Water wars, maybe, but who is the enemy?

Abstract

In the early 2000s there was frequent talk of water wars. One much quoted statement was made by the then Vice President of the World Bank Dr Ismail Serageldin who said that ‘Many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil but wars of the 21st century will be about water unless we change the way in which we manage it.’ The situations that people have in mind when they speak of water wars includes the Nile River Basin where in the past the Egyptian government threatened to blow up dams if they were built upstream, the multinational catchment of the Aral Sea, the Indus River shared by India and Pakistan and rivers shared by China with its neighbours to the north, south-west and south. The statement by Dr Serageldin was presumably made to emphasize the seriousness of water problems. However many people disagreed and pointed to the historical record which showed few examples of actual warfare despite the large number of international basins subject to conflicts. But did this indicate that water problems are not really that serious? In this commentary I argue that the real reason that water conflicts are unlikely to result in warfare is not because the threats are not real or serious but that they manifest themselves in ways that cannot be resolved through traditional military responses.