Miriam Lowi

Topics of Interest:
Instability, Violence, Civil War, Resource Politics, Politics Post-Arab Spring (e.g., authoritarianism/despotism, collapse/fracturing of the state, etc.), Saudi Arabia & intra-GCC politics, Palestine & Israel

Countries/Regions of Interest:
​GCC, Syria, Algeria, Palestine

List of Publications

Books:
Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics: Algeria Compared  (U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009; second edition, 2011)

Water and Power: the Politics of a Scarce Resource in the Jordan River Basin (U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993; second edition, 1995) 

Environment and Security: Discourses and Practices (U.K.: MacMillan Press, 2000) [edited with Brian Shaw]

Articles and Book Chapters:   
“Oil and Instability in Middle Eastern States: the Political Economy of Distribution,” Awrāq special issue, Casa Arabe, Madrid, fall 2017

“Justice, Charity, and the Common Good: In Search of Islam in Gulf Oil Monarchies,”  Middle East Journal  2017

“Modernity on Steroids: the Promise and Perils of Climate Protection in the Arabian Peninsula” in, Paul Wapner and Hilal Elver, eds. Re-imagining Climate Change, Routledge, 2016
    
“Algeria: Between Co-optation and Repression” in, Peter Lewis and John Harbeson eds., Coping with Crisis in African States, Lynne Rienner Press, 2016, pp. 37-56

“War-Torn or Systemically Distorted?: Rebuilding the Algerian Economy,” in, Leonard Binder, ed.,  Rebuilding Devastated Economies in the Middle East, Palgrave, 2007

“Algeria, 1992-2002: Anatomy of Civil War,” in Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (eds.), Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005, pp.221-46

“Oil Rents and Political Breakdown in Patrimonial States: Algeria in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of North African Studies vol.9, no.3 (autumn 2004), pp.83-102 

“Algérie 1992-2002: une nouvelle économie politique de la violence,” Maghreb-Machrek (France) no.175, (spring 2003), pp.53-72 

"Water and Conflict in the Middle East and South Asia” in, Miriam Lowi and Brian Shaw (eds.), Environment and Security: Discourses and Practices, (U.K.: MacMillan, 2000), pp.149-71

“Introduction and Overview” in, Miriam Lowi and Brian Shaw (eds.), Environment and Security: Discourses and Practices, (U.K.: MacMillan, 2000), pp.1-9 

"Water and Conflict in the Middle East and South Asia: Are Environmental Issues and Security Issues Linked?” Journal of Environment and Development  (vol.8, no.4, Dec. 1999),  pp. 376-96 
    
"Transboundary Resource Disputes and their Resolution" in, Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew (eds.), Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics, (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 223-45

"Rivers of Conflict, Rivers of Peace", Journal of International Affairs , vol. 49, no.1, (summer 1995), pp.123-44

"Bridging the Divide: Transboundary Resource Disputes and the Case of West Bank Water", International Security vol.18, no.1, (summer 1993), pp.113-38; reprinted in, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller, (eds.), Global Dangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp.118-43
    
"Arabs and Israelis: the Jordan River" in, Guy-Olivier Faure & Jeffrey Z. Rubin (eds.), Culture and Negotiation: The Resolution of Water Disputes, (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993) [co-authored with Jay Rothman], pp. 156-75 
                                                
"Conflict and Cooperation in Resource Development" in, Elise Boulding (ed.): Building Peace in the Middle East: Challenges for States and for Civil Society (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), pp.265-76
    
"Culture, Conflict and Cooperation: the Jordan River Basin" in, Gershon Baskin (ed.): Water: Conflict or Cooperation, Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, vol.1, no.2 (May 1992) [co-authored with Jay Rothman]

Monographs, Working Papers, Etc.:
“Notes on Low Oil Prices and their Implications” Middle East Report Online, February 24, 2016

“Algeria, 1979-82:  Leadership Decisions and Political Instability,” The 1979 ‘Oil Shock:’ Legacy, Lessons, and Lasting Reverberations, MEI Viewpoints Special Edition (August 2009), pp. 53-56. http://www.mei.edu/Portals/0/Publications/1979%20Oil%20Shock.pdf

“Algeria and the Resource Curse” in, Lydia Olander, Erika Weinthal, Gordon Binder, eds., For Security’s Sake: Can the United States help petroleum rich nations avoid the resource curse? consensus recommendations and report from a roundtable hosted by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University, held in Washington, D.C., 22 September 2006.  March 2007, pp.12-14
 
"Political and Institutional Responses to Transboundary Water Disputes in the Middle East" in, Environmental Change and Security Project Report no.1, (spring 1996), Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., pp.5-8

"West Bank Water Resources and the Resolution of Conflict in the Middle East", Environmental Change and Acute Conflict, Occasional Papers no.1, September 1992 [American Academy of Arts and Sciences/University of Toronto Peace and Conflict Studies Program]
    
"The Politics of Water: the Jordan River and the Riparian States, 1919-1967", monograph, McGill Studies in International Development no. 35, (Centre for Developing- Area Studies, McGill University, Montreal), September 1984

Book Reviews:
Jacob Mundy, Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence: Conflict Science, Conflict Management, Antipolitics (Stanford University Press, 2015) in Review of Middle East Studies (RoMES) vol. 50, no.2, Aug. 2016, pp. 213-16.

Pauline Jones Luong and Erika Weinthal, Oil is Not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in Soviet Successor States (Cambridge 2010), in, Perspectives on Politics (Critical Dialogues), vol. 11, no. 2, (June 2013), pp.593-5 

Marc Schade-Poulsen, Men and Popular Music in Algeria, in, Journal of North African Studies, vol.5, no.3 (autumn 2000), pp.103-5

Sharif Elmusa, Water Conflict: Economics, Politics, Law and the Palestinian-Israeli Water Resources, in, Middle Eastern Studies Association Bulletin vol.33, no.2, (winter 1999), pp.278-9 

Daniel Hillel, Rivers of Eden: the Quest for Water and the Quest for Peace in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1994) in, International Journal of Middle East Studies vol. 28, no.1 (February 1996) and in, Agricultural History vol. 70, no. 1 (winter 1996)  

Gregory Gauss III, Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States in, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol.28, no.4, (November 1996), pp.610-12

OpEd Pieces:
“Gulf Arabs should Welcome the Nuclear Agreement with Iran” Al-Araby al-Jadeed 23 July 2015, http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2015/7/23/gulf-arabs-should-welcome-the-nuclear-agreement-with-iran

“The Lessons Algeria can Teach Today’s Middle East”, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 22 April 2015
http://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2015/4/22/the-lessons-algeria-can-teach-todays-middle-east 
Arabic translation, Al-Araby al-Jadeed 24 April 2015
http://www.alaraby.co.uk/opinion/2015/4/23/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%A6%D8%B1--%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AC%D8%B1%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%88%D8%A7% D9%84%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%86%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9% 85%D9%85% D9% 83%D9%86-%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%A7 
​
Debunking some Myths about Israel’s Water Politics,” Al-Jazeera, 10 March 2014 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/03/debunking-some-myths-about-isra-201431041151246684.html

My career as a scholar of the Middle East began in Cairo where I taught English as a Second Language for two years after graduating from McGill University. It was in Egypt where I first studied Arabic and fell in love with the region. I entered the Ph.D. program in Politics (and Near Eastern Studies) at Princeton University shortly after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Intrigued by analyses suggesting that Israel was anxious to control the Litani River, I began to study the water dimension of the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict.’ My thesis, which became my first book (Water and Power, Cambridge 1993), explored the potential for cooperation over shared water resources among adversarial riparian states; it included a case study of the Jordan waters conflict, with comparative evidence from the Euphrates, Indus, and Nile river basins. 

After several years of writing about water and conflict between states, I turned my attention to oil and instability within states, with a focus on Algeria. Partly in response to the rentier state literature, I argued – in my second book, Oil Wealth and the Poverty of Politics  (Cambridge 2009) -- that the principal effect of oil is to consolidate what is already in place, and that leadership decisions remain the key variable in explaining outcomes in oil-rich states at critical junctures. Several articles spun off of my fieldwork in Algeria, including one -- “Algeria, 1992-2002: Anatomy of Civil War” -- that was part of a collaborative project, initiated by Paul Collier et.al., on the economics of civil war.   

My third, and current project remains within the natural resource dimension of political life, but this time, the field site is the oil-rich Gulf monarchies and the research question concerns how oil wealth has impacted the way Gulf Arabs live as Muslims today. I consider such practices as charitable giving, Islamic banking, the employment of foreign labor. The project is encapsulated in my article, “Justice, Charity and the ‘Common Good:’ In Search of Islam in the Gulf Oil Monarchies” (Middle East Journal, 2017).

I am professor of comparative and Middle East Politics at The College of New Jersey. In addition, I chair the MENA wing of the Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA), and I’m on the Editorial Committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).