Existing explanations for the 2011 uprising in Syria identify authoritarianism and, or, climate change as the main causal variables for the revolt. Syria became a showcase for critics of the Arab Spring, eager to point to the dangers of instability and transition to democratization. Proponents of climate security discourses have also heralded Syria as a striking empirical application for conceptualizations of climate change-induced conflicts. These studies now point to the 2006-2010 drought and the effects of climate change as the incipient factors of the Syrian conflict; and argue that the decimation of rural economy was induced by drought and water scarcity, which has ultimately driven farmers away from their farms into the cities where they fueled social tensions. The paper strongly argues against this conventional wisdom. Since repression and environmental degradation are constant themes in Syria’s post-independence history, they cannot however explain why the Syrian people rebelled in 2011. It also fills a gap in the literature by explaining how the combined effects of authoritarianism and environmental insecurity concerns intensified the human, political and social grievances at the roots of the Syrian Revolution. Hence, this paper argues that political violence arose because of a combination of poverty levels in the midst of extraordinary wealth, environmental degradation and social, political and institutional failures to address these challenges. The drought indeed shattered the livelihood of the populations in the northeastern part of the country. But the likely impacts of the drought on subsequent uprisings are found in political, economic, and environmental mismanagement. Baathist food security objectives and industrialization policies encouraged the over-exploitation of Syria’s aquifers. The ‘new’ Assad regime opted in 2005 to move away from a centrally planned statist type of economy by liberalizing major sectors such as banking and education, to the detriment of Baathist social constituencies in the rural peripheries. In doing so, the government intensified existing networks of corruption and failed to provide coping institutions or mechanisms to deal with environmental stress. Based on primary sources collected before 2011, and extensive field research carried out with Syrian refugees and activists in Lebanon post-2011, the analysis explores past practices relating to water management in the context of authoritarian rule and the politics of liberalization that were initiated in the decade that preceded the Uprising. Such endeavors illuminate opportunities for tailoring strategies for the restoration of an economic, political and social order in post-conflict Syria.

In early 2016, the level of physical destruction of the urban fabric in Syria is high. It explains to a certain extend the magnitude of the displacement of millions of Syrians seeking refuge both within the country and outside its borders. More generally, the territorial organisation of the country has changed dramatically over five years of conflict: some areas have been destroyed and to a large extend emptied; some others have been used as shelters; new political, economic and social orders have established themselves in each of the areas controlled by one of the actors of the conflict, including in regime-held ones, with many overlaps, fuelling an economy of war and survival; and the borderlands areas of Syria’s neighbours have been deeply reshaped by the Syrian conflict as well. The argument of this paper is that these characteristics of the Syrian conflict cannot be considered as the classical collateral effects of warfare. Their typology indicates rather that physical destruction and human displacement are used as instruments in and of the warfare, serving different purposes and aims. The forms of violence to which the Syrian society is subject are therefore not random: they are part of a new regime of violence and (dis)order, to which the economy of war belongs as well. In the paper, it is argued that violence is linked with the underlying logic of power, and that it is grounded in the prevailing social and distributional order of Syria; It was present all the more in the pre-2011 Syrian society as the Asad regime had weak institutions of conflict management and had, over the last decade, accentuated social and territorial divided, and the polarisation of the rents within the hands of a small elite. In that sense, regime stability hid potential instability, and possibly the violence that is since at stake. This paper is based on an extensive survey and analysis of the information sites produced within Syria, on interviews of Syrians (businessmen, activists, normal people that are today refugees in France, UK, Lebanon, Egypt), on the analysis of satellite imagery of the country, on secondary sources (data, reports, newspapers, etc).

The Sectarianization of the Syrian Conflict: The Salience of Authoritarianism over Theology In his critically acclaimed book, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future, Vali Nasr has suggested that traditional concepts and categories used to explicate the Middle East, such as modernity, democracy, fundamentalism and nationalism, no longer adequately explain the politics of the region. It “is rather the old feud between Shias and Sunnis that forges attitudes, defines prejudices, draws political boundary lines, and even decides whether and to what extent those other trends have relevance.” In keeping with this argument, President Obama has on numerous occasions invoked the phrase “ancient sectarian differences” to explain the turmoil and conflict in the Arab-Islamic world today, Syria in particular. This raises the question: how salient is the variable of sectarianism in explaining conflict between Shias and Sunnis today in the Middle East? Rejecting a primordialist paradigm of “ancient sectarian hatreds” this paper locates the roots of sectarian conflict in late twentieth century and not in the seventh century. More specifically, the political context that illuminates the question of sectarianism is the persistence of authoritarianism – as the dominant feature of the politics of the Middle East – and the crisis of legitimacy facing ruling regimes that has followed as a consequence. The political mobilization and manipulation of sectarian identities, it will be argued, is a key strategy for regime survival and it is within this framework that the question of sectarianism can be better understood. Drawing on the literature of religious mobilization and the literature in international relations theory (that explains the regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran), the question of sectarianism will be analyzed in the context of Syria post-2011. It will be argued sectarian identities were deliberately politicized and cultivated by state actors both domestically (Assad) and regionally (Iran and Saudi Arabia) to advance the narrow political agendas of ruling elites. How this process manifested itself and took shape will be examined in this paper.