#2- The Water Knife: Reality or Fiction

With increasing freshwater demands, rising populations and climate change looking over our shoulders, it’s no surprise that inter-state water resources have been the origin of escalating disputes across the world. However, in many cases these conflicts are not described as such. Instead, mainstream media, literature and “high politics” like to use the headline-grabbing notion of ‘water wars’ to explain the tensions that arise between competing riparian countries.

In fact today’s post was inspired by such a sensationalist title, which I came across a few months ago: the science-fiction novel “The Water Knife” published by Paolo Bacigalupi in 2015 (Figure 1). In his work he explores what most people would imagine happening during a water war: the drought-ridden American Southwest becomes the playground for ‘radical geopolitical upheaval’. Although (rest assured) Bacigalupi’s novel isn’t based on true events, recent news headlines don’t seem very dissimilar from the author’s imagination (Figure 2). Thus, the aim of this post is to deconstruct this concept of water wars and how in most cases it simply remains inspiration for story-telling. 

Figure 1. The Water Knife book cover

Figure 2. Examples of ‘water war’ headlines by different media sources: BBC article (left), India Today article (centre), CNBC article (right).

In many ways these ominous titles play into the ‘apocalyptic rhetoric of “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”’, which has become quite prominent in the current environmental discourse. However, as previously mentioned, it's not just tabloids and news magazines that exploit this concept as a means for provoking public interest; politicians are equally at fault. From the former World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin stating that ‘wars of the next century will be over water’, to the eighth UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon suggesting that water scarcity will ‘transform peaceful competition into violence’, politicians have been and continue to reinforce the notion of water wars.

Yet, conflict over shared water resources is nothing new. While future water wars aren’t completely out of the question, these predicted events are based on the Malthusian premise that water scarcity will ultimately end in conflict, when in reality water shortages are often managed through regimes and institutions of cooperation. Of the 263 cross-boundary waterways globally, the use of treaties and cooperation exceeded violent disputes by far. That being said, it’s also important to note that researchers such as Zeitoun and Warner move beyond the reductionist conflict-cooperation/ either-or perspective and view the power relations at transboundary water resources as a spectrum of interactions. Also known as hydro-hegemony, these interactions are based on the relative power of riparian actors, often resulting in an asymmetric power dynamic between the competing parties. Thus, it’s less about pitting conflict against cooperation, but more about the level and intensity at which various actors execute their power. 

Finally, this discussion about water wars acts as the foundation for the following post, in which I will discuss the interaction of riparian parties along the Zambezi river basin.