Weather, wheat, and war: Security implications of climate variability for conflict in Syria
| Author | Andrew M Linke,Brett Ruether |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343320973070 |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Weather, wheat, and war: Security implications
of climate variability for conflict in Syria
Andrew M Linke
Department of Geography, University of Utah & Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
Brett Ruether
Department of Geography, University of Utah
Abstract
We examine how Syria’s local growing seasons and precipitation variability affected patterns of violence during the country’s
civil war (2011–19). Among Syria’s 272 subdistricts (nahiyah), we study conflict events initiated by the Assad regime or its
allies, and, separately, by other armed non-government groups (‘rebels’). Throughout the war, violence to capture agriculture
has been used regularly to control valuable cropland and harvests. Combatants also seek to deny their adversaries access to
these resources by deploying violence to destroy agriculture. We test the hypothesis that conflict was most likely during local
growing seasons due to both of these motivations. Additionally, we examine whether unusually dry conditions further
elevated the risk of conflict during growing season months. A theory for why higher levels of conflict would occur during
unusually dry conditions is that livelihood losses elevate incentives to control scarce crops and also facilitate recruitment of
militants or their sympathizers. We find that violent events initiated by the governmentand rebel groups are both more likely
during the growing season than other times of the year. There is also evidence that dry conditions during thegrowing season
led to an increase in government-initiated attacks over the duration of the war. We find the strongest relationship between
precipitation deficits and both government- and rebel-initiated violence in later years of the war. Compared with our growing
season results, the rainfall deviation estimates are less consistent across models.
Keywords
agriculture, civil war, drought, Syria
Introduction
In 2011 the Arab Spring brought the world’s attention to
the Middle East and North Africa. Large pro-democracy
uprisings led to political upheaval throughout the region.
Since the first deadly violence erupted in Daraa in mid-
March, Syrian unrest escalated quickly and by early 2020
had claimed 586,100 lives, including 116,000 civilians
(SOHR, 2020). There are currently approximately
6.2 million Syrian internally displaced persons, the larg-
est number of any country in the world, and an esti-
mated 9.3 million Syrians face food insecurity (UNSC,
2020). Millions of refugees have fled Syria to neighbor-
ing countries and to Europe (UNHCR, 2018).
Syria’s civil war has been fought between President Bashar
al-Assad’s regime and a variety of non-government opposi-
tion groups (hereafter ‘rebels’). The regime also deployed
non-government militias. A basicdistinction between pro-
and anti-government forces conceals the great complexity
of the war, however.Several main factionscoalesced during
the conflict: pro-government militias, opposition rebels,
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS
1
), Kurdish autono-
mous forces, and Turkish-backed fighters. Each group
received some level of foreign support. Russia and Iran
supported Assad, while jihadists were funded by Saudi
Arabia and Qatar (Shaheen et al., 2015; AbuKhalil,
Corresponding author:
andrew.linke@geog.utah.edu
1
The organization is sometimes referred to as ‘Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant’, ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’, ‘Islamic State’, and
the Arabic acronym Daesh. We use ‘ISIS’ hereafter.
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(1) 114–131
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343320973070
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2018).Until 2019, the USA was a patronof Kurdish forces
and Turkey reportedly aided ISIS on occasion (Yayla &
Clarke, 2018; Mogelson, 2020).
The origins of Syria’s war are still disputed. Most
scholars point to some combination of three conditions:
political awakening among the population, Assad’s
repression of dissent, and deteriorating ecological condi-
tions. Some ‘environmental security’ research names
Syria as a prototypical drought-induced civil war. Kelley
et al. (2015) claimed that collapsing Syrian agriculture
drove urban migration. This change amplified existing
grievances among the populations in cities and led to the
protests that escalated throughout 2011. Other research
found that meteorological droughts led to protests
between January and June 2011 in Sunni regions of the
country where migrants arrived (Ash & Obradovich,
2020). The association between Syria’s war and drought
has nevertheless been disputed, with researchers empha-
sizing Assad’s harmful political and economic policies
and also pointing to problematic assumptions about
migrants’ activities in those studies (De Cha
ˆtel, 2014;
Fro
¨hlich, 2016; Selby et al., 2017; Selby, 2019).
Any evidence that environmental factors led to Syria’s
civil war falls in line with research that found tempera-
ture extremes (Burke et al., 2009; Hsiang, Burke &
Miguel, 2013; Maystadt, Calderone & You, 2015; van
Weezel, 2020) and rainfall deficits (Fjelde & von Uex-
kull, 2012; Hendrix & Salehyan, 2012; Maystadt &
Ecker,2014;Raleigh,Choi&Kniveton,2015;von
Uexkull et al., 2016; Harari & La Ferrara, 2018; van
Weezel, 2019; Do
¨ring, 2020) elevate armed conflict risk.
Weather trends will become increasingly unpredictable
as climatic change continues (Giorgi, 2006; Dai, 2013)
and this could have impacts on crop productivity that
lead to violence (Vesco et al., 2021).
While weather variability can lead to instability, vio-
lence is not inevitable. Irrigation infrastructure (Gatti,
Baylis & Crost, 2020), institutions that manage resource
use (Linke et al., 2018a), food security improvements
(Hendrix & Brinkman, 2013; Koren, 2019), and pov-
erty reduction or political reforms (Mach et al., 2019)
can prevent conflict. Recent research has focused on
environmental migration (Koubi et al., 2021; Adger
et al., 2021; Linke et al., 2018b), and has argued that
accommodating these vulnerable populations can reduce
conflict.
In this article, we investigate whether local growing
season rainfall deficits increased the likelihood that the
Syrian government or its allies or rebels perpetrated vio-
lence. To our knowledge, our research is the first that
studies how local crop seasonality and weather variability
influenced patterns of violence in Syria after the civil war
began. Relatively few studies of the war in Syria have
focused on agricultural land at all (Jaafar & Woertz,
2016; Eklund et al., 2017; Sly, 2019; Ash & Obrado-
vich, 2020), despite the need for such consideration.
Manipulation of food supplies has been a strategy in
violent conflicts for centuries (Oberschall & Seidman,
2005) and food insecurity remains a focus of ongoing
conflict research (Koren, Bagozzi & Benson, 2021).
A euphemism commonly used to describe rebel
groups as ‘living off the land’ (Koren & Bagozzi, 2017;
Zhukov, 2017: 57) is especially pertinent for our study.
Beyond food for sustenance, the revenues earned from
selling harvests have funded ISIS, Free Syrian Army
(FSA), Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF),
2
and other Syr-
ian groups (Sly, 2019; Kanfash & al-Jasem, 2019). Rebel
organizations often relied on local populations for their
supply of food and other resources (Weinstein, 2006;
Hazen, 2013; Hendrix & Brinkman, 2013; Crost &
Felter, 2016; Koren, 2019). Governments struggle to
diminish those resources that support rebel fighting. In
Syria, the Assad regime has launched airstrikes repeatedly
to destroy cropland and grain-processing infrastructure,
denying its opposition control over these valuable assets
(Fahim & Saad, 2012; Gutman & Raymond, 2013;
Ciezadlo, 2015).
With most of the environmental security literature
focused on the start of the Syrian war, the relationship
between the environment and conflict during the war
remains understudied.
3
In 2018, the Food and Agricul-
ture Organization (FAO) estimated that agriculture
accounted for 60% of GDP; only 18% of GDP was
agricultural in 2010 before the war (FAO, 2019). While
many families moved to cities beginning in 2011 (Ide,
2018), thousands of farming households remained in
rural Syria and tended crops throughout the conflict.
Our focus on such households is a logical extension of
research finding that environmental stress contributed to
the onset of Syria’s war (Ash & Obradovich, 2020).
Our findings are most readily generalizable to
Yemen’s current civil war. The Saudi-led Arab Coalition
has systematically destroyed crops and farming
2
Some sources use ‘Syrian Defense Forces’ and ‘Syrian Democratic
Forces’ interchangeably. We use ‘SDF’ hereafter.
3
There are studies of Syrian agriculture after 2011. However, ISIS
research models land use as a dependent variable rather than conflict
events (Eklund et al., 2017). Vegetation health has declined in three
northern governorates through 2015 (Eklund & Thompson, 2017)
according to other research, but violent event data was not part of the
empirical analysis.
Linke & Ruether 115
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