Rescuing the case study; and speculative fiction

I

Malena López Bremme and Salvador Santino Regilme present a fabulous case study of the Syrian refugee crisis in their “Climate Change, Ecocide, and the Rise of Environmental Refugees: The Case of Syria” (2025, Political Studies, accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217251382404?utm_source=researchgate).

Starting on article’s page 8, their case study is detailed, wide-ranging and, as far as I can determined, conclusive:

This case study identifies Syria’s prolonged dictatorship as a period characterized by ecological risks and mismanagement, culminating in protracted war and forced displacement. It explores the climate-conflict hypothesis related to environmental migration, interconnected through a complex chain of water scarcity, drought, governmental neglect, agricultural failure, socioeconomic decline, political oppression, rural-urban competition, internal displacement, civil unrest, and the involvement of regional and global actors. (my bold)

where the hypothesis in question was:

Rather than treating environmental stress as a direct trigger of violence, [the article] theorizes vulnerability as co-produced— arising from the interaction of climate-induced degradation, authoritarian governance, institutional neglect, and deep-rooted socioeconomic inequalities. In the Syrian case, prolonged drought was not a singular cause but one element in a relational and contingent configuration of crisis. Syria thus exemplifies how environmental stress becomes politically explosive under specific governance failures and international conditions. (terms highlighted in the article)

Co-produced, relational and contingent indeed make for complex networks of causality. I strongly encourage the reader interested in the topic of climate refugees to read pp. 8 – 16 of this article.

What I find questionable is the chief policy implication: “the necessity for global governance to address the ecological and humanitarian impacts of climate-induced conflicts.”

II

One can well agree with the authors that the case illustrates what can happen with “sovereign abandonment—a mode of power where state inaction or deliberate neglect leads to death and displacement.” But, even where true, the chief policy implication isn’t then: global governance is required. Rather, the immediate implication is: Don’t abandon sovereignty elsewhere if only because the Syrian case study establishes a counterfactual demonstrably worse.

But the necessity of protecting positive forms of national sovereignty–humane, non-ecocidal–is not, I think, what the authors are recommending.

So what? One would be hard-pressed to say that novels–which when they work are their own form of case studies–argue for global governance. Or more positively, perhaps the latter is now the function of science fiction and the increasing calls to incorporate speculative fiction into policy formulation.