Water Diplomacy in the Middle East | Rachel Havrelock | Recording Available November 16
Co-Sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Central Illinois and the UIS Global Studies Program
Rachel Havrelock will explore water diplomacy in the Middle East.
She will examine the era of the Oslo Peace Accords and the many joint
Israeli-Palestinian organizations that arose subsequently. Some
twenty-five years later, only one group, the trilateral
Jordanian-Palestinian-Israeli NGO Ecopeace Middle East, survives.
Although confronting Climate Change and conflict at once presents
considerable challenges, Ecopeace’s unique mode of environmental
peacebuilding establishes shared knowledge and awareness before moving
participants toward collective planning and advocacy. This talk covers
Middle East water history and the innovations making new forms of water
use and distribution possible. After appraising new projects on the
horizon, she will discuss their applicability or relevance to Illinois
and North American waters.
Rachel Havrelock is the founder and director of the Univerity of
Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Freshwater Lab and co-creator of the
Freshwater Stories digital platform. She is an Associate Professor of
English at UIC and author of River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (University of Chicago Press), as well as the forthcoming The Joshua Generation: Israeli Occupation and the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2020).
A childhood of freshwater swimming around Detroit and the Great Lakes
fed Dr. Havrelock’s interest in water and environmental peacemaking
with the NGO Ecopeace Middle East. Her current book project, Pipeline: How Oil Created the Modern Middle East and How Water Can Transform It,
chronicles the role of oil extraction and infrastructure in the
militarization of the Middle East and suggests how regional water
management could transform the landscape. She conducted research in the
United Kingdom, supported by a fellowship at the University of
Cambridge and in the Middle East on the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences Dean’s Research award. She received an alumni impact award
from the U.S. Department of State Global Fellows Program in June 2014.
In addition to the Middle East, Dr. Havrelock’s work addresses the Great
Lakes as a transborder water system both abundant and imperiled. She
holds grants from the Mott Foundation and the Humanities Without Walls
Initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.