In the last decades, dystopian fiction, that is fiction that offers pessimistic visions of the future, has become particularly popular in Arabic culture. These works, that range from novels, to movies to tv series, often portray Arabic cities destroyed by environmental catastrophes, or future Arabic societies ruled by oppressive governments. This project analyzes the development of this genre in Arabic culture during the modern and contemporary era. It focuses on a number of fictional works (novels, movies, TV-series) written by Egyptian and Tunisian authors during the XX and XXI centuries. Borrowing insights from global literary theory, it investigates the specificity of the genre in Arabic and how it participates to the global circulation of near-future fictions and catastrophic thinking. Besides, combining dystopian theories with eco-criticism, it explores the “environmental imaginaries” offered by these works, exploring the ideas that authors and readers develop about the landscape, including perceptions about that environment and assumptions on how it came to be in its current state (Davis 2011, 9). The project, thus, sheds light on how Arab authors imagine the future in their works, and it investigates whether the environmental challenge is becoming a growing concern for Arab authors, as part of a long-standing tradition of political commitment (iltizām).