The Syrian Climate-Migration-Conflict Nexus: An Annotated Bibliography
Publisher: Centre for Middle Eastern Studies
Author(s): Gianna Angermayr, Pinar Dinc, and Lina Eklund
Date: 2022
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Disasters, Livelihoods, Renewable Resources
Countries: Syrian Arab Republic
The scientific debate about the Syrian civil war being linked to climate change that manifested through a prolonged drought took off in 2014, with two key publications: De Châtel’s article in the Middle Eastern Studies in January, and Gleick’s article in Weather, Climate, and Society in July. In 2015, Kelley published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which yielded massive media attention and has been cited more than 1300 times, according to Google Scholar. The debate reached a peak in 2017 (fig. 1 below), when Selby et al. (2017b) published an article criticising Gleick (2014) and Kelley et al. (2015). This led to three consecutive responses (Gleick, 2017; Hendrix, 2017; Kelley et al., 2017) and a rejoinder (Selby et al., 2017a). Since 2017, there has been on average one article per year, suggesting that the debate is still ongoing.
This annotated bibliography is an article-by-article summary of the peer reviewed literature published on the climate-conflict nexus in Syria. It currently includes 19 articles where drought after 2005 is discussed together with the Syrian uprising turning into a civil war in 2011. It may be relevant to note that different articles place the drought between different years, from 2007-2009 to 2006-2011. This reveals a disparity in how drought is defined in the different studies, and also in the framing of its severity. A 3-year drought is different from a 6-year drought.