This paper analyzes international law regarding the human right to water for people who are stateless, displaced, and/or armed conflict zone residents in the contemporary Middle East. Cases include Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Deficiencies in international law (humanitarian, water, human rights, criminal) are examined to demonstrate law’s challenges to guarantee water rights for vulnerable groups already dealing with ambiguous legal statuses. The roles of international justice institutions, particularly the ICC, are evaluated to assess possibilities for reparations to water access denial victims, including when water is manipulated by states, occupying powers, and non-state actors (e.g. the Islamic State). The ICC Chief Prosecutor announced a new focus on “environmental crimes” in 2016, but few developments have followed. What are the implications for the ICC examination in Palestine, or future investigations in the Middle East? Problematically, water crises induced by natural disasters, occupation, economic blockade, geopolitical conflict, and pollution are collapsed into one monolithic category of ‘global water challenges.’ The Middle East hosts devastating water crises—all poised to worsen—but existing analyses often erroneously point to physical scarcity as the sole cause, or are de-politicized, presenting water restrictions as effects without causes. The Middle East is “the most water-stressed region in the world” (Joffé 2016), and unjust water distribution will be exacerbated by climate change (e.g. in Gaza, where only 25% of people have daily access to water, resulting in a catastrophic health crisis; in Yemen in the midst of the Saudi-led coalition’s war and the ensuing cholera crisis; and water weaponization in Syria/Iraq). Analysis is framed by Hannah Arendt’s assertion that loss of citizenship in a sovereign state renders people without the “right to have rights.” Interpretations by scholars including Benhabib, Agamben, Benjamin further frame the analysis. My work builds on research by Roy, Zeitoun, Selby, Gordon, Weizman. Fieldwork in the OPT (interviews with civilians, NGOs, UNRWA staff), Geneva, and The Hague informs this research, which expands on research presented at MESA in 2017. I argue that while progress has been made for protection of the human right to water, the paper offers avenues through which this right can become increasingly enforceable. A substantial body of law exists to deal with transboudary water usage, and the Geneva Conventions address water during conflict. The paper addresses a significant lacuna, however, regarding law regulating water access/environmental destruction for people facing challenges resulting from ambiguous legal statuses, specifically for jus post bellum.

This paper analyses the social and political effects of numerous hydroelectric power plant (HEPP) constructions in Turkey with a focus on the Black Sea Region. Based on a field study in villages in three river basins in Duzce, Kastamonu and Rize and with their diaspora associations in Istanbul conducted mainly with the opponents of the power plant constructions, it studies how the peasants respond to the changing involvement of the state and private capital investments in the region. It questions why the resistance movements take different shapes in different regions in the Black Sea Region and under what circumstances they achieve their goals and continue to protect their valleys and under what circumstances they dissolve. One of these cases is Loc Valley in Kastamonu which is a landmark social environmental movement with significant achievements, the second one is Ikizdere Valley in Rize which speaks for a significant social movement that could at least protect some regions of the valley and the third one is Aksu Valley in Duzce which represents a weak local movement that was not able to achieve its goals. I will argue that the differences in outcomes between these three movements are at least partly due to choices in mobilization strategies, willingness to confront the government forces like police and gendarmerie and the presence or absence of clientalistic relationship with the government.

The violence experienced by the Iraqi people in recent decades has had detrimental effects on the natural environment as well. Environmental damage to Iraq’s south has frequently been taken as emblematic of the damage wrought on the country as a whole, from Basra’s palm trees incinerated during the Iran-Iraq War to the draining of the marshes in the 1990s by the Baathist regime. In this paper, I examine how two recent works of fiction have addressed the ongoing environmental catastrophe of the Basra region, as well as the complex relationships between the human and natural worlds. The 2017 novel al-Sab?liyy?t by the Basra-born Kuwaiti novelist Ism???l Fahd Ism???l has as its protagonist an older Iraqi woman, whose village along the Sha?? al-?Arab is evacuated in the early days of the Iran-Iraq War. Returning to the military zone, she makes an accommodation with the troops stationed there and single-handedly revives plant and animal life while restoring dammed streams. Her interactions with humans—whether the military or her own family members—are tense and frustrating, and her only true companions are non-human: her loyal donkey and the apparition of her late husband. Drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, I argue that al-Sab?liyy?t replaces a problematic and destructive anthropocentrism in favor of a more expansive biocentrism. The Basran author ?iy?? Jubail? evokes similar themes in certain stories from his 2018 flash fiction collection, L? ?aw???n Haw?? f? l-Ba?ra, although his stories, which frequently veer into magical realism, offer a darker view of both humanity and the natural world. In one story, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War returns to his ruined farm in the Faw peninsula and, in draining the salt water and sowing seeds, revives—to his horror—the corpses of dead soldiers lying under his soil. In other stories, a young man, waiting in vain by the Sha?? al-?Arab for his beloved, turns into a tree, and Walt Whitman’s beard grows to encompass an entire public park in Basra. In Jubail?’s brief narratives, the conventionally defined borders between humans and the environment become blurred and at times, menacing. Both works of fiction present a reassertion of natural world in response to war and violence visited upon Iraq.

Recently, Turkey has started to attract scholars working in the broader environmental humanities field, particularly in the field of environmental history. However, the studies related to the environments in Turkey are still limited; the attempts of linking environment, religion, and politics are rare. The latter mostly focuses on the relationship between religious identity and environmental attitude. This study, instead, seeks to contribute to the debate by investigating whether dogmatism at individual level causes a lack of environmental attitude in Turkey. It also seeks to understand whether this relationship is affected by the political ideology of individuals. In this respect, the current work surveys three bodies of literature. Firstly, it draws on the study of religion and nature, which emerged after Lynn White Jr.’s critique of Christianity’s anti-ecological essence. Benefitting from religion and nature thinking, this study approaches the human-nature interaction from a constructionist perspective enabling an ecocentric comprehension of the environments. Secondly, it pays attention to the analytical works assessing environmental behavior and attitudes to find common routes of examination. Lastly, it benefits from the literature on political behavior to explore religious and environmental identities concerning political ideology in Turkey. Within this conceptual framework, it presents two hypotheses: (1) In Turkey, dogmatism correlates with anti-environmental attitude. (2) There are no significant differences among the voters of AKP and CHP in the environmental aspect. In order to test these hypotheses, this study will employ the Wave 6 World Value Survey data on Turkey. Some parametric tests will implicate on data such as t-test, ANOVA and stepwise regression models. The study utilizes the data to obtain the distributions of citizens regarding dogmatism and environment as well as their voting tendencies. It does not treat the problem a religious one as Lynn White Jr. did, but a problem of dogmatism. So, it mainly applies two questions to be related to dogmatism: "Whenever science and religion conflict, religion is always right" (Q153) and "The only acceptable religion is my religion" (Q154). For evaluating environmental attitude, it uses the data obtained from the question about "protecting the environment vs. economic growth" (Q81). The data about political party preference (V228) will also be assessed in its relationship to religion and environment dimensions. Keywords: Dogmatism, Environmental attitude, Political ideology, Turkey, World Values Survey