One-Year Anniversary of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page Launch

One-Year Anniversary of  Jadaliyya’s Environment Page Launch

One-Year Anniversary of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page Launch

By : Environment Page Editors

In recognition of Earth Day 2021, Jadaliyya’s Environment Page celebrates the one-year anniversary of the page’s 2020 launch. The co-editors have prepared this post to share all the articles, “Environment in Context” podcast episodes, live event recordings, interviews, and more published since the page’s launch.

We hope these resources will be useful for researchers; all who are looking to learn more about environmental questions in the region; and those in search of teaching materials that critically engage with these topics.

We continue to welcome submissions to the page, and encourage you to read and share our current call for submissions, which invites general submissions and submissions that provide critical analyses of the relationship between the Arab uprisings and environmental questions in the Middle East and North Africa.

Thank you to all of our readers, listeners, and viewers for supporting the page over this past year! You can reach our editorial team at environment@jadaliyya.com with questions or ideas about how to contribute. We are delighted to share these interventions with you, and look forward to publishing more work in the months and years ahead.

Browse our published works from the past year in the following categories:

●      Environmental Justice / Environmental Racism / Race and the Environment

●      Infrastructure / Engineering / The Built Environment

●      Political Economy: Labor, Commodities, Markets, and the Environment

●      Analyzing Dominant Narratives: Ecology, Scarcity, and Resources

●      Climate Change / Climate Crisis / Environmental Disasters

●      COVID-19, Disease, and the Environment

●      In Solidarity

●      Media Roundups 

Environmental Justice / Environmental Racism / Race and the Environment


Toxic Saturation and Health Devastation in Iraq: The Indelible Damage of War (Part 1)
Carly A. Krakow

Environmental Reclamations (Podcast)
Huma Gupta and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Essential Readings: Land, Water, and the Environment in Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories (by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins)
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)

Environmental Justice in the Middle East: Activism, Resistance, and Decolonisation (Video) (Video)
Carly A. Krakow, Muna Dajani, Mona Harb, Michael Mason

Environmental Protection and Education as Resistance to Injustice in Palestine: An Interview with Mazin Qumsiyeh (Video)
Mazin Qumsiyeh, hosted by Carly A. Krakow and Huma Gupta

Quick Thoughts: Carly A. Krakow on the COVID-19 Pandemic and Environmental Racism
Carly A. Krakow

Green Energy Colonialism in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights (Podcast)
Wael Tarabieh and Muna Dajani, hosted by Malihe Razazan 

Countering Lawfare and Environmental Racism in Gaza and Palestine: The Case Study of the Jewish National Fund versus US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
Gabi Kirk

Danger, Turbines! A Jawlani Cry against Green Energy Colonialism in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights
Muna Dajani 

Infrastructure / Engineering / The Built Environment


The Transformation of Dubai Creek into Infrastructure
(Podcast)
Todd Reisz, hosted by Huma Gupta

Wetlands and the Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey (Podcast)
Caterina Scaramelli, hosted by Huma Gupta and Camille Cole

Introduction: A Roundtable on Engineers, Technopolitics, and the Environment
Danya Al-Saleh and Mohammed Rafi Arefin

Retrofitting Materials, Retooling Expertise
Gökçe Günel 

Cairo’s Sanitary Engineers: Debating Growth and Efficiency
Shehab Fakhry Ismail

Engineering Water: Dams, Modularity, and State Power in Cold War Iran
Shima Houshyar

“How I Learned to Start Thinking Like an Engineer: Lessons from Palestine”
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins 

Engineering Nationalism
Majed Akhter

“Technoscience, the Continuity of the Zionist Settler-Colonial Project, and Infrastructures of Elimination”
Samer Alatout 

Gehood Zateya: Incremental Infrastructure from Below
Noura Wahby

Doing Environmental, Infrastructural, and Urban Histories along the Suez Canal
Mohamed Gamal-Eldin

Gökçe Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (New Texts Out Now)
Gökçe Günel 

Political Economy: Labor, Commodities, Markets, and the Environment


Fast Fashion & Sustainability in Bahrain with Rawan Maki
(Podcast)
Rawan Maki, hosted by Huma Gupta

Ecologies of Capital in Egypt (Podcast)
Aaron Jakes, hosted by Huma Gupta and Camille Cole

The Agrarian Question in Lebanon Today: A View from a Camp in the Bekaa Valley
China Sajadian

Phosphates & the Political Economy of Environmental Transformation in Tunisia (Podcast)
Layli Foroudi, hosted by Huma Gupta

Cement, War, and Toxicity: The Materialities of Displacement in Iraq (Podcast)
Kali Rubaii, hosted by Huma Gupta and Gabi Kirk 

Analyzing Dominant Narratives: Ecology, Scarcity, and Resources


Michael Christopher Low, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (New Texts Out Now)
Michael Christopher Low

Bioregional Imaginings in Two Recent Mesopotamian Novels
Matthew Chovanec

In the Shadow of the Mountains: The Jordan Valley and Israel/Palestine's Marginalized East
Matan Kaminer 

Ecological Imaginaries of Water and Climate Change in Dubai (Podcast)
Nadia Christidi, hosted by Huma Gupta and Danya Al-Saleh

Sowing Scarcity: Syria’s Wheat Regime from Self-Sufficiency to Import-Dependency
Rohan Advani 

Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy (New Texts Out Now)
Robert Vitalis

Iraq and the Arab World on the Edge of the Abyss: A Conversation with Kurdish Iraqi Journalist and Environmental Affairs Researcher, Khalid Suleiman
Khalid Suleiman interviewed by Osama Esber, translated by Huma Gupta

Middle East History in the Time of COVID-19: A Roundtable on Disease, Environment, and Medicine
Joelle Abi-Rached, A. Tylor Brand, Christopher Rose, Seçil Yılmaz, and the Environment Page Editors 

The Campaign to Eradicate Smallpox in Monarchic Iraq
Sara Farhan and Huma Gupta

Jadaliyya Talks: Co-Editors Go In-Depth on the New Environment Page (Podcast)
Danya Al-Saleh, Brittany Cook, Huma Gupta, and Owain Lawson, hosted by Malihe Razazan

Essential Readings: Environment and Politics in the Middle East
Camille Cole, Brittany Cook, Gabi Kirk and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)

Climate Change / Climate Crisis / Environmental Disasters


The World Is Burning - Fire and Climate Crisis from the Mediterranean to the US West Coast
(Video)
Zena Agha, Diana K. Davis, Salma Nashabe Talhouk, Gabi Kirk 

Wildfires in Mount Cudi and the Ecological, Ideological, Political, and Historical Dimensions of Forest Fires: Turkey's Destruction of the Kurdish Environment
Anil Olcan and Zozan Pehlivan

Water Scarcity, Climate Change, and COVID-19 in Yemen: An Interview with Helen Lackner
Helen Lackner interviewed by Carly A. Krakow 

Green Sukuk - The Future of Islamic Financing for Climate Change Adaptation (Podcast)
Aneil Tripathy, hosted by Huma Gupta and Bassam Haddad

On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (New Texts Out Now)
On Barak

COVID-19, Disease, and the Environment


We have published several pieces analyzing the connections between the COVID-19 pandemic, disease, and environmental issues. Each piece in this category is listed under another category above, but we have also grouped them here to offer readers a collection of works that address this set of topics.

Michael Christopher Low, Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (New Texts Out Now)
Michael Christopher Low

Quick Thoughts: Carly A. Krakow on the COVID-19 Pandemic and Environmental Racism
Carly A. Krakow 

Water Scarcity, Climate Change, and COVID-19 in Yemen: An Interview with Helen Lackner
Helen Lackner interviewed by Carly A. Krakow

Middle East History in the Time of COVID-19: A Roundtable on Disease, Environment, and Medicine
Joelle Abi-Rached, A. Tylor Brand, Christopher Rose, Seçil Yılmaz, and the Environment Page Editors

The Campaign to Eradicate Smallpox in Monarchic Iraq
Sara Farhan and Huma Gupta

In Solidarity


Jadaliyya Environment Page Co-Editors Statement in Support of Samer Alat
out

Media Roundups


Environment Page Extended Media Roundup (January-February 2021)

Environment Page Extended Media Roundup (November-December 2020)

Environment Page Extended Media Roundup (September-October 2020)

Environment Page Extended Media Roundup (May-August 2020)

Environment Page Extended Media Roundup (January-March 2020)

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    • Roundtable on Capitalism and Climate

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Introduction: A Roundtable on Engineers, Technopolitics, and the Environment

Scholars and policymakers write on the Middle East and North Africa through a one-dimensional focus on geopolitics, war, corruption, and repressive regimes, which often overshadows complex environments and environmental challenges. When they discuss the environment, they have historically resorted to simplistic and deterministic accounts of scarcity and overpopulation. But even a cursory review of recent events highlights the socioecological complexity of life across the region. Consider the following three events in Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon.

During the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and again during the period of time in 2014 when ISIS held control of Mosul, longstanding concerns over the stability of the Mosul Dam came to international attention. Often called the most dangerous dam in the world, the Mosul Dam sits atop cavernous ground which requires constant reinforcement to avoid catastrophic breakdown and social and environmental devastation. Imperialist wars, sanctions, and regional strife have continually interrupted its engineering maintenance. These disruptions have also made it possible for the US Army Corps of Engineers and foreign contractors to profit from the dam’s most recent repair and reinforcement.

In 2015, one year after the concerns around Mosul Dam were raised, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s regime in Egypt announced a massive infrastructural project to expand the Suez Canal, costing upwards of eight billion US dollars. Economic and environmental appraisals of the project were bleak, arguing the financial benefit was nonexistent and that the expanded canal could devastate the Mediterranean’s biodiversity. These daunting forecasts, however, did not put a damper on the state-sponsored country-wide celebrations of a new era of Egyptian megaprojects. Placing engineers at the heart of the country's path towards stability, Sisi claimed the expansion of the Suez Canal as a major accomplishment of his early rule.

Most recently in Lebanon, the Beirut blast represents yet another regional event where the supposedly discrete spheres of the technical and the political quite literally ruptured, constituting what Mazen Labban argues is environmental violence. Leaving behind ruin and rubble, the explosion sedimented new layers of neglect atop the already garbage- and sewage-plagued streets of Beirut. Engineers became central in managing and assessing the explosion’s damage. Civil engineers assessed the structural integrity of the city’s buildings and also sought to measure the impact of the explosion, which a research group recently determined was one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history. Furthermore, investigators tasked forensic engineers with the challenge of determining not only technical failure, but also the politics of responsibility. The blast, as many trying to make sense of it argue, can only be explained by understanding how technical, political, and urban environmental neglect articulate together, causing an unbearable level of destruction and trauma.

This roundtable calls for renewed attention to the particular role of engineers and engineering in technopolitical and environmental projects within and beyond the 'Middle East.'

In all of these instances, the relation between the technical, political, and the environmental becomes clear—if only through urgency, a spectacular display of state authority, or crisis. Without the proper analytical tools, the role of technical expertise in shaping and often depoliticizing environmental struggles becomes sidelined. While the academic study of technopolitics has an established geographical point in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf, this roundtable calls for renewed attention to the particular role of engineers and engineering in technopolitical and environmental projects within and beyond the “Middle East.”

What does a focus on this class of technical workers and body of knowledge reveal about historic and contemporary power structures of and struggles over the environment? This roundtable features a group of scholars whose research varies across histories, geographies, and engineered forms, spanning from water and sanitation infrastructures to dams and floating power plants. Across these diverse contexts, engineers are key actors that take part in designing, manipulating, and managing the environment. Engineers have implemented and designed the colonial and imperial infrastructures that continue to shape the region’s urban and rural environments. Engineers serve as managerial labor overseeing the nation’s dams, sanitation systems, extractive infrastructures, and electric grids.

Trained in their studies to be “problem solvers,” engineers often perceive themselves as uniquely positioned to control and render solvable the messiness of the material world. Through what contributor Gokçe Günel terms “technical adjustments,” engineering and engineers are closely tied with the development and reproduction of capitalism. The profession remains central for producing seemingly technical and apolitical solutions to the conflicts and ecological contradictions of capitalism, including the climate crisis and energy transitions.

We invited seven scholars from the social sciences and humanities to reflect on one of the following three questions:

Expertise, Power, and Environment: Who are the engineers in your research and how are they positioned vis-à-vis power structures and institutions, such as states, universities, colonial regimes, and corporations?


Gökçe Günel, Shehab Fakhry Ismail, and Shima Houshyar offer insight into how the engineers in their research position themselves as experts off the coast of Tema in Ghana, in the bureaucracies of colonial Cairo, and in the Dezful region of Khuzestan, Iran. Günel analyzes how Turkish engineers working on an floating power plant in Ghana were able to retool their training as ship engineers to become energy workers. Ismail shows how ideas about efficiency and growth among engineers in the United States resembled how colonial engineers understood and contested their role as experts in Cairo. He focuses on a debate that took place in the 1890s between sanitary engineers in Cairo concerning water consumption and sewage system design in relation to the city’s potential growth. Houshyar traces how networks of US and US-trained Iranian engineers mobilized their experience in the US West to construct the Dez Dam in Khuzestan. In each case, engineers work, study, and travel beyond what is demarcated as the “Middle East,” raising important questions about the labor, uneven development, and transregional networks of expertise shaping the environment.

Engineers and Methodology: How have you navigated the epistemological and ontological frictions and possibilities between engineering and the critical social sciences?


Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Majed Akhter address the epistemological differences they confronted during their environmental research on sanitation and water with engineers. Stamatoupoulou-Robbins, grappling with the role of Palestinian engineers in designing, maintaining, and contesting settler-colonial infrastructures, criticizes one-dimensional characterizations of engineers, reflecting on how her own assumptions changed throughout her research. Akhter, on the other hand, begins with his own background as an engineer to trace how he has come to understand how engineers working for the state in Pakistan, or engineer-administrators, produce nationalism through their technological interventions managing dams. 

Technopolitics and Infrastructure: What do you think a focus on engineers and engineering can contribute to contemporary scholarship and struggles over infrastructure and the environment? 


Samer Alatout and Noura Wahby each address how a focus on engineers invites new ways of thinking about struggles over infrastructure and the environment, particularly in relation to the state. Alatout argues that Zionist engineers articulated technical debates about water abundance and scarcity in Palestine in accordance with settler-colonial settlement and state-building agendas before and after 1948. Wahby argues that the state-led engineering of Cairo’s systems of water provision depends on auto-engineered infrastructures, or “infrastructures from below.” However, the state’s relationship to these informal engineering practices has shifted over time and often depends on the class background of the communities building systems of water access.

Pipes for intake of seawater for desalination in Doha, Qatar. Credit: Danya Al-Saleh