A Severed Land and People: A History of a Mesopotamian Dispossession

The combination of modern warfare, colonial terraforming, cultural dispossessions, severed environmental imaginations, and ongoing regional geopolitics has resulted in an ecological degradation so severe that it made present-day Iraq, the historical Mesopotamian land to be one of the world's most vulnerable to climate change, facing extreme surges in populations, temperatures, and dependence on limited water resources. As a modern state, Iraq itself has been perpetually stuck in the politics of its identity and its losing fight for peace since its colonial inception, making conversations about the environment extremely challenging to address. Yet to truly solve the issue of the environment, it is Iraq’s Identity that we must address, through which foundation was an outcome of not only physical dispossessions but ones that spans the cultural and the imaginary, achieved over centuries-long violence and manifested in the ultimate physical and imagery severance of peoples from their land, left with no tools to save it. Although the question of the environment is existential for Mesopotamia’s future, it is crucial to understanding its past, as although the historical decline of the birthplace of civilisation was often attributed to social, political, and economic factors, it is now increasingly understood to be the result of historical environmental crises. While addressing the severe modern genocides and ecocides is crucially important, it is only by tracing the socio-ecological history and transformation of the region do we begin to unpack the complexities of the its political ecology and highlight alternative possibilities to the crises of its identity and future survival.