“Today, towards the end of yet another ‘rainy season’ that brought no rain, many rural communities seem trapped in a dizzying vortex of catastrophe. 4Ī few years later, in 2014–2018, an unusually severe drought hit Central America’s dry corridor, which runs through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Fears of uncontrolled immigration provided opportunities for nationalist leaders to weaken democratic institutions in the name of building stronger states to defend the integrity of their nations. Heightened popular anxieties about disorderly migrants, and the clumsy administrative reaction to the immigration surge, brought further turmoil to the European Union through the vote for British exit, conflicts over immigration and asylum policy, and the growth of nationalist and anti-immigration parties. 3īecause Europe itself was already economically weakened and politically divided over issues stemming from the Great Recession of 2008–2009, the expansion and integration of the European Union, and reactions to Islamic terrorism in the Middle East and in Europe, it had great difficulties responding to this sudden surge of immigration. The war in turn created millions more refugees, who spread to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, and then to Europe, where a sudden surge of over one million war refugees sought asylum in 2015. Two years later, when a rebellion broke out in southern Syria, revolt quickly spread to these northern cities and precipitated civil war. Because Syria already was suffering from widespread popular discontent over political exclusion and corruption, these refugees added to the existing weight of urban misery and anger with the regime. 1 In “the 2007/2008 agriculture season, nearly 75 percent of these households suffered total crop failure.” 2 Hundreds of thousands left their lands and moved to the cities of Aleppo, Hama, and Damascus. Syria’s young and fast-growing population meant that over a million people in the region were directly affected by the drought. In 2007–2009 a major drought-the worst in forty years-struck northern Syria, the country’s agricultural breadbasket and a region that had already been suffering from loss of irrigation subsidies and water shortages.
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