Format/Structure

This panel is created by members of the POLLEN Levant node and will be divided into 2 panels (9 papers in total).

Long Abstract

In the Middle East and North Africa/South West Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) research on environmental transformations have been limited, explored largely through environmental science, environmental history, or security studies. Political ecology remains comparatively underdeveloped, fragmented, and insufficiently recognised as a cohesive field in the region. The result is that the structural inequalities, power dynamics, and colonial legacies remained under-explored in relation to environmental change. The unfolding of struggles over land, livelihoods, and natural resources - from energy and water to critical minerals, communal pastures, and refugee geographies

- offer powerful empirical sites for interrogating broader dynamics of environmental conflict, dispossession, and resistance.

This panel argues for the urgent relevance of political ecology in the MENA/SWANA region. It brings together critical political ecology perspectives to foreground the historical, material, and geopolitical specificities shaping land, labour, agriculture, and resource control across the region. In doing so, we situate pressing issues including ecological violence, militarized development, and neoliberal restructuring, within broader dynamics of imperialism, settler colonialism, and capitalist accumulation.

It seeks to foster critical dialogue around the region’s significance to global political ecology, both as an empirical terrain of intensifying environmental struggles and as a site of theoretical innovation.

• How can political ecology reshape broader understanding of the politics of pressing environmental concerns

• How can political ecology scholarship in and of MENA/SWANA advance global scholarship on key questions of repair, decolonization, and environmental justice? 

• How can political ecology deepen critical understanding of the material dynamics that shape access to and control over resources across the region?

• How can political ecology research in and of MENA/SWANA contribute to broader understanding of the politics of environmental knowledge production and alternative epistemologies?

This Panel has 10 pending paper proposals.
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