,” are Jessica Barnes and Jadaliyya Co-Editor Muriam Haleh Davis with guest editor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412