Workshop on International Law, Natural Resources and Sustainable
Development
Environment and International Law in the Arab Uprisings
Usha Natarajan
Department of Law, American University in Cairo
This research examines the role of environmental issues in the demands for political change
currently sweeping across the Arab world, calling for a historic shift from autocracy to selfdetermination. I consider systemic problems with the nature of the state in the Arab region.
I argue that through, among other things, various international law doctrines, sovereign
control of natural resources has stood at the foundation of state legitimacy and power in
the region. Natural resources such as oil and water played a pivotal role in the rise of
autocratic systems. I also examine the environmental consequences of the unequal
encounter between the West and Arab societies in relation to current demands for political
change. Modern understandings of societal progress and development have been complicit
in the disempowerment of Arab societies from the benefits of their natural wealth.
Dominant development paradigms mask the dark underbelly of developmental progress,
including inequality and environmental degradation, and the resultant discontent is now
surfacing through mass popular uprisings. These movements have the potential to be
revolutionary not only in their overthrow of long-standing autocrats, but in terms of
imagining new forms of state-society relations and new understandings of development
that are environmentally and politically sustainable. Vital natural resources have made the
Arab world an influential and strategic pivot in global affairs and the region’s political and
legal order has implications for sustainable development locally and globally.