Review: Environmental Politics of the Middle East, edited by Harry Verhoeven

Abstract

The rise of climate change and environmental disasters are undeniable and are especially threatening countries with coastal geographies and islands, making them susceptible to flooding or to disappearing altogether due to rising sea levels as a consequence of, for example, melting glaciers. In addition, there is an increased frequency of wildfires that result in the burning of forests in different countries and regions in the world such as Australia, India, the American coastline, and the Amazon, which is considered to be the lungs of the Earth. This book review of Environmental Politics in the Middle East has been written within the context of understanding the environmental problems of this region, which rich in resources is suffering from diverse calamities, in addition to searching for solutions that can help avoid future environmental disasters in the area.The book, which is edited by Harry Verhoeven, an Associate Professor at the University of Georgetown in Qatar, is written in collaboration with several academics from different fields at the university such as political science, international relations, global security, sea security, environmental resources, and economics, making it rich in analytical frameworks applied from different fields of study. The main theoretical methodology of the book connects ecological processes with the political and socio-economic history of the region. The study sheds light on the negative effects of pollution and environmental degradation in the Middle East; moreover it illustrates how the region is suffering from a severe water drought crisis, placing millions of citizens under the threat of the lack of access to clean water, especially in Syria and Iraq. Regional politics and the hydro-hegemony of regional powers play a vital role and are a catalyst for, in addition to drought, causing humanitarian crises by their blocking of dams and diverting water routes. The additional value of this research is the inclusion of case studies from Arab countries which do not generally gain attention from researchers, even in the Arab world, particularly countries in the Horn of Africa, such as Djibouti and Somalia.The core issue discussed in the book is the centrality of environmental politics in the Middle East in conjunction with the authoritarianism and political economy of Arab states. The importance of the book also lies in illustrating the environmental insecurity of the states in the region which threatens their preservation. The book is divided into an introduction written by the editor and nine chapters written by a variety of academic experts analyzing different environmental problems in the Middle East and Arab countries.The introduction approaches the environmental crisis by illustrating different schools of thought such as classical environmentalism, liberal institutionalism, and by exploring how human societies have been part of environmental dynamics since ancient times. It demonstrates how the environment has been one of the main pillars in building civilizations for thousands of years, especially in the Middle Eastern region, which is considered the origin of “hydraulic civilizations.” Given this important fact, it is strange that there is no discussion of how future wars over water resources are threatening the area and how regional powers could play a major role in fueling these wars, especially that the geopolitics of water have been recently playing out in tensions between Egypt and Sudan on one side and Ethiopia on the other or in relation to water resources near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and, last but not least, those that are evident with regard to water resources in Palestine or the Golan Heights.In the first chapter, Jeannie Sewers discusses the history of environmental activism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the extent environmental activists can influence the policies of their governments. Sewers mentions that the activities of environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to increase at the beginning of the 1990s in Lebanon and Tunisia. In the second section of the book, Tunisia is the object of study for two authors, Francis Ghiles and Eckart Woertz, in their analysis of how neoliberal policies have impacted the environmental security of the Tunisian heartlands where phosphate factories have been located since the French colonialist period. The extreme amount of dust from these factories has adversely affected the health of residents living in neighboring areas. In addition to health problems, neoliberal policies have generated inequalities and a huge economic gap between the heartland areas and the Tunisian coastal regions where tourism and key Tunisian economic projects are located. Thus, instead of having the heartland areas where factories are built acting as a magnet for workers as they were in 1897, the coasts have become the main source of economic growth as Tunisians have preferred to immigrate from the heartlands to the coasts due to pollution and unemployment. In addition to this, the demographic increase in the heartland areas where factories are located has been a major reason for increasing unemployment and the main trigger for the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia started by factory workers’ protests in 2008.The third and fourth chapters analyze the connection between natural resources and environmental security, but in relation to how the protection of these resources, particularly oil in the Gulf, became part of a policy of securitization in the region, especially with countries resorting to the contracting of private security companies from the West to protect their oil refineries from the threat of terrorist and cyber-attacks. The origins of oil securitization in the Gulf can be traced back to when the Iraqi army, under Saddam Hussein, burned oil wells during its withdrawal from Kuwait, causing clouds of black smoke which affected civil aviation movement. Securitization also increased after cyber-attacks originating from Iran, according to Jill Crystal, damaged oil refineries in the area. The interest in environmental policies in the Gulf does not stop at the security of natural resources but extends to the field of sustainable development policies where the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are working on the forestation of deserts projects, desalination, and buying agricultural technologies to cultivate the desert.The fifth and sixth chapters discuss the environmental crisis in Somalia and Horn of Africa countries. In Somalia, the illegal trade in charcoal is jeopardizing the future of Somalia due to the cutting down of thousands of trees every year, as stated by Ilya Gridneff. The illegal trade of charcoal is controlled by Jihadists leaders, generating millions of dollars in profit. The second environmental crisis in the Horn of Africa is the illegal fishing of thousands of tons of fishes by foreign ships. Afyare A. Elmi also highlights the unresolved problem of piracy which goes back thousands of years.The seventh and eighth chapters are integrated in their theme: authors Clement M. Henry and Wessel N. Vermeulen foresee a new geopolitical multipolarity in the region and a new economic order for the oil market whereby it is shared between the United States, China, and Russia. This is due to the waning of American unipolarity in the region, while China is now the biggest importer of oil from the Middle East, and Russia is one of the biggest exporters of oil and a main player in controlling and deciding market prices. In chapter eight, Vermeulen advocates solving the problem of mismanagement and deviant use of energy. He suggests that this could be achieved by stopping energy subsidies which would enhance the diversification of exports in the region. The author illustrates examples from Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan showing how their economic and export indicators have started witnessing growth after stopping energy subsidies. For Wessel Vermeulen, the Middle East region is one of the main contributors to climate change due to its unorganized energy policies and consumption.In the last chapter, Abbas Maleki shifts away from the MENA region and writes about energy politics in the Black Sea and its geopolitical importance throughout history and the core of Halford John Mackinder’s geographic theory. The Black Sea and the countries surrounding it are considered to be rich in energy resources such as gas and hydrocarbons. Since September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Afghanistan, the region has become rife with conflicts between international and regional powers vying for influence and supremacy over it.One shortcoming of the book is that it neglects to link the environmental crisis in the MENA region to climate change on an international level as if the region is on another planet. A lot of research has illustrated how the melting glaciers of the North Pole have resulted in sandstorms and droughts in the Middle East. In addition, there is no mention of how capitalist states and industrial countries are refusing to reduce toxic emissions from their factories. For example, the United States under the Donald Trump administration refused to enter the Paris Climate Agreement to offset global warming. In the seventh chapter, the author, Clement Henry, does not take into consideration the conflicts over energy resources in Libya, Syria, and Yemen knowing that one of the most ferocious battles in the Libyan civil war was in the oil crescent region, while in Syria, one of the main reasons for Russian military intervention was securing its gas interests in the Mediterranean. In Yemen, the battle between local and regional powers intensified especially around the Maarib and Hadarmout regions that are both rich in vast energy fields of gas and oil.Integration in the Arab world is a key policy for any future progress to solve economic and environmental problems. It would pave the way for building a complete regional order that achieves sustainable development and environmental security. Highlighting the importance of lifting energy subsidies and how such a policy helped countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan empower their industrial and export sectors obscures the fact that exports and production industries, agriculture, and development were all stronger in the post-independence period in the Arab world before neo-liberalism and the adoption of World Bank and European Union policies. Even if the regimes adopted socialist policies in the post-independence period, they were still characterized by better governmental intervention in economic affairs allowing them to secure major priorities for their citizens such as food and water security. Such governmental intervention built dams, diverse industries, electricity production plants, and strengthened agriculture in addition to securing medical supplies, healthcare, and free education. Demonstrating the importance of World Bank policies in the region, as laid out in chapter eight, ignores the fact that approving any sort of World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance requires the approval of the United States on a political level. Egypt’s signing of the Camp David Treaty is one example of how guaranteeing international and US assistance for Egypt came at a price.The editor does not separate the ecological process from the political and socio-economic history of the region, but he does detach international politics from the causes of environmental problems in Middle Eastern and Arab countries which are discussed. Other key reasons for the disintegration and weakening of central authority in Horn of Africa countries are due to Western policies, especially in Somalia, where US military intervention toppled the central government, making Somalia a failed state living in a dire situation. Linking environmental pollution to neoliberal policies in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia ignores the wave of neoliberalism that hit the Middle East at the beginning of the 1980s, initiated by the Ronald Reagan administration in the United States and Margaret Thatcher’s government in Britain. Neoliberalism increased and reached its peak following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a major supporter of several Arab regimes. There is no doubt that these neoliberal policies have failed in procuring environmental development and reducing polluting and toxic emissions. Moreover, compared with progressive political and economic systems such as the Scandinavian model, for instance, which is well known for its regulatory policies, those regimes that adopted socialist policies, even if partially, proved to have been better at an environmental level. Historically, Arab socialist regimes were superior to the current ones on environmental and developmental levels.Applying the policy of stopping energy subsidies by Arab governments will lead to economic diversification on an export level and may reduce the high consumption of energy; however, the oil-rich countries of the Middle East are key allies of the United States, which is one of the top four consuming countries of oil beside China, Russia, and Canada. This means that the United States, as an economic power and an ally of oil-rich countries in the region, protects them militarily and will have a major role in the decisions that will affect the amount of oil production in these countries, structured economically on neoliberal policies allied and linked to the West. Economic diversification, however, in Arab oil-rich countries could lead to the breaking of ties with Western economies, and with United States in particular.The book focuses on a variety of case studies such as that of Tunisia, yet, in contradiction to its title, it does not discuss environmental problems in the whole region, something which requires extensive research in future. The front cover image, for instance, is from Lebanon, a country that has been facing a waste recycling crisis since 2015. The book mentions briefly a few lines as to the role of civil society in the country and NGO environmental activism since the early 1990s after the end of the civil war where the number of environmental NGOs increased from eighty-five to 138 registered with the Ministry of Environment in 2009, but does not explore this further.On an informative level the book contains important facts in most of its chapters, especially in the introduction where Verhoeven introduces environmental philosophy through history, its relation to human behavior, and how it was a milestone for building civilizations. The second positive element of the book is the separation of the ecological process from the political and socio-economic history of the region. The third valuable contribution is that the book illustrates different case study examples from Arab countries instead of relying on general theoretical methodology. A key case study is the discussion of phosphate extraction in Tunisia and the relation between pollution and the neoliberal policies adopted by the Ben Ali regime over the course of three decades. Fourth, the book is commendable for shedding light on Arab countries that do not usually gain attention from researchers and analysts, especially in the Horn of Africa, such as Somalia and Djibouti where it demonstrates that environmental pollution causes losses of hundreds of millions of dollars for those countries annually. Regrettably, however, the book ignores the role of international relations and superpower hegemony in energy politics. It is essential to analyze how the reduction in the consumption of energy in the Middle East and the lifting of subsidies will help reduce hyper-consumption in the Arab world which is considered to be among the top consuming regions globally, in addition to how Arab economies will be diversified. Consulting this work, however, will help in understanding the main impetuses behind environmental problems in the region and the relation between politics, the environment, economics, history, and society. More extensive research that includes all countries in the region without exception is required, however.Environmental Politics in the Middle East is a collaborative project that could help initiate similar studies in future concerning the dynamics of power and the environment in the region. Further work is required that incorporates collaboration between research centers and governments to further investigate, in a detailed manner, environmental problems using case study examples. Climate change has become a core concern in the agendas of various countries, among them the United States, especially after the election of Joe Biden and the re-entry of the United States into the Paris Climate Agreement after former President Donald Trump pulled out. Moreover, the European Union has started implementing the European Green Deal which aims to take the continent to climate neutrality by 2050. This deal will cost US$1 trillion and will lead to the innovation of new technologies that will be environmentally friendly such as the manufacturing of electric cars. Arab countries are capable of combatting climate change regionally and globally if they acknowledge that coastal cities are under threat of being flooded and disappearing under sea levels, in addition to the fact that millions of Arabs are suffering from malnutrition and a lack of access to clean water as a consequence of severe drought. Changes in the Arab world, however, cannot be limited to the environment alone, but are interlinked with the economic and international relations of the Arab world on the level of energy politics, as mentioned above. Reforms at an environmental level must be linked to economic and political reforms.