Water conflict
In February 2013, Egypt’s delegate to the UN Security Council stated that “increasing drought and desertification are irrevocably exacerbating the causes of conflict in the Sahel. The Middle East, the other region to which Egypt belongs, is the world’s water-poorest region. Research has predicted that future wars in these two regions would be water wars”. Yet “water wars” is a contested concept: with respect to drinking water, cooperation is the rule, while military conflict remains the exception. The International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine, for example, was established in 1950, paving the way for a series of intergovernmental cooperation agreements from 1963 onward.
In the 20th century, only seven wars can be directly correlated to water-related issues, while 145 treaties were concluded in this area over the same period. Water resources are the subject of political conflicts but rarely do they lead to military action. Nonetheless, it is important to understand the persistent political tensions around water resources, primarily driven by material conditions affecting them: quantity (scarcity or abundance), quality (pollution, salinity, seasonal regularity, etc.), distribution (especially between riparian countries) and main uses (domestic and industrial). The neo-Malthusian approach analyzes water scarcity as an indirect factor driving conflicts. Research in political ecology has focused on power and dependency relations as the key to understanding water-related tensions, as in the case of the Nile.
Egypt’s hydro-hegemony – despite its downstream position – derives from its regional power and its historic advantages, acquired in 1929 (agreement with the British Empire) and 1959 (agreement with Sudan). It also reflects the country’s high level of dependency on the river waters (for agriculture and energy), incentivizing its claims to absolute rights over this resource. These rights are, however, disputed by upstream nations, in particular via the Nile Basin Initiative established in 1999 and the construction of dams, as in Ethiopia.
Nile River Basin
Comment: The Nile River Basin is a classic illustration of the political tensions surrounding drinking water resources, and it has been the subject of much research into the historical development of power games and mutual interdependency between the states which border it. The political changes in this group of states (particularly Egypt and Sudan) tend to permanently reconfigure the stakes governing water distribution. This map uses a combination of several sources and shows the number of countries affected between the upper and lower basin (and therefore the size of the populations concerned), their level of dependence on the Nile (in the case of Egypt it represents 97% of the country’s water consumption, 77% for Sudan, 55% for Eritrea, and so on) and the relative importance of dams: more than 10, of very different capacities, are currently in existence, and there are many ongoing projects.
- neo-Malthusian > Neo-Malthusianism
- The neo-Malthusian approach asserts that planet earth is a finite system whose natural resources are limited and endangered by demographic and economic growth (which it sees as correlated). Inspired by Thomas Malthus, who examined the relationship between agricultural production and demographic growth in the 18th century, which he saw as presaging self-regulatory mechanisms (wars, famines, epidemics) to restore equilibrium. Since they reappeared during the 1960s, these theories have been widely criticized for their empirical foundations (unrealistic scenarios), theoretical basis (economic growth does not drive demographic growth – quite the contrary) and ethical and political implications (coercive birth control policies, etc.).
- conflicts > War
- Violent confrontation between armed groups over values, status, power or scarce resources, in which the aim of each party is to neutralize, weaken or eliminate their adversaries. This organized, collective, armed violence can be undertaken by states (via their national armies) or by non-state groups; it can bring several states into opposition (interstate war) or occur within a single state (civil war). The former, progressively codified within a legal framework, have become rare, while the latter, today primarily caused by state institutional failure, are tending to become more international in scope, to last over time (sometimes decades) and to be extremely devastating, especially for civilian populations.
- political ecology > Political ecology
- Interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences at the intersection of human geography, sociology and political science. There is no standard definition, but it is characterized by a critical approach and addresses themes relating to the connection between environment and society. Research in political ecology seeks in particular to demonstrate the effects of dependency relations (property rights, center-periphery relations, interrelations of local, national and international scales, etc.), the social construction of vulnerabilities and power relationships in the management, appropriation and exploitation of the environment, criticizing the unequal distribution of environmental costs.
- hydro-hegemony > Hydro-hegemony
- Hydro-hegemony describes the dominant position of an actor, generally a state, over shared water resources. Hegemons maintain asymmetrical relations between riparian states through their relative advantages in three areas: physical access to resources (upstream and downstream), power (hard and soft power), and material capacity for capturing and conserving the resources. A combination of these three attributes confers hydro-hegemony. While Thailand is an example of an upstream hydro-hegemon (sharing the river basin with Vietnam), India (sharing with Nepal) and South Africa (sharing with Lesotho) illustrate downstream hydro-hegemony.