H20 Hotspots: a cause for violence?

'The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.’ Ismail Serageldin

This quote has gained incredible traction across the international community and seems to have become an ever more fatal reality with the impact of climate change.  Even just through scrolling my usual news feed, I have found this to be the prevailing viewpoint (see below):

 

To examine this narrative, I will shine a spotlight on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a mega infrastructure project along the Blue Nile that acts as a beacon for riparian tensions over access to the Nile’s freshwater reserves. 

The GERD construction plan was initiated by Ethiopia in 2011 with the primary aim to generate more power. Now being the largest dam in Africa and generating over 6000MW of electricity, it has the potential to provide electricity to more than half of Ethiopia’s population, around 110 million people, of which only a third have access to today. On the other hand, despite being a catalyst for the Ethiopian economy, it may result in short-term water shortages for downstream states. This is a particular concern for Egypt who relies on the Nile for 90% of its water supply. As Ethiopia began filling the dam earlier this year, these controversies have been swept up in the media storm of future ‘water wars’ and have led politicians to signal the imminent threat of an inter-state conflict. 

Nevertheless, critics highlight that in most countries water scarcity will, more often than not, result in collaborative initiatives to strengthen climate change resilience. Testimony of this is the Declaration of Principles in Khartoum of 2015, which sets out 10 commonly shared principles of international water law and opens up the path for future peace and trade in the region. This counter-argument has created a debated conflict vs cooperation dichotomy, in which water scarcity can lead to either one or the other. 

The reality is, however, that although these cooperation efforts may seem genuine, political tensions persist. In the case of Ethiopia and Egypt, both prime ministers have alternated 'between war-mongering and seemingly peaceful rhetoric'. These idiomatic narratives of war and peace should, therefore, be seen as ideal types (using Weber’s sense of the word) that undermine the complexities of riparian relations. 

To navigate the political situation of the Nile, I will instead use the hydro-hegemonic theory, defined as ‘hegemony at the river basin level, achieved through water resource control strategies’. Within this paradigm, hydro-politics is not viewed through the binary lens of conflict and cooperation but is embedded in a dynamic algorithm of power dynamics and state subjectivities. The diagram below illustrates this theory by showing how a state’s power determines the tactics they can deploy to exert control over water resources. 

Figure 3: Water Resource Control Strategies and Tactics 

With relation to this diagram, states can renegotiate power balances through various tools such as infrastructure projects like the GERD. Using a power-centric approach to analysing water-accessibility concerns, the following posts will go beyond the news headlines to unpick the hidden complexities of hydro-politics surrounding the GERD project.