Making Crisis, Sovereignty, and the Environment in Iraq and Kuwait

Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, will be presenting on research that considers how imperialism, anticolonialism, and the contradictions of sovereignty in twentieth-century Iraq and Kuwait are reflected in environmental concerns. She illustrates how a state of crisis between the two countries historically occurred at the nexus of resource extraction and consciousness of climate anomalies (now understood as climate change). Viewing this issue through the problem of freshwater access helps us understand the different, and conflicting, ways that formerly colonized people articulate their aspirations for liberation amid imperial intervention.