The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security

This event will be the launch of Marwa Daoudy's latest book 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.

Marwa Daoudy is Associate Professor and Seif Ghobash Chair in Arab Studies and International Relations at Georgetown University. Prior to this, Daoudy was a lecturer at Oxford University in the department of Politics and International Relations and a fellow of Oxford’s Middle East Center at St Antony’s College. Her research program in the last decade has generally focused on the intersection of security, politics, law and economics to examine the problems of water and the question of conflict, with a focus on the Middle East. Her main scholarly contributions have focused on three more specific research interests. The first is the relationship between transboundary water resources, power, conflict and cooperation. The second is a critical examination of the climate change-conflict nexus that is applied to developing countries in conflict. The third is the intersection of International Relations theory and Middle East politics in explaining inter-state dynamics in the region after the Arab Spring. 

Michael Mason is Director of the Middle East Centre. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment and Associate of the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. His research interests encompass environmental politics and governance, notably issues of accountability, transparency and security.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #LSESyria