Mishkat Al Moumin

Associate Professor
Environmental Law Institute
United States

Jun 1, 2021

Mishkat Al Moumin is an Associate Professor at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, where she teaches language and culture with the aim of fostering cultural awareness in U.S. defense personnel. Before joining the center in 2011, she served as the Minister of Environment of Iraq from 2004-2005 and led the Women and the Environment Organization (WATEO), an NGO training rural women in Iraq in environmental stewardship. Like her work experience, Mishkat’s academic background is diverse, with her bachelors through PhD in international law from Baghdad University School of Law, an MPA from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a recently started PhD program on educational leadership with the American College of Education. Uniting her professional and academic commitments is the goal of building peace in countries of conflict through local environmental governance.

Mishkat became interested in environmental issues by studying international environmental treaties in her law courses. “I like to advocate for marginalized causes, like human rights and a healthy environment in Iraq,” she says. As Iraq’s first Minister of Environment, she led the collection of baseline environmental data and the development of the country’s first environmental needs assessments to inform decision-making and attract support for environmental priorities. Although the Ministry was not a budget priority for Iraq’s leaders at the time, Mishkat used the data gathered to fundraise from the international community, increasing the ministry’s budget from 7 million to nearly 80 million USD. She stresses that environmental projects are particularly important for the international community to fund in post-conflict settings because they can bring people together, they are urgently needed to protect lives and livelihoods and reduce drivers of conflict, and they are often low priorities for post-conflict leaders focused on military capacity and international donors focused on democracy. “You can’t build a country even with the best constitution and elections unless you have running water,” she says.

Mishkat survived several assassination attempts while in office, prompting her to move to the US and found WATEO. Supported by UNEP and other international donors, the organization worked to improve environmental management as well as women’s rights by training rural women in Iraq in environmental management. Due to traditional gender roles, explains Mishkat, women in Iraq are the primary suppliers and users of basic environmental resources like water and fuel, so they are the most important people to reach with educational campaigns. And because of their child-rearing responsibilities, Iraqi women often bring their children to trainings or pass on their knowledge to children, making the training of women particularly impactful. These trainings can in turn empower women by improving their livelihoods and establishing their expertise in their communities, potentially allowing for more authority in decision making. The organization ultimately trained about 1,500 women and 2,600 children living in 43 Iraqi villages.

Education is central to Mishkat’s environmental peacebuilding. Her leadership in Iraq and research as a Visiting Scholar at the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) have sought to transform the views of two groups: people in post-conflict settings and the international community seeking to establish security in those settings. She believes that leaders and people in post-conflict settings must learn to prioritize the environment by understanding it as the basis for life and livelihoods, instead of imagining environmental issues as “protecting some endangered species in the middle of nowhere.” She also seeks to educate the international community to prioritize the environment in security efforts and to make environmental programming “organic” to local cultures. For example, her research and practice illumine how the Quran’s teachings on environment can foster environmental stewardship in the Middle East. Mishkat’s work raises the question of what insights and outcomes might be made possible by greater cultural awareness in environmental peacebuilding.