Introductory blog post!

 

Welcome to my blog!

As a point of initial reflection, I wish to start with the statement 'Africa, of course, is now everyone's pet cause;' a slightly depressing, but largely realistic, summary of Africa's representation in western media and political discourse.

Commonly perceived through the binary lens of an exotic tourist destination or an empty landmass that harbours famine and conflict, Africa is often used as a uniform platform on which western activists and environmentalists can exhibit their altruistic intentions and superior expertise.

Although this blog may be conducive to strategising conflict resolution, I hope to distance this blog from being another poorly disguised form of western interventionism and 'performative allyship'. Instead, I aim to navigate past the myriad of African clichés and offer an initial honest explanation for my engagement with the continent. 

This blog stems from my deep interest in political affairs and international relations, which cannot be studied without a basic recognition of water's geopolitical potential. Far from being just a basic commodity, water has a central role in human societies and acts both as a power of production and co-operation as well as a force of destruction.

In Africa, the political impact of water is even more acute; it is home to '9% of the world's freshwater reserves, a mounting population, and a landscape most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. Although careful not to overstate the importance of Africa's resource availability when discussing water scarcity, it can still be used as a 'starting point' to examine the possible patterns of demand and supply concerning the political realities at play.

To illustrate, '85% of Africa's freshwater stems from basins covering multiple countries', with the Nile connecting 11 of them. This stresses the demand for multiplex dialogues and distributive networks whilst alerting us to the potential for both inter and intra-state conflicts. Documented examples of current tensions include the conflictual row over the river Nile dam which has drawn in multiple state actors. National and local disputes, such as the use of water as a weapon of war by Somali militia groups, remain equally salient and have only been intensified by recent water shortages.

At the crossroads of a relinquishing pandemic and an impending climate crisis, hydro-politics, therefore, has become an ever more pertinent point of discussion, which I cannot wait to take part in.

Without being able to examine the multi-faceted dimensions of water and simultaneously capture the energetic diversity of 54 countries, I have decided to focus on hydro-politics in the Horn of Africa. This encapsulates the easternmost peninsula of the continent, a region vulnerable to meteorological changes and heavily dependent on  transboundary water reserves and agriculture.

Figure 1

The following posts will use this geographical space as a map for exploring the inter and intra-state dynamics of water scarcity and allocation.

See you there!