Late Holocene droughts in the Fertile Crescent recorded in a speleothem from northern Iraq

Droughts have had large impacts on past and present societies. High-resolution paleoclimate data are essential to place recent droughts in a meaningful historical context and to predict regional future changes with greater accuracy. Such records, however, are very scarce in the Middle East in general, and the Fertile Crescent in particular. Here we present a 2400 year long speleothem-based multiproxy record from Gejkar Cave in northern Iraq. Oxygen and carbon isotopes and magnesium are faithful recorders of effective moisture. The new Gejkar record not only shows that droughts in 1998–2000 and 2007–2010, which have been argued to be a contributing factor to Syrian civil war, were extreme compared to the current mean climate, but they were also superimposed on a long-term aridification trend that already started around or before 950 C.E. (Common Era). This long-term trend is not captured by tree ring records and climate models, emphasizing the importance of using various paleoclimate proxy data to evaluate and improve climate models and to correctly inform policy makers about future hydroclimatic changes in this drought-prone region

The analytical framework of water and armed conflict: a focus on the 2006 Summer War between Israel and Lebanon

This paper develops an analytical framework to investigate the relationship between water and armed conflict, and applies it to the ‘Summer War’ of 2006 between Israel and Lebanon (Hezbollah). The framework broadens and deepens existing classifications by assessing the impact of acts of war as indiscriminate or targeted, and evaluating them in terms of international norms and law, in particular International Humanitarian Law (IHL). In the case at hand, the relationship is characterised by extensive damage in Lebanon to drinking water infrastructure and resources. This is seen as a clear violation of the letter and the spirit of IHL, while the partial destruction of more than 50 public water towers compromises water rights and national development goals. The absence of pre-war environmental baselines makes it difficult to gauge the impact on water resources, suggesting a role for those with first-hand knowledge of the hostilities to develop a more effective response before, during, and after armed conflict

Livelihoods, conflict and aid programming: Is the evidence base good enough?

In conflict-affected situations, aid-funded livelihood interventions are often tasked with a dual imperative: to generate material welfare benefits and to contribute to peacebuilding outcomes. There may be some logic to such a transformative agenda, but does the reality square with the rhetoric? Through a review of the effectiveness of a range of livelihood promotion interventions—from job creation to microfinance—this paper finds that high quality empirical evidence is hard to come by in conflict-affected situations. Many evaluations appear to conflate outputs with impacts and numerous studies fail to include adequate information on their methodologies and datasets, making it difficult to appraise the reliability of their conclusions. Given the primary purpose of this literature—to provide policy guidance on effective ways to promote livelihoods— this silence is particularly concerning. As such, there is a strong case to be made for a restrained and nuanced handling of such interventions in conflict-affected settings.Department for International Development - PO511

Lineages and trajectories of change and conflict in Syria

The chapter tries to view the current conflict in Syria from a historical and political perspective. With all the analytical limits of summaries, it highlights the main lineages of social and political conflict in the country: from the major changes that occurred in the 2000’s, to the transformation of the political conflict in 2011 into a full-scale war until late 2016. It also takes a look at the main features of the political regimes that developed alongside the conflict, with a final remark on a possible post-war Syria

Religion and Social Policy in the Middle East: The (Re)Constitution of an Old-New Partnership

This article reports back on the key preliminary findings and developing arguments of research which has been funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council in four politically and culturally significant countries of the Middle East: Lebanon, Iran, Turkey and Egypt (more limited research in this country). Focusing primarily on Islam and Christianity, the article critically examines what it denotes as an old-new partnership between religious actors or institutions and social policy, understood broadly as both state and non-state interventions in the public sphere aimed at influencing social welfare and development. At a time of increasing interest in Middle Eastern social policy, driven in great part by multilateral aid agencies such as the UN and World Bank, the article offers a descriptive overview of the key dynamics of social policy in the Muslim-populated countries of the region. It then engages in discussion of how religion provides an impetus for social action by introducing a typology of religious welfare. The article thus makes a contribution to the theoretical literature in this area by departing from the conventional model of social policy in the Middle East known as the ‘rentier state’. However, in recognizing that social policy in the Middle East remains subsidiary to concerns with economic development, the article (1) critically examines the contemporary make-up of the relationship between religion and social welfare action in the region, and (2) presents a preliminary argument for reconstituting future social policy in the region by taking better account of how religious values and ideals influence social welfare