Climate change is among the most pressing challenges of our age, and along with the Arctic, the Middle East is where temperatures are rising sharpest. This course seeks to explore issues related to this challenge from the perspective of actors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Fossil fuels, the primary contributor to global warming, are a central pillar of the political economy in many MENA countries, both in those exporting oil and gas and in others dependent on remittances and support from them. How do governments, business elites and civil society perceive the challenges posed by the foreseeable end of the fossil fuel age? How do they envisage and prepare for a ‘green shift’ towards an economy based on renewable energy sources? How do elites in ‘rentier states’ try to safeguard their interests in a post-oil future? What kind of discourses do we encounter in this context, and what are the actual policies and practices implemented?
And further: how do the people of the region react to the growing threat of an environment turning uninhabitable as temperatures soar and water resources become depleted? For it is not only the shift from fossil fuels to renewables that requires extensive changes in the current economic and political makeup. In the MENA, ‘desertification’ and access to water have been issues in development discourse for decades. There is a growing realisation in the region, however, that one participates in a larger struggle against the exhaustion or destruction of vital ‘natural’ foundations on which the economic, social, and political ‘order of things’ is based. In other words, the very physical existence of humans and other living beings in the region is at stake.
In this course, we shall take an environmental humanities and social science approach to these questions, that is one focusing on how people in the Middle East talk about and act faced with environmental and climate challenges. Among the topics addressed are: fossil fuels and the green shift; water and conflict; air pollution and waste management; environmental activism and social media; environmental history; and eco-criticism in Arabic literature. The course is envisaged as an exploratory introduction to the field in all its diversity where posing questions and developing critical perspectives is more important than the study of set solutions. In a series of seminars, we shall read and discuss select research articles; teachers will have a guiding role in introducing the various topics but will otherwise engage in class discussions on an equal footing with student participants.
Most of the required reading for this class will be in English, but in line with the guidelines of our master’s programme in Asia and Middle East Studies, about 20% of the sources used in students’ term papers should be in a Middle Eastern language.