Speakers on “Panel 1: Political Ecology” will be presenting their work from 10:05–11:40am in Allard 121.
Ebba Hooft Toomey (BA, UBC), Desertification as Policy Crisis Narrative: The Colonial Origins and Aims of Environmental Policy in Algeria
Put briefly, desertification denotes the degradation of an ecosystem from an arid to desert landscape. Behind this innocuous definition, however, lies a sordid history. Fabricated by French colonizers in Algeria, desertification helped produce a crisis narrative that framed the inhabitants of Algeria as villains causing environmental damage and colonizers as heroes working to save Algerian land. Even as the colonial project ended, and scientific evidence challenged the idea, it has persisted and even thrived in policy circles, perpetuating the colonial project despite claims to the contrary.
This paper explores this history, demonstrating how desertification was incorporated into the environmental history of Algeria and why it has endured as a policy crisis narrative employed by international actors from the colonial period to the present day. I use narrative policy analysis and the recent Narrative Policy Framework to identify the narrative within three different periods represented in the policy literature: French colonization (1830-1962), the Sahel drought (1968-1985), and climate change (1988-present day). I then locate a meta-narrative, underlying the three periods, that perpetuates an orientalist environmental history and maintains the colonial project even as colonialism is putatively denounced. In the meta-narrative, Algerians remain villains desertifying their land, which is represented as a victim that international actors can and must save by restoring its fertility. My findings demonstrate the enduring reach of colonial science and policy initiatives and emphasize the importance of decolonial thinking for understanding and anatomizing environmental histories of the “Middle East.”
Sophia Lee (BA, UBC), Troubled Waters: “Token” Cooperation in Israeli-Palestinian Environmental Peacebuilding
The 1995 Oslo II Agreement offered a historic opportunity for Israel and Palestine to transition from conflict to cooperation via joint water resource management. The inclusion of natural resources in a peace agreement, combined with the formation of a joint management institution, can act as a form of environmental peacebuilding to enhance trust between former adversaries by producing a formal institutional structure to strengthen mutual water security. If configured correctly, environmental peacebuilding initiatives could improve climate resilience, natural resource governance, and regional partnership. However, because transboundary cooperation is always underpinned by power relations, governments can exploit cooperation mechanisms to distort policy priorities and maintain pre-existing hegemonic rapports.
First, this paper examines how the structural flaws of Oslo II allow Israel to pursue expansionist territorial and settlement interests in the West Bank. Second, this paper asserts that although Oslo II successfully created the Joint Water Committee (JWC) to coordinate transboundary resource management, the lethargic pace and administrative complexities of its approval mechanisms made the system ineffective in producing positive-sum cooperation. Third, this paper considers how the Oslo II-JWC water regime fails to produce water equity by increasing Palestinian dependency on external actors. Ultimately, this paper argues that by failing to fulfill its role in producing an effective governance framework for joint resource management, the Oslo II-JWC water regime facilitates a form of “token” cooperation that is symbolic but unproductive in nature, which formalizes pre-existing power asymmetries and fails to support the consolidation of sustainable peace.
Jeremy Allen (MGEM, UBC), Nature of War: The Political Ecology of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has had profound consequences for both the political and physical geography of the South Caucasus region. In their 2015 article, Baumann et al. examined these changes by studying the conflict’s effects on local land-use during the conflict period between 1987–2000 (Baumann et al., 2015). Their results uncovered that these changes consisted primarily of destroyed cities or settlements and the abandonment of agricultural lands in the vicinity of the conflict zone. Since the fighting of the 1990s there has been a relative status quo, with a militarized line of contact separating the two sides. This changed on September 27 2020, when intense fighting erupted along the whole of the front, and especially in the south-east. After a month and a half, fighting concluded on 10 November 2020 which saw the implementation of a ceasefire which ceded large portions of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) Republic to Azerbaijan. There has yet to be an investigation on the kinds of changes to human and natural systems that the most recent conflict (2020) engendered.
In response to this research lacuna, this project will examine the effects of the 2020 armed conflict on the region’s agricultural systems. To analyze these effects, this project will examine changes to land use and cover change (LUCC) using remote sensing techniques. Specifically, NDVI metrics derived from BAP image composites will be correlated with quantified conflict data from ACLED. This approach aims to test the hypothesis that areas which witnessed the most intense fighting saw significant drops in NDVI, indicating land fallowness and abandonment. The changes to NDVI and LUCC will provide insight into the broader question of whether the 2020 armed conflict significantly impacted the region’s agricultural systems, and if so, where they were impacted and how severely.
Kiana Zemenchik, (MA, SFU) Flows of Dominance: How water in Palestine is used as a tool of hybrid warfare by the settler colonial state of Israel
Within security studies, unconventional warfare has become a topic of interest, particularly with regard to interstate conflict. In the Middle East, the settler-colonial state of Israel currently holds significant political, economic, and military power over the occupied Palestinian population. Following the Oslo II Accords, the topic of water insecurity in Palestine has been called into question by scholars and non-government organizations alike. This research paper argues that Israel’s domination of water resources in the region, though argued to be a violation of human rights, is backed by external actors, such as the United States, indicating that Israel’s mechanism of hybrid warfare is also backed by political warfare. This paper employed a qualitative analysis of existing literature on the topic to inform three policy recommendations, which include: implementing new water laws and regulations, treating sewage and wastewater, and applying international pressure on the United States.
This paper found that the Joint Water Committee would approve Israeli water projects at a much higher rate than Palestinian proposed projects, thus impacting the quality of water facilities and infrastructure in the occupied territories. Furthermore, unconditional American financial and diplomatic support for Israel has prevented Israel from being held accountable for its acts of hybrid warfare toward Palestine. The main implication of these findings is that Israel’s use of water as a tool of hybrid Palestinians further establishes Israel’s dominance as a settler state while maintaining asymmetrical power dynamics, which is further legitimized by American financial and diplomatic support.