Adaptive state capacity and the climate-conflict pathway: rethinking drought’s role in the Syrian civil war

The claim that the 2006–2010 drought triggered the Syrian civil war has become one of the most cited and contested examples in the climate-conflict debate. This article uses a structured critical review of the literature to reassess that claim. It asks under what political and institutional conditions climatic stress became destabilising in Syria, rather than whether drought caused the war in a simple sense. More than forty sources, identified through citation tracing and database searches, are assessed against a four-link sequence: climatic stress, livelihood loss, displacement, and grievance-driven unrest. The review finds the strongest agreement on climate attribution and livelihood loss. Disagreement is greatest over the scale of displacement and the formation of grievance, the two links most directly shaped by state institutions. The key conditioning variable is adaptive state capacity, understood as the ability of state institutions to absorb environmental shocks before they cascade into social crisis. In Syria, the Ba’athist regime’s mismanagement of water and agriculture, the withdrawal of rural subsidies at the height of the drought, and the coercive handling of protest turned a recurrent environmental shock into a political rupture. Neighbouring jurisdictions faced the same drought under different governance arrangements without experiencing a comparable breakdown. Read in this way, the Syrian case neither confirms deterministic climate-conflict narratives nor justifies dismissing climate stress altogether. It clarifies the governance mechanism through which environmental stress becomes politically consequential and suggests that research and policy should focus less on whether climate change causes conflict than on the institutional pathways through which it can do so.