Pinar Dinc

Environmental destruction and extractivism are increasingly central to contemporary armed conflicts. Yet scholarship has paid limited attention to how these processes reshape landscapes over time and become embedded within strategies of war, governance, and resource control. This article examines the intersection of armed conflict, extractivism, and environmental change in Kurdish-dominant areas of the Middle East through a comparative study of Afrin in Syria and Şırnak in Turkey between 2017 and 2024. Both regions have experienced intense militarization, environmental destruction, and expanding resource extraction, making them critical cases for understanding war-driven landscape transformation. The study combines satellite-based land-use and land-cover change analysis with qualitative analysis of official state discourse. High-resolution multispectral satellite imagery is used to detect vegetation loss and land-use transitions, while continuous time-series change detection distinguishes persistent transformation from seasonal variation. This analysis is complemented by a systematic examination of public statements, parliamentary records, and official communications to assess how environmental change is narrated and justified. The results reveal substantial and spatially uneven vegetation loss across both cases. In Afrin, tree-crop cover declined by approximately 19.5% at its lowest point, before partially recovering in 2024, indicating a fluctuating trajectory. In Şırnak, vegetation degradation is concentrated in sparsely vegetated zones alongside a more than fourfold expansion of mining areas. Across both regions, approximately 28 000 hectares of vegetation loss were detected. The findings demonstrate that environmental destruction in war operates both as a material process and a strategy of governance, legitimized through intertwined security, moral, and development narratives. By combining satellite-based environmental monitoring with discourse analysis, the study shows how environmental transformation becomes embedded within broader projects of territorial control and resource extraction. The study contributes to debates on political ecology, extractivism, environmental governance, and sustainability in war-affected landscapes.

Water has long been a strategic resource in the semi-arid landscapes of Mesopotamia, a region spanning Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers form the lifeline of societies. As water scarcity intensifies due to a combination of climatic stressors and anthropogenic pressures, the governance of transboundary rivers has become critical for ensuring health, food security, and regional stability. The stakes are particularly high in this basin, where upstream–downstream asymmetries shape political relations and exacerbate vulnerabilities.The long-standing dispute between Turkey, the upstream hegemon, and Syria, a downstream user, has deepened in the past decade with the emergence of a de facto Kurdish administration in northern and eastern Syria along Turkey’s southern border. This political reality adds complexity to water governance, intersecting with security concerns and competing narratives of resource control. Despite the centrality of water in these dynamics, empirical verification of water availability and flow remains limited. Data scarcity, driven by sparse in-situ measurements and restricted access to hydrological information, hampers assessment of scarcity and its implications for conflict and cooperation.Against this backdrop, this study examines whether upstream reservoir dynamics at the Atatürk Dam in Turkey are reflected in storage variations at the downstream Tishrin reservoir in Syria, and whether these hydrologic changes are accompanied by detectable signals in agricultural activity. We compiled multi-year satellite-derived time series for both reservoirs and nearby agricultural zones, including reservoir surface water level, precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and NDVI-based vegetation activity. Variables were harmonized to a common monthly scale and prepared for anomaly-based analysis to reduce seasonal confounding.A qualitative review of the time series indicates baseline hydroclimatic contrasts between the two study regions. Precipitation, soil moisture, and baseline NDVI appear lower in the Tishrin-side agricultural area than in the Atatürk-side agricultural area, suggesting a more water-limited system and greater sensitivity to variability in water availability. These background differences provide context for downstream vulnerability but do not explain the temporal structure of reservoir storage fluctuations and associated vegetation anomalies. The reservoir and vegetation time series suggest downstream dynamics are constrained within a lower-productivity envelope, consistent with stronger exposure to moisture stress and limits in irrigation reliability.To move from qualitative evidence to attribution, we test whether upstream and downstream reservoir dynamics are coupled once hydroclimatic controls are considered. We use time-series comparison and statistical controls to separate signals linked to reservoir operations from those attributable to regional climate variability, drawing on precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture as contextual drivers. We then investigate whether vegetation activity across surrounding agricultural areas covaries with local reservoir conditions and hydroclimatic stress, using NDVI anomalies as an integrated measure of crop response. Finally, land use/land cover trajectories will be evaluated to place short-term variability in a longer-term landscape context, with mapping consistency to ensure apparent shifts in cultivation are not conflated with classification artifacts. This integrated satellite-based framework offers a robust, adaptable basis for evaluating transboundary water-management influences on downstream storage and agricultural conditions in a politically complex setting.

This article presents a scoping and conceptual literature review on environmental politics in North and East Syria/Rojava. The review aims to synthesize existing academic research in English on the interplay between armed conflict and environmental change in the region, focusing on the Kurdish‐led socio‐political model known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). The study is guided by two main questions: the knowledge produced about the environment's role in AANES politics and the theoretical advances in environmental politics. Employing a scope and conceptual literature review methodology, the article identifies key themes such as ecological sustainability, gender equality and direct democracy. It highlights the challenges and opportunities faced by AANES in implementing ecological policies amidst ongoing conflict and geopolitical pressures. The findings underscore the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and the need for further research on ecological democracy, environmental justice and peace ecology. The review concludes by emphasizing the significance of radical democratic and ecological consciousness in achieving peace and justice in conflict zones.

Farmland abandonment is often associated with biophysical, political, or socio-economic changes, like droughts, economic reforms, rural-urban migration, or armed conflicts. Syria has seen several such changes in the period between 2000–2011, however, few assessments of how these factors have interacted with land abandonment have been carried out. In this study we investigate land abandonment patterns in northeast Syria, using a land use classification based on satellite data to indicate agricultural drought impacts and land abandonment. We combine these data with information on land use and migration patterns collected through a unique fieldwork, including surveys and interviews with Syrian farmers who had migrated to Turkey. Our analysis shows that drought coincided with a strong drop in cultivated croplands in 2008 and 2009. We also found a comparatively high cropland abandonment between 2001 and 2013, however no strong increases during or after drought years. Local insights indicate that migration took place during both normal years and drought years, and that most migrants had abandoned their lands after leaving Syria. We suggest that long-term mismanagement of water resources along with changes in the political economy, drove land abandonment in northeast Syria between 2001 and 2010. After 2011, armed conflict likely drove abandonment, but rates remained similar to the pre-conflict period. We discuss the potential of land abandonment as an indicator of rural migration in areas where migration data is sparse and conclude that more research is needed to understand the migration-land abandonment nexus, particularly in the Middle East.

This article contributes to the existing literature on the populist online communication of governments. We look at the role of the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter under the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the wider Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) during the peace process. We carried out a rhetorical analysis of the Twitter posts of four key AKP actors – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Yalçın Akdoğan, and Efkan Ala – between July 1, 2012 and November 1, 2015. First, we show that the AKP actors persistently label the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and in Syria as a threat to the national security of Turkey, reflected in their rhetoric toward the remilitarization and resecuritization of Turkey’s Kurdish question within and across its borders. Second, we argue that the AKP used the peace process and various persuasive communicative techniques not only to consolidate Kurdish electoral support, but also to reach its aim to remove the Kemalist military–bureaucratic tutelage in Turkey that was replaced with hyper-presidentialism under the strong personality cult of Erdoğan. Third, we argue that Erdoğan’s increased one-man power has been reflected in the AKP’s branding itself as the only viable choice for the Kurdish region’s stability, which has blocked more constructive dialogue toward a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish question.