Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative

Reporting on the Syrian civil war and on Syrian migration to Europe since 2015 often suggests that a drought from 2006–2009 caused an agricultural collapse, spurring rural-to-urban migration and social conflict underpinning the uprisings of 2011. Such narratives regularly focus on the mass death of sheep, goats, and other “livestock” as indexes of the environmental violence underpinning war and migration. Climate security narratives tend to configure animal death as national debility in ways that suggest that slow environmental processes affecting rural pastoralists erupt into social destabilization. Critically examining such visions of migration and animal death as national debility, this essay offers a critique of Syrian climate migration and climate war discourses. Arguing that the effects of aerial bombing and long-term agrarian struggles are evident in the publicity around animal depopulation, the essay suggests that international reporting on climate war and migration are limited by a failure to inquire into concerns (raised in some sectors of the opposition) about the sustainability of monoculture enterprises and the forms of capitalist agriculture. As such, they tend to evacuate political struggles over infrastructure and environment in wartime Syria. Building on this interpretation of the tropes of animality and debility in Syrian war representation, the final section of the essay draws out methodological lessons for how scholars of disability studies and animal studies might advance the intersection of those fields as well as transnational frameworks of critique in each.