• Owain Lawson

    historian of the modern middle east

    environment, development, climate

  • About Me

    I am a historian of environment, development, and social movements in the modern Middle East. I serve as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Co-editor of the Jadaliyya Environment page. I am Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Lehigh University, where I am working on my first book, Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon.

     

    My research and teaching investigate the intersecting histories of environment, technology, capitalism, incarceration, and the climate crisis.

     

    I was formerly Lecturer in Environmental History at Cardiff University (2023–24), a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto (2022–23), and Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oberlin College (2021–22). I received my Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2021. I also hold an MPhil and MA in History from Columbia, MA in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo, and BA from Concordia University in Montréal.

     

    Fellowships and grants from the Social Science Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Max Weber Stiftung, Doris G. Quinn Foundation, and Columbia's Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life have supported my research. In 2018–2019, I was a fellow-in-residence at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Alongside teaching at Cardiff, Oberlin, and Columbia, I design and teach classes for incarcerated students through the Prison Education Programs of Cornell and Columbia.

  • Research

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    Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon

    My first book project, Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon, recovers the primacy of river basin development and equitable resource distribution in twentieth-century Middle Eastern conceptions of and efforts to achieve postcolonial sovereignty. In the 1950s, engineers, activists, and village committees across the Middle East argued that water distribution was essential to justice and equality, and building water infrastructure essential to building a sound postcolonial order. However, in recent decades, historians have neglected the powerful resonance of such analyses. Historians of the Middle East and, more broadly, the Global South have interrogated the cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic aspects of how former colonies sought to establish meaningful sovereignty. Simultaneously, historians of empire and development have typically studied the development era from the perspective of international institutions, footloose Western experts, and their archives, but neglected local and regional dynamics.

     

    Power Failures makes this argument through the history of efforts to develop the Litani River in Lebanon. It is a transnational history that analyzes how local stakeholders, national institutions, and global networks each drove postcolonial development. Arab engineers, religious leaders, and rural communities debated and pursued resource development as a means to fuel their different visions of progress, address inequalities, and build self-sufficiency. My research demonstrates how and why these local stakes, debates, and conceptions of progress shaped such projects more durably than international imperatives. It reveals how the long-term life of dams and canals—from design, to construction, to maintenance—create and foreclose opportunities for movements for popular sovereignty and economic rights.

     

    You can learn more about my book project in this blog post for Cardiff University and in this interview at the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at NC State University.
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    "A National Vocation: Engineering Nature and State in Lebanon's Merchant Republic." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40, no. 1 (2021)

    Here's the link for this article. This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon’s post-independence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon’s national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and under-examined counter- current advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the post-independence era as an opportunity to claim their professions’ status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium’s environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism, and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.

     

  • Engaged Scholarship

    I connect my research to present-day politics of infrastructure, resources, and environmental justice, in particular, the climate crisis, in engaged public scholarship.

     

    In Fall 2022 issue of Arab Studies Journal, Gabi Kirk and I co-edited an Essays section titled "Critical Environmental Perspectives in Middle East Studies." In this collection, a multidisciplinary group of scholars of the Middle East reflect on how environmental crises have shaped their scholarship. Gabi and I's introduction, "Environmental Crisis as Event and Structure," discusses interdisciplinary methods we can use to situate an environmental crisis within its proper context. You can also read Gabi's fantastic contribution to the section translated into Japanese here.

     

    In 2021, I organized a roundtable for Jadaliyya titled "Crisis and Change: An Interdisciplinary Roundtable on Climate," on how the interpretive social sciences and humanities are and can address the climate crisis as it pertains to the Middle East. Follow the link to read the exceptional contributions by Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Elizabeth Holt, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.

     

    Jadaliyya Environment Page co-editors Gabi Kirk, Graham Pitts, and I organized a webinar in 2020 titled "The World is Burning: Fire and the Climate Crisis from the Mediterranean to the US West Coast." It brought together scholars of Lebanon, Palestine, North Africa, and global arid lands to reflect on the local and transnational ramifications of forest fires, burning practices, property regimes, and techniques of environmental control in the context of the climate crisis.

     

    I have also discussed my research in "Roundtable on the Past and Present of Electricity in Lebanon," organized by Ziad Abu-Rish, which highlights important elements of the electricity sector in Lebanon, including public discourse and policy research about it.

  • Teaching

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    Spring 2022

    Incarceration in the Modern Middle East

    This undergraduate colluquium examines the social history of incarceration in the Middle East and North Africa from the late nineteenth century to today. We will consider how carceral institutions have been central to governance and everyday life under colonial rule, independent governments, and military occupation. Adopting a broad definition of incarceration, we will explore institutions like prisons, refugee camps, orphanages, police forces, and conscription armies, and how those institutions have criminalized communities and shaped social movements.

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    Spring 2022

    History of the Middle East and North Africa II: From 1800 to the Present

    This course explores the last two centuries of social, political, and economic history in the Middle East and North Africa. We will study how Middle Eastern societies have dealt with questions of justice, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, imperialism, self-determination, and secularism. Our readings will push us to think differently about ideas we often take for granted. For example: How do nations come into being? What does it mean to be a modern society? How have Middle Eastern societies negotiated questions of religion and state?

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    Spring 2022

    Environmental History of the Middle East

    This colloquium explores how societies in the Middle East and North Africa have shaped and been shaped by the natural environment from the early modern era to the present. We will investigate the seismic changes in environment and society brought about by empire, nation-state formation, capitalism, and war. By viewing environmental history from the perspective of MENA communities, we will consider urgent questions about the agency of nature, urban environments, environmental orientalism, political ecology, and the climate crisis.

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    Fall 2021

    History of the Middle East and North Africa I: From the Rise of Islam to 1800

    This survey course explores change and continuity in the cultural, political, and economic history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from the seventh to the eighteenth century. We will identify major dynamics that unfold across this vast region and time period: shared challenges that different societies faced in different ways, institutional formations that persisted through change, ideas and questions that sparked debate among interlocutors across time and space. And throughout we will reflect on how people in more recent times, both in the Global North and in MENA countries, have learned from, used, and abused these histories.
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    Fall 2021

    Social History of Development in the MENA

    This research seminar examines the history of development in the twentieth-century Middle East and North Africa. Rather than starting with a fixed definition of “development,” we will investigate the different ideas about development and progress that have animated revolutionary leaders, colonial officials, social movements, and NGOs, and how those ideas have changed over time. We will explore the defining issues of the development era: urbanization, rivers and dams, oil, family planning, infrastructure politics, agrarian change, and the question of neoimperialism. Participants will research in primary sources and write an original historical contribution.

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    Summer 2018

    World History, 1750–2010

    This course explores the social, political, and economic forces that have shaped the modern world. We will study issues of power, mobility, rights, freedom, money, environment, law, and culture in a world context. We will consider how historians think about the “world” of world history by examining surprising interconnections between far-flung regions, networks of trade across oceans, empires and colonies, debates about freedom and humanity taking place between cultures, financial crises and wars felt around the world, and transnational political and social movements. This course was developed and taught for Cornell University's Prison Education Program.

  • Video

    Development and Environmental Justice in Lebanon

    This is a recording of a conversation about my book project between myself and Dr. Akram Khater, hosted by the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at NC State University.

    Global Souths / Native Norths

    This is a recording of a really phenomenal panel discussion I participated in organized by the Environmental Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago.