Can the Environment be a Peacemaking and State-building Tool?

Avner Vengosh and Erika Weinthal View Solving the Water Crisis in Gaza as a Potential Step Toward Collaboration p.4

Weinthal’s interest in the environment and politics of Central Asia and the Middle East began in the early 1980s, during her high school years in Rochester, N.Y.

“I was a child of the Cold War,” she says. “I wanted to know what life on the other side, the Soviet Union, was like, so I started to learn Russian.” As an undergraduate at Oberlin College in Ohio, her fascination with Soviet politics and her burgeoning interest in the environment led her to study the environmental movement within the Soviet Union, a topic that received relatively scant scholarly attention at that time in the West. During a study-abroad trip to Russia in the late 1980s, she wrote her first paper on the subject—an examination of Russian environmental activists’ limited role in the policymaking process.

It was during her undergraduate years that she also developed an interest in the Islamic cultures of the USSR’s Central Asian republics and allies. “I wanted to explore these republics when I was in Russia, but traveling to them was still much too difficult,” she remembers.

When the Soviet era ended in 1991 and the former republics began breaking away, Weinthal realized it was a golden opportunity to combine all her scholarly interests and study firsthand the role environmental policymaking would play in the newly emerging Islamic states.

She made her first visit to the region in 1992, when travel there by Western scholars was still extremely rare and restricted. Two years later, she moved to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan on a graduate research grant and began her doctoral dissertation on the role environmental cooperation played in domestic and international politics in the region.

In 1998, after receiving her PhD in political science from Columbia University, Weinthal moved to Israel and joined the faculty at Tel Aviv University. “Once I was there, I realized that much of what I had learned in Central Asia was applicable to understanding state formation processes and water issues in the Palestinian-controlled regions,” she says.

She and Vengosh, who was on the faculty of Ben Gurion University in the southern Israeli desert town of Beer Sheva, 65 miles south of Tel Aviv, had met the year before in California. Vengosh was on sabbatical at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Weinthal had a predoctoral fellowship at the Center for International Security and Arms Control—now called the Center for International Security and Cooperation— at Stanford University.

Scholarly discussions and collaborations eventually led to romance, and in 2000, the couple was married in a civil ceremony in Lincoln, Mass., the site of Walden Pond.

Their daughter, Emma, was born in 2002—the same year MIT Press published Weinthal’s award-winning book, Statemaking and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic and International Policies in Central Asia. In 2004, the couple’s son, Adam, was born.

In 2005, Weinthal and Vengosh accepted offers to join the Nicholas School faculty, and the family moved to Durham.

“We wanted to be at the same university, but it had to make sense for both of us,” Weinthal says. “The strength in environmental chemistry and applied hydrology here is a good fit for Avner. And being a political scientist on the faculty of an environmental school is my dream job.”

• • •

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5