Climate Migrants as Protestors? Dispelling Misconceptions about Global Environmental Change in Pre-Revolutionary Syria
Publisher: Contemporary Levant
Author(s): Christiane J. Fröhlich
Date: 2016
Topics: Climate Change, Governance, Land, Livelihoods, Renewable Resources
Countries: Syrian Arab Republic
For a growing number of commentators, the Syrian uprising is explained by a prolonged drought period immediately preceding the outbreak of conflict in Syria in 2011. In this narrative, the marginalized ‘climate migrants’ are seen as a decisive factor for the onset of conflict. In this paper the author dispels these assumptions by arguing for a more complex approach that takes into consideration pre-existing internal migration patterns – social, demographic, political and economic drivers of migration – as well as new local-level data showing that ‘climate migrants’ could not have orchestrated an uprising of this magnitude for lack of reliable social networks.