Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our sponsors, the scholars who travelled to Columbus, Ohio, to participate in the event, the OSU administrators, and the Middle East Studies Center’s student team for their support. We especially thank our partner Esther Gottlieb, Director of the Hydropolitics Lecture Series, Senior Advisor for International Affairs, Adjunct Professor, Education.  Dr. Gottlieb was instrumental in the funding, planning and hosting of the workshop.  We thank all of the partners  and co-sponsors who helped make the events of April 21-22, 2016 possible: the Hydropolitics Seminar Series on Water Scarcity and Water security, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies; The Global Water Institute, The John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, The Ohio Water Resources Center, The School of Earth Sciences, and The Syrian Student Union.

We thank the workshop presenters and especially the keynote speaker, Aysegül Kibaroglu, for sharing their research and their insights on critical political, pragmatic and environmental issues of the Euphrates-Tigris region. We thank Maria Fanis, Associate Professor of Political Science, Ohio University, and Research Fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University, who served as the workshop moderator.   Observations were shared during the discussions and roundtable, that were valuable for all, if challenging.  The conversations demonstrated the value of bringing diverse, often contradictory, disciplinary perspectives together for a more complete understanding of circumstances surrounding water resource management. 

We thank the offices at OSU without whom we could not have succeeded.  We thank the Office of International Affairs Business Operations for their support throughout the process of budgeting,  making funds transfers and completing numerous expenditures for the events in a timely manner.  We especially thank Soyoung Carpenter for her support with these aspects of event planning.  We thank Arts and Sciences Communications for their publicity support, especially Elizabeth Alcalde who helped us reach out to the university, and the local community in Columbus.  We thank International Affairs Communications for social media support. We thank the Office of Distance Education and E-Learning for their technical support during the creation of this e-book.

We thank the students and interns who worked to make the events possible in regard to logistics, publicity, and numerous essential forms of support, including Allyson Sabo, Luke Mesiano, Kaitlyn Raibe, Gabe Giddens and others who pitched in at the events. We give a special thanks to MESC intern, Allyson Sabo, for her diligence in the logistical planning and detailed record-keeping.  We thank to Alex Rand, who assisted in writing the copy for this book.