Environmental factors as a triggering effect on migrations in the Syrian civil war: A green geopolitical analysis

This thesis aims to offer a critical geopolitical reading, beyond the geopolitical assumptions that have structured political practice, for recent migration cases, especially environmentally induced ones. In this direction, the thesis firstly focuses on the relationship between classical geopolitics and the concept of migration. During the periods when classical geopolitics was the dominant geopolitical discourse, the concept of migration did not have sufficient visibility in the literature. Classical geopolitical discourses approached migration with a state-centred perspective, just like other conceptualizations; thus individual-motivated migrations were ignored in this period. The other focal point of the thesis is about the relationship between the critical geopolitical discourse, inspired by the critical turn in social sciences, and the concept of migration. In this period advanced conceptualizations of migration through the individual experiences were directly included in the geopolitical discourse especially in terms of its results, nonetheless, the causes of migration were not made visible enough. Ultimately, the main argument of the thesis is that green geopolitical theory, which is based on climate change and environmental security, is one of the most appropriate geopolitical discourses to analyse environmentally induced migrations. Therefore, as a result of the case study conducted by using the principles of green geopolitical theory, this thesis underlines that the drought in Syria before the civil war and the internal displacement due to this drought were effective factors in the process leading to conflict. This thesis aims to examine the transformation of the concept of migration within the dominant geopolitical discourses that has changed since the emergence of geopolitics as an academic discipline.