Dressing up domination as ‘cooperation’: the case of Israeli-Palestinian water relations

This article analyses the extent to which Israeli-Palestinian water relations were affected and transformed by the Oslo process. Focusing in turn on the management of water systems and supplies, the monitoring of water resources and the development of new supplies, the article suggests that many of the seeming and much-lauded achievements of the Oslo process were more cosmetic than real. Comparing Israeli-Palestinian water relations before and since the onset of the Oslo process, the article contends that the Oslo agreements did little more in this particular sphere than to dress up and discursively repackage Israel's domination of the West Bank water sector in a new vocabulary of Israeli-Palestinian ‘cooperation’

Cooperation, domination and colonisation: the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee

Do there exist instances of international (water) policy coordination which are so unequal that they should not even be considered 'cooperation'? This article argues, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that this is indeed so. Theoretically, it posits that 'cooperation' should be distinguished from 'policy coordination', and that situations of policy coordination without mutual adjustments or joint gains should instead be considered instances of 'domination'. And empirically, it illustrates the existence of such relations of domination through an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC), using new evidence from JWC negotiation files, plus interviews with leading Israeli and Palestinian participants. Most startlingly, the article finds that under the constraints of JWC 'cooperation', the Palestinian Authority has been compelled to lend its formal approval to the large-scale expansion of Israeli settlement water infrastructures, activity which is both illegal under international law and one of the major impediments to Palestinian statehood. The article suggests the need for both the complete restructuring of Israeli-Palestinian water 'cooperation', and for further research on relations of domination, and the ideology of cooperation, within international (water) politics

Misrepresenting the Jordan River Basin

This article advances a critique of the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia’s (ESCWA’s) representation of the Jordan River Basin, as contained in its recently published Inventory of Shared Water Resources in Western Asia. We argue that ESCWA’s representation of the Jordan Basin is marked by serious technical errors and a systematic bias in favour of one riparian, Israel, and against the Jordan River’s four Arab riparians. We demonstrate this in relation to ESCWA’s account of the political geography of the Jordan River Basin, which foregrounds Israel and its perspectives and narratives; in relation to hydrology, where Israel’s contribution to the basin is overstated, whilst that of Arab riparians is understated; and in relation to development and abstraction, where Israel’s transformation and use of the basin are underplayed, while Arab impacts are exaggerated. Taken together, this bundle of misrepresentations conveys the impression that it is Israel which is the main contributor to the Jordan River Basin, Arab riparians its chief exploiters. This impression is, we argue, not just false but also surprising, given that the Inventory is in the name of an organisation of Arab states. The evidence discussed here provides a striking illustration of how hegemonic hydro-political narratives are reproduced, including by actors other than basin hegemons themselves

Post-Zionist Perspectives on Contemporary Israel

Review essay of Baruch Kimmerling’s “The Invention and Decline of Israeliness”, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s “The Global Political Economy of Israel” and Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled’s “Being Israeli”

Climate change and the Syrian civil war, part II: the Jazira’s agrarian crisis

This article is the second in a series on the alleged links between climate change, drought and the onset of Syria’s civil war. In a previous article it was argued that there is little merit to the Syria-climate conflict thesis, including no clear evidence that drought-related migration contributed to civil war onset. Building on this earlier work, the present article investigates an issue which was not fully analysed in the previous one: the nature and causes of the pre-civil war agrarian crisis in Syria’s northeast Jazira region, and especially in the governorate of Hasakah. This crisis is usually represented as rooted essentially in a severe multi-year drought which, it is claimed, led to multiple crop failures and in turn large-scale migration. Here it is argued, by contrast, that the central causes of Hasakah’s agrarian crisis were long-term and structural, involving three main factors: extreme water resource degradation; deepening rural poverty; and underpinning these, specific features of Syria’s and Hasakah’s politics and political economy. The article contends, most notably, that the exceptional severity of Hasakah’s crisis was a function of the nationwide collapse of Syria’s agrarian and rentier model of state-building and development, combined with Hasakah’s distinctive political geography as an ethnically contested borderland and frontier zone. I thus conclude that rather than supporting narratives of environmental scarcity-induced conflict, the Syrian case actually confirms the opposite: namely, political ecologists’ insistence on the centrality of the political, and of conflict, in causing environmental scarcities and insecurities

Post-Zionist Perspectives on Contemporary Israel

accumulation capital capitalism centralization crisis distribution elite energy ethnicity globalization inflation Israel liberalization Middle East military oil Palestinians politics power privatization ruling class sociology stagflation state TNC war ZionismReview essay of Baruch Kimmerling’s “The Invention and Decline of Israeliness”, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s “The Global Political Economy of Israel” and Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled’s “Being Israeli”

Ruptures and Ripple Effects in the Middle East and Beyond

Perhaps more than any other region or any other period of post-Cold War history, the Middle East since the Arab Spring constitutes a significant challenge to established ideas about development and its relationship with conflict. The failure of democracy movements, the collapse and rebirth of authoritarian regimes, the regional conflagration around Syria, new experiments with Islamism, and the return of geopolitics all, in one way or another, challenge these established ideas. The Middle East has always been something of an outlier within development thinking and practice: both the discipline of development studies and development policy have always taken sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America as their central reference points, not the Middle East. But with so much international attention currently on the Middle East, it is worthwhile examining what recent trends and events there tell us about development and the role of conflict therein; this is what is done in this IDS Bulletin. Broadly, the articles consider myths around conflict and development about the Middle East region. These include: that there is a unilinear model of development; that low development and violent conflict are natural bedfellows; that there is an alternative rentier path of development; that fragile statehood is the main institutional cause of violence; that environmental scarcities are an increasingly important contributor to conflict; that countries need to pass a number of milestones on a democratisation pathway; that more humanitarian aid will contain the Syrian refugee crisis and that, following a period of ‘Arab Spring’, people’s agency has been defeated

Introduction: Eight Myths of Conflict and Development in the Middle East

In this introductory article we identify eight myths of conflict and development related to the Middle East region. Some of these myths, which cut across academia, foreign policy and development interventions, are specific to the Middle East; others are ‘global’ myths that regional developments contradict. We do not claim to be the first to identify all these myths; many of our arguments are indebted to a long history of critical scholarship. The articles in this IDS Bulletin all speak to the disconnects, disjunctures and misconceptions highlighted here

Governing energy in organisations: Energy management professionals, marginalised practices, and the limits to change

Organisations and institutions of many kinds play important roles in maintaining and transforming energy systems, not least through their direct contributions to energy demand. Major service‐providing institutions such as universities and hospitals have especially large and complex demands. Facing pressures to reduce environmental impacts and costs, many of these organisations are trying to reduce their energy consumption—with varying degrees of success. The responsibility for pursuing this goal in practice often lies with practitioners here referred to as Energy Management Professionals (EMPs). However, there has been little systematic investigation of EMPs' practices and their energy implications. Using qualitative evidence from English universities and hospitals, we argue that three types of work are marginalised in EMPs' practices, namely: (a) change‐focused work, and within that; (b) work engaging with people and what they do, and within that; (c) work engaging with institutional policy‐making. We argue that these marginalisations limit the scale and scope of demand reduction efforts, and also show how they arise from interacting dynamics of national policies and priorities, institutional structures and professional practices, and the influence of neoliberal governance, among other things. Finally, we discuss how rethinking institutional energy governance could help reduce energy demand and reflect on wider lessons for research and policy on organisational sustainability

From exports to exercise: how non-energy policies affect energy systems

Because of existing policy silos, energy policy tends to be addressed from a narrowly energy-centric basis; yet energy systems are clearly also affected by a wide range of policies emanating from other sectors. This article explores the impacts of policies associated with various ‘non-energy sectors’ on energy supply and demand, using a systematic and wide-ranging review of academic, policy and grey literatures. We discuss six policy sectors where these impacts are, in our assessment, not sufficiently recognised by policymakers or researchers but have significant energy implications. Overall, we find that there is little acknowledgement or analysis of this issue, especially of the full causal chain from ‘non-energy policies’ through to energy system impacts; for whatever reason, consideration of the reverse links (e.g. of the health impacts of energy policies) is far more common. The upshot is that non-energy policy impacts on energy systems are not sufficiently visible within either research or policy. We argue that this serves as a barrier to change, and that increasing the visibility of these complex and multi-faceted connections is thus a vital task for researchers and policymakers alike