For a Political Ecology of Bilad as-Sham: Material Struggles, Colonial Legacies, and Agrarian Futures

Why do we need a Political Ecology of Bilad as-Sham?

In South Lebanon, the smell of burnt olive trees mixes with tear gas and the fumes from Israeli drones. What was once a source of livelihood, kinship, and rootedness becomes, overnight, a front line. This scene echoes across Bilad as-Sham: from Palestinian shepherds navigating surveillance and fencing in the Jordan Valley, to Syrian farmers displaced by war and drought, to Jordanian communities losing ancestral lands to wind and solar farms financed by Gulf capital. In each case, environmental struggle is not just about ecology, but also about power: who controls the region’s resources and who benefits from them? Who gets to live, cultivate, and stay? These questions are at the heart of political ecology. Bilad as-Sham needs more of it.

The region we call Bilad as-Sham stretches across present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and parts of Iraq and Turkey, and is marked by a convergence of crises: prolonged war, economic collapse, ecological degradation, dispossession, and migration. But to stop at “crisis” is to risk obscuring the very dynamics that are key to understanding why violence continues to scar the landscape. Political ecology enables us to ask what produces these crises, who benefits from them, and who manages and perpetuates them.[1]   

Unfolding struggles over land, livelihoods, and resources in Bilad as-Sham hold key insights for political ecology scholarship across the post-colonial world and beyond. We advocate for a renewed political ecology of Bilad as-Sham that recenters the region’s critical role in the making of global political ecologies of environmental conflict and resistance. From energy and water to critical minerals, and from communal grazing lands to urban refugee settlements, Bilad as-Sham is a foundational site of political and environmental struggle that ripples far beyond the region’s borders and powerfully shapes our collective social and ecological futures.  

Yet, Bilad as-Sham is still too often viewed through limiting narratives of conflict, authoritarianism, or cultural fatalism. As Muna Dajani and Christian Henderson argue, environmental scholarship across the region is still all too often written through Orientalist framings that distort, exceptionalize, and mislead.[2]

In response, this article makes the case for a renewed political ecology of Bilad as-Sham. We take inspiration from the growing body of critical work emerging from scholars, activists, writers, thinkers and artists across the region. In the following sections, we provide context to situate political ecology in the region, followed by a discussion of promising new research and activism that can help point the way towards a flourishing political ecology of Bilad as-Sham. 

What is Political Ecology?

Political ecology is both a set of theoretical provocations and a critical framework for interrogating the relationships that shape uneven access to natural resources. It is an evolving sphere of inquiry that builds from a foundational commitment to understanding how ecological processes are shaped by power, conflict, and historical inequalities. In contrast to cultural ecology or systems thinking, which often isolate “the environment” as a domain separate from politics or culture, political ecology insists on entanglement. The environment is not a backdrop, victim, or neutral stage. It is instead shaped by colonial mandates, agrarian reforms, donor programs, and war economies, and plays a constitutive role in influencing how historical and contemporary geopolitical conflicts unfold.

Drawing from geography, anthropology, agrarian studies, and postcolonial theory, political ecology examines how access to and control over resources—land, water, energy, seeds—is distributed and contested. It explores the material dimensions of land and livelihoods alongside the discursive production of scarcity, crisis, and resilience. Political ecology studies how environmental knowledge is constructed, and how resistance emerges in both everyday acts of cultivation or organized refusals of development schemes.

But the goal of this work is not merely critique. Political ecology also seeks to reveal hidden solidarities, alternative ecologies, and the possibilities for more just socio-environmental arrangements. By unearthing forms of kinship and care that endure despite colonial, imperial, and geopolitical violence, political ecology offers urgent tools to help envision and enact what it means to thrive.  

Why Bilad as-Sham, and Why Now?

It's important to clarify why we choose to use the term “Bilad as-Sham.” Our decision is motivated to abandon the term Levant due to its administrative use and colonial etymology, rooted in a European view of the region. Terms like the Orient or the Levant describe the region from a Eurocentric perspective that risks reinforcing the very hierarchies of knowledge and representation we seek to challenge. Yet we also recognize that none of the available alternatives, including Mashriq, Southwest Asia, Eastern Mediterranean or Bilad as-Sham, are free from their own histories and political entanglements. Our use here is provisional and open to contestation, gesturing toward a shared geography of entangled socio-ecological histories rather than freezing them into a static regional identity. We acknowledge the heaviness of these terminologies while moving toward reflexive engagement with the politics that the region is exposed to and embedded within.

Political ecology provides key tools to Bilad as-Sham as a region with its own distinct histories and ecologies which are also woven into wider regional and global relations of power. international and regional powers intersect through capital, militarism, and ideology in Bilad as-Sham. From Gulf investments in energy and agriculture, to the enduring legacies of historical mandates, to the extractive logics of international donors, contemporary resource and infrastructure politics draw together a multi-scalar political ecology in the region. Decisions made in boardrooms in Riyadh, Washington, and Paris reverberate in village plots and refugee camps from the Bekaa Valley to the Badia.

Engaging this region political ecologically means seeing how macro and micro scales co-constitute each other. It means tracing how wasta (or historically situated networks of kinship and power) and international finance intersect, how drone warfare reshapes farming calendars, and how climate finance reproduces dispossession.

Water scarcity in Jordan, for instance, is not just a painful reality; it is also a political artifact. It emerged through decades of donor-led hydraulic development, urban bias in infrastructure, and the securitization of resource planning. In Syria, drought is not merely a natural hazard. The collapse of smallholder agriculture, a consequence of liberalization and policy neglect long before the war, shapes the process and effects of drought. In Palestine, ecological degradation cannot be understood apart from military occupation, targeted destruction of farmlands, and a colonial hydropolitics that governs wells, aquifers, and mobility.

Towards a Decolonial Political Ecology

To engage Bilad as-Sham through political ecology means confronting the epistemological legacies of colonialism. Too often, knowledge about the region is produced through securitized, technocratic, or developmentalist frameworks that diagnose the region as a site of deficiency, crisis, or failure. But these are not neutral lenses. They reproduce a vision of the region as static, environmentally fragile, and culturally predisposed to mismanagement.

A decolonial political ecology calls for something else. It means rejecting neo-Malthusian narratives of desertification and degradation that trace causality to “traditional practices” or “overpopulation.” It means revisiting how the cadaster, as Elizabeth Williams shows, was not a neutral registry but a tool for classifying and disciplining land and labor. It means recognizing how environmental imaginaries, from Napoleon’s scientists in Egypt to contemporary NGOs, produce particular subjectivities of the irrational peasant, the endangered ecology, and the incompetent local administrator. 

A political ecology of Bilad as-Sham helps denaturalize crisis, exposing how colonial legacies, global capital, and regional regimes shape environmental change and injustice. It situates agrarian struggles within broader planetary dynamics: from heatwaves and hydrocarbon finance to the Green Revolution’s toxic legacy and new rounds of land enclosure under the banner of “green” transition. It allows us to see how the urban and rural, the local and global, and the ecological and political are always already entangled. 

Most urgently, it insists that environmental knowledge and policy cannot be separated from questions of justice. As climate impacts intensify and new regimes of environmental control emerge, from solar megaprojects to refugee agricultural zones, the need for politically engaged, historically grounded, and locally accountable ecological scholarship becomes ever more pressing. 

But it also means recovering other ways of knowing. Local agroecologies and seasonal knowledges still exist, often unrecognized by dominant policy and academic discourses. Work like that of Saad Amira shows how archival, embodied, and visual methods can reconnect environmental histories to struggles for justice and belonging.  

New Growth in Activism and Scholarship  

In recent years, the region has witnessed sustained and meaningful work in political ecology across research circles and civil institutions. Various organizations have advanced scholarship and opened spaces for dialogue on the intersections of environmental issues, power dynamics, and struggles for justice. While by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, we offer the following examples to highlight the critical and creative ways that writers, thinkers, activists, and organizers are reshaping the landscapes of Bilad as-Sham.

In Lebanon, at the American University of Beirut, collaborators have established the Critical Ecologies Lab in the Mediterranean East (CELME), an “experimental, collaborative, interdisciplinary research and education lab at the intersection of ecologies, social sciences, activism, and the humanities.” The Arab Reform Initiative has persistently provided a space to discuss climate crises, food sovereignty, and, more recently, seed sovereignty, across the region. Additionally, some of the subjects organized under the umbrella of the Agroecology Coalition have contributed to publishing work, notably the non-profit organization Jibal a their publication Land Stories.

In Palestine, Via Campasina has strengthened its collaboration with organizers and scholars emphasizing the necessity of global solidarity in the struggle over the land. The Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ)conducts extensive research on climate justice, human rights, and environmental inequalities under occupation. The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) in Bethlehem University has opened The Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) with exhibits related to natural and cultural heritage. The Environmental Education Center in Beit Jala has been delivering educational outreach to students and communities across the 67 territories for decades. Finally, the Al-Block Collective is creating new counter-cartographies mapping the social and environmental histories of greater Palestine. 

In Jordan, Al Barakeh Wheat project aims to reclaim local wheat varieties as an essential part of the local food system, following a notion of al-barakeh as a compass for thinking, building and being. Local organizations like Ruwwad have also helped build critical counter-mapping projects to redefine the past and future of land and urban space in Jordan’s informal refugee camps.

We recognize that political ecology research, and its funding, do not exist outside networks of power. As donor interests increasingly shape the conditions, priorities, and approaches of scholarship and organizing, we insist on reflexive engagement with funding positionality rather than adopting a position of moralized exclusions. We recognize that many political ecology initiatives operate within donor-dependent infrastructures, often due to structural necessity rather than choice. Treating external funding as disqualifying obscures the political realities that both sustain and constrain movements, weakening collective and emancipatory praxis. Instead, we want to open the space for collective discussion on how funding positionality is negotiated, resisted, and lived, and how political ecology research can continue to sustain critical, accountable practice under conditions of constraint. 

Furthermore, political ecology is not the property of any one discipline or language. Across the region, scholars, activists, farmers, and students are already doing political ecology, even if they do not call it that. They are documenting land seizures, tracing the politics of food imports, resisting climate securitization, and theorizing from drought, displacement, and dispossession.

In highlighting these examples, our goal is to invite more sharing, dialogue, and exchange through the diverse channels of thinking and action that are taking root across the region today. Our call is for visibility, solidarity, and expansion. 

Cultivating a Network: Next Steps for a Political Ecology of the Levant

As the POLLEN Bilad as-Sham Node, our goal is to create the spaces, tools, and relationships that can nurture a more visible, connected, and impactful political ecology scholarship from, for, and about the region. We offer the following practical steps as a beginning, not a blueprint, and we offer them as open questions for a collective process of building. 

Workshops and panels

We have begun to organize participatory workshops and panels that create visible space for dialogue between research, policy, and practice. These gatherings are designed not necessarily as traditional conference panels but instead as structured encounters where scholars, activists, practitioners, and farmers can engage in sustained conversation. By linking these events to existing platforms—including future POLLEN conferences—we aim to weave regional scholarship into broader transnational conversations while ensuring that the specificity of Shami political ecology is not subsumed into generic global narratives. These spaces will prioritize horizontal exchange, where the boundaries between “researcher” and “researched,” “expert” and “practitioner,” are deliberately unsettled.

Reading groups and writing workshops

Academic production is often an isolating endeavor, particularly for early-career scholars and those working outside of major institutional centers in the Global North. We will plan peer-led reading groups and writing workshops to support collective learning, mentorship, and the development of early-stage work across career stages. These sessions will be informal, low-stakes, and structured to foster intellectual camaraderie rather than performative critique. They will offer a space to work through difficult texts together, to workshop drafts in progress, and to build the kind of sustained intellectual relationships that are too often foreclosed by the accelerated temporality of academic publishing.

Reading lists

Canon formation is an act of power. To counter the erasure of regional scholarship, we will compile and share reading lists and bibliographies that center regional and underrepresented voices from within the region and writing by activists and practitioners that rarely enters academic syllabi. By making these lists openly accessible through online platforms, we hope to lower the barriers for students and scholars seeking to enter the field, while also challenging the dominance of English-language, Northern-produced knowledge. These bibliographies will be living documents, open to annotation, revision, and expansion by the community.

Presence, visibility, and networks

Political ecology of Bilad as-Sham remains underrecognized within both area studies and environmental social science. We will work to strengthen POLLEN's presence through sustained engagement with regional and transnational networks—connecting with existing scholarly associations, research centers, and activist formations across the Mashriq and beyond. This is not merely a matter of visibility for its own sake. It is about claiming space for knowledge production and conversation in and of political ecology of the region, insisting that Bilad as-Sham is not merely a site from which data is extracted but also a generative locus of theory, method, and critique. 

Knowledge sharing

Too often, scholarly activities leave no trace beyond an individual’s CV. We commit to documenting our collective work—workshop summaries, reading group syllabi, recorded conversations—through accessible outputs and archives that support cumulative learning and knowledge sharing. This might take the form of collaborative reports, public-facing essays, podcast episodes, or annotated bibliographies. The goal is to ensure that each conversation builds on the last, that insights are not lost, and that the network itself becomes a repository of shared wisdom. 

We offer this manifesto as a contribution to that conversation—and as an invitation to collectively reimagine what political ecology from and for the region can be.