Jeannie L. Sowers

Nature Reserves and Authoritarian Rule in Egypt: Embedded Autonomy Revisited

This article explores how Egypts system of authoritarian rule initially fostered and subsequently undermined nature conservation efforts. During the 1990s, international donors and local scientists established a well-managed network of nature preserves in the South Sinai region of Egypt. The concentration of state authority in a few executive institutions, such as the military and centrally appointed provincial governors, facilitated the creation of an effective management regime. However, these achievements have come under threat. Executive institutions charged with tourism development have challenged the authority of the protected areas division, and the capacity of the protected areas network has been undermined through systematic underinvestment and diversion of park revenues. In addition, local Bedouin communities that benefited from effectively managed parks remain politically marginalized. Although reformers in the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East can build environmental capacities, some of the economic and political logics associated with authoritarian rule limit the sustainability of these endeavors.

The Many Injustices of Climate Change

These volumes constitute part of an emerging literature addressing thorny problems of fairness and justice associated with human-induced climate change. Going beyond simplistic characterizations of responsibility and suffering, the authors employ a variety of methods and approaches to explore issues of climate injustice, with a particular focus on developing countries and future generations. In doing so, they provide a rich array of arguments, evidence, and policy recommendations for those interested in achieving a more equitable and more effective climate change regime. All three works argue that greater attention to issues of fairness and justice is necessary to move beyond stalemates in international negotiations and improve national-level policy-making. Roberts and Parks’ A Climate of Injustice is a bold bid to situate climate injustice in enduring and emerging inequalities in the international political economy. They elaborate and test a set of causal mechanisms associated with globally unequal development that render developing countries vulnerable to climate impacts, limit options for less carbonintensive development paths, and constrain possibilities for North-South cooperation. The volume edited by Adger et al. presents a range of perspectives, both normative and positive, on how to incorporate procedural and distributive justice into adaptation policies. Page’s Climate Change, Justice, and Future Generations, is a work of analytic philosophy, showing how theories of distributive justice can provide compelling ethical rationales for present generations to take seriously the adverse impacts of climate change on future generations. Each of these works tackles broad inequalities associated with human-

Securitizing Water, Climate, and Migration in Israel, Jordan, and Syria

AbstractProtracted droughts and scarce water resources, combined with internal and cross-border migration, have contributed to the securitization of discourses around migration and water in much of the Middle East. However, there is no clear understanding of the conditions under which water, climate change, and migration are conceived of as security concerns or of their policy implications. This article explores the different means through which Israel, Jordan, and Syria have framed issues of water, climate change, and migration as national security concerns. Based upon an analysis of governmental and publicly available documents, coupled with field interviews with Israeli and Jordanian policymakers, experts, and nongovernmental organizations, we identify two different framings of the water–climate–migration nexus, depending on whether migration is largely external or internal. In Israel and Jordan, concern with influxes of external migrants elevated migration as a security issue in part through impacts on already-scarce water resources. In Syria, where severe drought in the early 2000s prompted large-scale internal migration, officials downplayed connections between scarce water resources, drought, and internal migration, part of a broader pattern of rural neglect. Unlike much of the conventional literature that has posited a linear relationship between climate change, decreasing water availability, and migration, we provide a more robust picture of the water–climate–migration nexus that shows how securitized framings take different forms and produce several unintended consequences.

Targeting Environmental Infrastructures, International Law, and Civilians in the New Middle Eastern Wars

Research in conflict studies and environmental security has largely focused on the mechanisms through which the environment and natural resources foster conflict or contribute to peacebuilding. An understudied area of research, however, concerns the ways in which warfare has targeted civilian infrastructure with long-term effects on human welfare and ecosystems. This article seeks to fill this gap. We focus on better understanding the conflict destruction of water, sanitation, waste, and energy infrastructures, which we term environmental infrastructures, by drawing on an author-compiled database of the post-2011 wars in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). While research across the social sciences has examined the targeting of civilians and environmental destruction during wars, including the issue of urbicide, we expand the study of targeting environmental infrastructure to (1) examine the role of different types of actors (international vs. subnational), (2) document the type of infrastructure targeted, form of attack, and impacts, and (3) situate increased targeting of environmental infrastructure in the changing context of war-making in the MENA. Comparatively analyzing the conflict zones of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, we show that targeting environmental infrastructure is an increasingly prevalent form of war-making in the MENA, with long-term implications for rebuilding states, sustaining livelihoods, and resolving conflicts.

Activism and Political Economy in the New–Old Egypt

Under President al-Sisi, Egypt has revealed itself to be less tolerant of dissent and more successful at cloaking itself in nationalist sentiment than under either the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or Husni Mubarak. The massacre at Rabʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, the arrests, detention, and torture of youth and prominent activists, the proliferation of criminal and treason charges against journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and Muslim Brotherhood figures, the banning of various organizations, and the passage of restrictive laws on basic civil rights—these practices make clear that the regime has no commitment to democratization understood either as substantive participation or the safeguarding of basic civil liberties.