This is a recording of a live webinar held on Friday 3rd December 2021 for the MEC. Dr Christian Henderson, Assistant Professor at Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University presents ‘What does political ecology tell us about the environmental crises in the Middle East?’

Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s College, Oxford) chairs this webinar.

Like many parts of the world, the environment in the Middle East is in crisis. Climate change, biodiversity loss and unsustainable material extraction will have the same detrimental consequences for life as elsewhere on the planet. In recent years, however, the state of the environment in the Middle East has been framed in a sensationalistic manner; with little evidence, it is blamed for conflict and migration and is predicted to lead to societal collapse. Using a lens of political ecology, this talk will illustrate how these assumptions are problematic; they are rooted in a Western perception of the environment in the Middle East that is determined by cultural and political imaginaries. Political ecology also tells us that the current policies enacted by regional states to address sustainability will probably fail, on the basis that they are technopolitical. But it also tells us that there is a potential for an alternative that offers a more optimistic future, albeit one that requires radical change and a departure from the current system.   

Dr Christian Henderson is assistant professor at Leiden Institute for Area Studies at Leiden University, Netherlands. His research focusses on the agrarian political economy and the political ecology of the Middle East and North Africa. His work has previously been published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Environment and Planning A, Review of African Political Economy and the Journal of Arabian Studies.

Professor Walter Armbrust is a Hourani Fellow and Professor in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. He is a cultural anthropologist, and author of Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996); Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution (2019); and various other works focusing on popular culture, politics and mass media in Egypt. He is editor of Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (2000).

Middle East Centre Series

What does political ecology tell us about the environmental crises in the Middle East?

Speaker: Professor Robert Springborg (Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome)
Recorded on: Friday, 3 November 2017
Edited by: Anne Kimunguyi
First published: 16 November 2017

About the speaker:
Robert Springborg is a non-resident Research Fellow of the Italian Institute of International Affairs, Rome. Until October 2013, he was Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Program Manager for the Middle East for the Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2002 until 2008, he held the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he also served as Director of the London Middle East Institute. Before taking up that Chair, he was Director of the American Research Center in Egypt, University Professor of Middle East Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia; and assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught at King’s College, London; University of California, Berkeley; the College of Europe; the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po; and the University of Sydney. In 2016, he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative, Kennedy School, and Harvard University. 

His publications include Mubarak’s Egypt: Fragmentation of the Political Order; Family Power and Politics in Egypt; Legislative Politics in the Arab World (co-authored with Abdo Baaklini and Guilain Denoeux); Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East first and second editions, (co-authored with Clement M. Henry); Oil and Democracy in Iraq; Development Models in Muslim Contexts: Chinese, ‘Islamic’ and Neo-Liberal Alternatives and several editions of Politics in the Middle East (co-authored with James A. Bill). He co-edited a volume on popular culture and political identity in the Gulf that appeared in 2008. He has published in the leading Middle East journals and was the founder and regular editorialist for The Middle East in London, a monthly journal that commenced publication in 2003. His new book -‘Egypt’ has just been published in October 2017 by Polity Press.

MEC Seminar: Governing Divided Egypt

Speaker:Yael Zerubavel (Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University)
Chair: Professor Yaacov Yadgar (Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies, St Anne's)
Series: Middle East Centre Friday Seminar Series
Joint event with The Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA)

About the seminar:

At once an ecological phenomenon and a cultural construction, the desert has varied associations in Zionist and Israeli culture. Yael Zerubavel tells the story of the desert from the early twentieth century to the present, shedding light on romantic-mythical associations, settlement and security concerns, environmental sympathies, and the commodifying tourist gaze. Drawing on literary narratives, educational texts, newspaper articles, tourist materials, films, popular songs, posters, photographs, and cartoons, Zerubavel reveals the complexities and contradictions that mark Israeli society’s semiotics of space in relation to the Middle East, and the central role of the “besieged island” trope in Israeli culture and politics. The talk draws on the new book published by Stanford University Press (2019). 

About the speaker:

Dr. Zerubavel is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies and History and served as the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Study at Rutgers University. She is a scholar of memory studies with an expertise in modern Israeli society and culture. Utilising an interdisciplinary approach that informs both her teaching and writing, her work explores collective memory and identity, national myths, the transformation of traditions, war and trauma, and cultural perceptions of space, drawing on historical sources, Hebrew literature, educational materials, popular and folkloric forms, as well as in-depth interviews. Her work addresses the impact of nationalism, secularisation, immigration and dislocation, the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the reshaping of Jewish memory in Israel and developments within Israeli culture.

Yael Zerubavel is the author of the award-winning book, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Desert in the Promised Land (Stanford University Press, 2019), and is currently working on another book manuscript entitled Biblical Reenactments: The Performance of Antiquity in Israeli Culture. She has served on the boards of the Association for Jewish Studies and the association for Israel Studies and on the editorial boards of key journals in the field of Israel Studies.

Recorded on: 10 May 2019
First Published: 3 June 2019
Edited by: Kaja Wawrzak(MEC)

Desert in the Promised Land: The Politics and Semiotics of Space in Israeli Culture

St Antony’s College, Oxford University, is a world-renowned centre for research and teaching in global and regional issues. The College provides an interdisciplinary environment to study a range of subjects from development to international relations. St Antony's houses seven research centres focused on Africa, Asia, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eurasia as well as programmes on North America, Burma, Morocco, Sudan and Taiwan. In our regional centres and programmes we use insights and methods from both social sciences and the humanities to deepen our understanding of the key parts of the world. The work done here helps to inform public debate and public policy.

Our Fellows, students and visiting researchers include leading experts on the regions of the world and on issues of global and transnational importance. Each year we host visiting experts from the world’s leading universities and think tanks and from such fields as diplomacy, journalism, business, and politics. Our select group of more than 450 graduate students are among the best and the brightest, representing all the continents.

What does political ecology tell us about the environmental crises in the Middle East?

St Antony's College, Oxford

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