In 2016 I was asked to review a paper arguing that climate change had caused the Syrian uprising. I remember feeling annoyed. The paper was an obvious crossbreed of two of academia's hottest trends, climate change and the Syrian war. Someone had caught on that shortly before the start of the 2011 uprisings, Syria had experienced a drought—and even drought-induced, internal migration. Eureka! A seemingly obvious hypothesis started making the rounds at academic conferences and in journals: impoverished, disgruntled Syrian farmers, driven off their land by climate change–induced drought had risen up in frustration, stirring up the most devastatingly destructive war the modern Middle East has witnessed. This narrative engaged the middle-class Western minds of late-era capitalism, which are so receptive to the idea of the angry poor and to images of catastrophic environmental degradation.The eager embrace of this hypothesis involved a vast labeling exercise, reducing the complexity and deeply political nature of the Syrian conflict to a series of technical causalities, for which no one specifically was to blame. It involved a detraction from the Syrian government's decades-long repression of dissent as well as the severe alienation between Syria's population and its rulers. It remodeled Syria's revolution essentially as a bread-riot. Of course, there is something very comforting in the idea of a bread-riot: it can be resolved by giving the poor some bread. In fact, academia's uncovering of impoverished Syrian peasants as potential revolutionaries was the second time these farmers had been “discovered.” In 2009 the UN refugee agency UNHCR, which had then set up its largest humanitarian operation in Syria to help displaced Iraqis, began referring to these former farmers, and now urban poor, as “climate refugees,” sounding out the possibility of integrating them into their programming. But, as Marwa Daoudy's eye-opening and carefully analytical book, The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and the Syrian Conflict, reveals, by that point it was much too late. The political economy of Syria's agriculture, so important for the country's wellbeing, had been worn to the ground by decades of bad political decisions, mismanagement, and disregard for crucial public goods such as water and soil.Daoudy's book, with its measured and indeed sometimes fact-hogging prose, is balm for the souls of Syria-focused academics, who have witnessed the rise of aggressive and often heavily partisan media-pundits dominating the discourse around the country. The most fascinating parts of the book give a detailed description of Syrian agricultural policymaking (1960–2010) and of academic debates inside Syria about how to counter its increasingly destructive effects. Before getting there, Daoudy spends two thick chapters setting up her theoretical framework, which argues for a new way of understanding human security and the relevance of environmental factors within it. This “Human-Environmental-Climate Security Framework” (HECS, 15–21) highlights the interaction between environmental, political, economic, and climatic factors, and emphasizes that climate alone was not an independent agent of change, but rather part of a complex set of conditions.The HECS framework may be criticized for being too all-encompassing to really offer explanatory value. Daoudy's aim, however, is to emphasize that long-term structural factors have shaped food and water scarcity in Syria, in which climate change acted “as a background factor that amplified the impact of ideology and unsustainable water and agricultural policies” (15). Her key argument thus is that yes, climate change exists, but its impact on Syria remains wholly unclear, while her own research shows that for decades, “elites pursued policies that were not compatible with long-term water or food security” (15).A further, methodological aim of the HECS framework is to de-essentialize the study of the Syrian conflict, and to rather set it up as a case study, from which generalizations can be drawn. This, I assume, is also the point ofchapter 2, a lengthy literature review of different approaches to security, and the link between climate change and conflict. In summary, the HECS framework sets up the book's rich, historical, and largely structural account of the political economy of Syria's agricultural sector, which logically includes attention to its natural-resources base.For her account, Daoudy draws on a very wide range of both qualitative and quantitative data, including from Syria's national statistics bureau, interviews with Syrian agricultural experts, policymakers, activists, and refugees. Daoudy's decade-long work on water politics in the Middle East shines through and allows her to easily connect macro-issues, such as the ups and downs of Syrian-Turkish water negotiations since 1960, with micro-observations, such as the impact of specific laws on individual water usage on Syrian farms in the 1990s. This staggeringly broad perspective is the book's great strength: Daoudy integrates Syria's regional, international, and domestic situation, as well as political and economic factors, into a single investigation of Syria's agricultural sector and the impact of droughts upon it.Most of this work is done in chapters 3, 4, and 5. In chapter 3 Daoudy starts with a longue-durée description of the social perception of the right to water in the Middle East, including some theological excursions into Quranic water norms (77–78). Here, she argues that public access to water has long been considered as an inalienable right in the region, which has affected government attempts to put a price on water, limit its use, and avoid waste. In Syria water, like much of the land, remains state property and centrally managed. This section is followed by an interesting analysis of Syrian-Turkish interactions over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the last forty years, and the two countries' differing threat perceptions. As the downstream partner, Syria remains highly dependent on Turkish dam-building and water extraction; however, Syria has been able to leverage its power over a large Kurdish population, relevant to Turkish domestic politics and regional security. Some additional information on the role of Iraq, to which Syria is the upstream partner, would have been of interest here, and the pressures that may have emanated from this relationship. Overall, Daoudy convincingly shows that “water has been a defining feature in both Syria's historical development and its contemporary interactions with neighboring countries” (98).The ambitious chapter 4 then analyzes how Baʿth party ideology shaped agricultural policymaking in modern Syria up until 2005, and the changes wrought by the ensuing post-Baʿthist, neoliberal reforms. This is a fascinating undertaking because at its core it highlights the ideological underpinnings of any national modernization theory that is bent on everlasting growth, while at the same time ensuring state security, of which Baʿthism is a particular version. In fact, I would argue that modernity here would have been a better prism than ideology, a vague concept that Daoudy struggles to explain and make relevant for her political-economy framework. What kind of modernity did Syrian Baʿthists pursue, what resources did they believe necessary for this modernity, and what role should agricultural and rural regions play?Daoudy shows that key contradictions arose between the simultaneous pursuits of food security, increasing agricultural exports, and maintaining domestic price stability for certain crops. For twenty years, intensifying agricultural resource-extraction and vast subsidies, financed by Syria's oil rents, papered over these contradictions, but by the early 1990s falling ground-water levels, depleted soils, and diminishing hard-currency reserves started to bite. For some reason, and here Daoudy does not explain, Syria's elites failed to find solutions and remained stuck in bureaucratic inefficiency and outdated technology and were unable to prevent damaging farming practices amid expanding corruption. In an April 2021 interview, Daoudy's Georgetown colleague Daniel Neep offered an explanation for the complex fiasco: rather than being ruled from the top, as is often assumed, Syria is governed by an ecosystem of powerful individuals and interests … better thought of not as an inner circle of trusted generals around Bashar calling the shots, but as the aggregate, emergent effect of all these networks operating in quasi-autonomous fashion.1 This situation created institutional failure for Syria, in which no one controlled the state, and orders from the top failed to be implemented at the bottom. The interesting question that political historians of Syria such as Daoudy and Neep have yet to answer is at what point under Hafez al-Asad did this institutional failure take root because for at least twenty years, Baʿthist modernization proceeded apace. Daoudy takes us through several pillars of this modernization in great detail, including hydroelectric dams, irrigation projects, collectivization, and indeed Arabization, arguably very much with the hindsight knowledge of their impending failure. Here it would have been important to learn more about the mindset prevailing at the time, for example via extracts from old Baʿthist writings or oral histories with former party leaders. What were the expectations placed on certain agricultural policies? From where was advice sought? Were there differences in opinions, or debates about Baʿthist visions for rural Syria? With her evidently large network among Syrian economists, Daoudy could have probably delivered a little more here than relying on a relatively small set of secondary literature.The last section of chapter 4 analyzes Syria's 2005 abandonment of Baʿthist economics and is more attuned to the internal rivalries and personalities through which this process played out, clearly drawing on Daoudy's personal involvement as a water consultant for large international organizations. Again, the overall story is one of failure. Of striking interest is the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in pushing for (neo)liberalization and the close reading of debates among Syrian economists, and their relatively open criticism and dissent: “by 2009,” writes Daoudy, “virtually every Syrian expert agreed on the detrimental impacts of the end of subsidies to the poor … and called for their reintroduction” (146). Further, the nature of Syrian corruption changed after 2005. While under Baʿthism, widespread petty corruption of low-level bureaucrats prevailed, liberalization allowed for comprehensive kleptocracy in which elites divvied up entire economic sectors among themselves (148).Building on these structural insights, chapter 5 investigates how precisely they affected farming in northeastern Syria prior to the 2011 uprising. To put it technically, Daoudy now applies her HECS framework to understand the link between Baʿthist/post-Baʿthist policymaking and the resilience and vulnerability of Syria's rural population. Highlighting the weak and inconclusive scholarly debates on climate change, drought, migration, and conflict in Syria, she proceeds to “carefully examine these questions using data from domestic and international sources over two key periods of drought: 1998–2001 and 2006–2010” (162). A wide range of datasets on average rainfall, temperature, surface- and groundwater quality, sectoral water allocation, and water extraction highlights primarily that (1) water availability in Syria closely tracks the amount of food production: droughts immediately lead to loss of agricultural land; (2) calculating the composite effect of natural and human-made factors on drought is extremely difficult, especially as data for Syria is patchy; and (3) water usage in Syria has been unsustainable for years, as falling groundwater and rain levels were compensated by overpumping and a rapid expansion of the number of wells.Above all, chapter 5 shows the two droughts' catastrophic effects for Syria's northeastern population from 2000 onwards: between 2000 and 2009 20percent of jobs in agriculture were lost (191), the second drought destroyed the livelihoods of at least 700,000 farmers, amid a loss of livestock of up to 70 percent (192) and malnutrition rose by 370 percent in Hasakah and 229 percent in Deir ez-Zor (199). The government's earlier, drastic cuts to fuel and food subsidies compounded the crisis, while rapidly assembled emergency policies were essentially too little, too late (200). This national catastrophe, which hardly touched urban elites in Damascus, led to a qualitative change in outward rural migration. While previously, individual job-seekers would depart, “suddenly the exodus involved the entire extended family” (199). After 2007, around 100,000 families left Hasakah Governorate, joining the newly developed slums on the outskirts of major cities.Why then, is it wrong to conclude that climate change caused the Syrian uprising? Daoudy categorically states: “little evidence suggests climate changed in Syria sparked popular revolt in 2011,” as “government policies were largely responsible for turning a drought into a national crisis,” and “unemployed farmers, who were the biggest casualties of the drought, did not incite the protests” (205). While I fully concur with Daoudy on the matter of climate change as an observable or even measurable cause for the Syrian revolution, I wonder about her statement that “the original issues protested were wholly unrelated to the drought” (205). Environmental degradation, caused by the Syrian state's utter institutional failure amid rampant kleptocracy, led to a visible increase in desperate urban poverty, which was shocking to Syrian middle-class city-dwellers living in a middle-income country, where social justice was a proclaimed public good. The appearance of veiled female beggars in downtown Damascus, hugging their emaciated babies, and street children on dusty highway crossings frequented by the nouveau-riches' sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) may well have contributed to a feeling of enough is enough among those who did eventually take to the streets. Daoudy's book confirms what is often overlooked in Syria: changing class relations have been the key determinant of the country's domestic upheavals.Daoudy's book, thus, is essential reading for anyone interested in modern Syria's development and, beyond that, will serve as a useful study for scholars interested in the climate-security nexus. Her comprehensive, analytical framework that pays simultaneous attention to environmental, political, material, and ideational factors may serve as an inspirational foil for other cases. As a textbook, it could be usefully added to graduate courses on Syria, the Middle East, water politics, and environmental security topics. Unfortunately, however, I have to add one note of caution: The Origins of the Syrian Conflict received a terrible editing job. In parts, the book reads like a first draft of a manuscript, certain chapter introductions appear like parts of a book proposal and even frankly embarrassing typos such as “Sunny” instead of Sunni (148) were left uncorrected. Future imprints of this book should aim to at least eliminate the most jarring errors, as they detract from an otherwise outstanding contribution to scholarship.