Water flows. And so does time. But while time always flows at the same speed (at least from the point of view of a social scientist), water flows are not immutable. Natural and artificial phenomena such as precipitation, droughts, dams, and canals can alter water flows with sometimes dire consequences for those at the receiving end. And yet, with time comes change. People die and are born, wars are won and lost, empires collapse, countries separate and merge, and even climate changes. This book will develop along two main threads: that of time, in the guise of evolving political scenarios and processes in post-Soviet Central Asia, and that of water, as it flows in the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.
The fact that water is one of the key themes of this book can be easily inferred from its title; the importance of time to this project merits more explanation. Time, and together with it, change, matter because if it was not for the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we would not be discussing water politics in Central Asia today. The demise of the Soviet Union was indeed one of the crucial events of the twentieth century. Never before in history had an event of this social and political magnitude emerged with almost no violence (Kramer, 2003). Besides its global impact, which marked the end of the Cold War and of the bipolar international system of superpowers1 (Huntington, 1999), the vanishing of the last multinational empire gave birth to fifteen countries, as the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union all of a sudden acquired the status of sovereign states.2 Among them, the five Central Asian republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, which never existed before as distinct states, were the least prepared to manage an unexpected and not necessarily sought independence (Mandelbaum, 1994).
These five countries were literally thrust out of the Soviet Union when Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine decided to reform themselves as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in December 1991 (Olcott, 1996). One of the implications of this premature birth was that the old economic and political ties established by the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and with them the centralised Soviet resource distribution system that managed the exchange and allocation of water, energy, and food supplies among the republics. A whole new set of international relations emerged, and the newly formed Central Asian governments had to redefine the policies related to the exchange and sharing of their natural resources.
This book explores the interconnections and interdependence that emerged from this complex scenario, and the related power dynamics in interstate relations in Central Asia,3 a region that offers a unique viewpoint for the analysis of transboundary water politics (henceforth hydropolitics). While, on the one hand, there is a certain degree of continuity between the old communist rule and the nature of the newly formed Central Asian governments, on the other hand, important changes have occurred and the five Central Asian republics have all followed their own distinct trajectory.4 Furthermore, their youth as republics allows us to review the entire process through which the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle for the control of the regionâs water resources has manifested during the last twenty-five years. This is important because hydropolitics, it will be argued, needs to be observed as a process, rather than as a series of isolated events, if we are to fully understand it. As Linton (2010: 4) tellingly explained in his historicised account of water, water is fundamentally a process, and therefore, â[w]ater is what we make of it, but it seldom stays that way for long.â And certainly, if we apply Lintonâs logic to transboundary water relations, it is evident that the agency of governments can make many things out of water. The signing of a treaty on water cooperation, the construction of a water reservoir, the dissemination of a specific discourse on water management, or the militarisation of the border between two countries are all examples of the ways in which a government can use power to obtain a desired end (such as, for instance, a more advantageous water allocation). Viewing these series of events as part of a broader process can reveal the constant struggle for hegemony that drives interstate relations in several contested river basins around the world, and consequently help us dig beneath the surface of hydropolitics.
The politics of international waters
But why should we focus on the politics of international waters? Why it is important to study how water shapes relations among states and broader regional dynamics? First of all, and rather obviously, water is a quintessential component for life and for the development of societies, and therefore inevitably influences political activities and negotiations. Water is also an irreplaceable and transient resource, which crosses political boundaries in the form of rivers, lakes, and groundwater aquifers. Freshwater resources account for only 2.5%5 of total world water, and this relative scarcity further increases their political and economic relevance. Overall, 276 river basins around the world cross the boundaries of two or more countries, and their basin areas comprise about 47% of the land surface of the earth, containing 40% of the worldâs population (Wolf, 2007). For two-thirds of these rivers â including the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya â there is no agreement between the countries that share them, which is evidence of the problematic nature of cooperation over water (Holmgren et al., 2013). According to Peter Mollinga (2001: 733), â[a]t a general level, the statement that âwater is politicsâ hardly needs any defence,â and indeed, if we accept politics as the activity of bringing together and defending our friends, and disaggregating and fighting our enemies (Bobbio et al., 2004), we can perhaps also understand why hydropolitics has been primarily examined as âthe systematic study of conflict and cooperation between States over water resources that transcend international bordersâ (Elhance, 1999: 3).
Elhanceâs view effectively sums up the dichotomous approach towards the discipline maintained in the 1990s and early 2000s. Neo-Malthusian6 (among others, Falkenmark, 1992; Gleick, 1993; Homer-Dixon, 1994, 1999; Gleditsch, 1998; Toset et al., 2000; Klare, 2001; Russell and Morris, 2006) and Cornucopian7 (e.g. Deudney and Matthew, 1999; Elhance, 1999; Wolf and Hamner, 2000; Allan, 2001; Jägerskog, 2003; Phillips, 2006; Wolf et al., 2006; Dannreuther, 2007; Hamner, 2008; Dinar et al., 2011) scholars, respectively, saw water as a reason for either conflict or cooperation, thus mirroring the two main discourses forming the rationalist paradigm of International Relations (IR), realism, and liberalism. And at the outset, because water is a relatively scarce and irreplaceable resource, it is unsurprising that water management was linked to security concerns. The end of the Cold War set a milestone causing the falling-off of the traditional security threats and the development of a new global political agenda. Problems that transcend national borders, such as global warming, water scarcity, and pollution, emphasised the worldâs growing environmental interdependence, redefining the concept of national sovereignty and stressing the need for regional rather than national solutions.8 Towards the end of the 1980s, with a groundbreaking article published in Foreign Affairs, Jessica Tuchman Mathews (1989) called for a redefinition of the concept of national security to include resource, environmental, and demographic issues.9 A few years later, in 1994, Robert Kaplanâs pessimist and highly debated article âThe Coming Anarchyâ (1994) defined the environment as the key national security issue of the early twenty-first century, the one that would set the tone for international relations in the years to come.
Water was quickly connected to security issues and to the imminent occurrence of wars over its control (Naff and Matson, 1984; Starr and Stoll, 1988). In a widely cited article, Joyce R. Starr (1991: 17) warned that
The water wars narrative gained momentum, and as Warner et al. observed (forthcoming), â[e]ver since Naff and Matson and Starr and Stoll proclaimed international water wars, violent open conflict over water has preoccupied politicians, journalists and academics.â Indeed, besides realist scholars and sensationalist media articles, leading politicians and former UN Secretary-Generals also warned about an imminent water war, thus providing a more official angle to such claims. Boutros Boutros-Ghali (BBC News, 2003) predicted that âthe next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics,â and Kofi Annan added that âfierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the futureâ (United Nations University, 2011). Ban Ki Moon underlined the potential of water to fuel wars and conflicts, explaining that âwater scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflictâ (United Nations University, 2011).10
Despite such predictions, water wars have (almost) never occurred in the past, and are unlikely to happen in the future. In 2000, a groundbreaking study carried out at Oregon State University by a team of scholars led by Aaron Wolf (Wolf et al. 2003 and later) demonstrated that during the last 4,500 years there have been 3,600 water-related treaties and only one known water war between nations. That single water war occurred in 2500 B.C. between the Sumerian states of Lagash and Umma in the Tigris-Euphrates basin (Wolf, 2007: 20). The reason for this predominance of cooperation, according to Wolf, is that water is too important to fight over. At the sub-national level, water can exacerbate existing tensions and even cause conflicts, but at the interstate level, things go differently (Wolf et al., 2006).
And yet, water wars are apparently still looming on the horizon, at least according to alarmist newspaper articles (Al Jazeera, 2016; BBC News, 2016; Foreign Affairs, 2016) and government reports (US Senate, 2011) that recurrently single out Central Asia as a hot spot for a future water war. While the actual occurrence of a water war is a remote prospect, it is undeniable that fundamental water problems persist, both in Central Asia and elsewhere. As emphasised by the 2015 WHO report on âProgress on sanitation and drinking waterâ (WHO, 2015), at the global level 2.5 billion people still lack improved sanitation, and 1.1 billion people (15% of the world population) still practice open defecation. Furthermore, it is estimated that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in conditions of absolute water scarcity (meaning that their annual water supplies will be below 500 cubic metres per person per year) and almost half the worldâs population will be living in areas of high water stress (i.e. with an annual water supply lower than 1,700 cubic metres per person) by 2030 (International Decade for Action âWater for Lifeâ 2005â2015, no date). According to the 2015 UN World Water Development Report (UN Water, 2015: 7), âthe global water crisis is one of governance, much more than of resource availability,â and less than 20% of the agreements over transboundary waters are multilateral. Countries tend to manage shared water resources bilaterally, a sign of the missing political will to engage in long-term agreements at the river basin level.
And indeed, if one for instance looks at the Water Conflict Chronology, a tool created by the Pacific Institute think tank to examine the connections between water resources, international security, and conflict (accessible at http://worldwater.org/water-conflict/), it is clear that shared freshwater resources have caused and are still causing numerous interstate conflicts around the world. While in the 1990s Miriam Lowiâs (1993) distinction between the âlow politicsâ of water and the âhigh politicsâ of war and diplomacy seemed generally acceptable, it seems now more appropriate to refer to a global âhigh politics of waterâ (Nicol et al., 2012). As Zeitoun et al. (2017) illustrated, deeply entrenched water conflicts are at present observable in several international river basins. Conflict hotspots include the Tigris-Euphrates River basin; shared by Turkey, Iraq, and Syria; the Jordan River basin, shared by Israel, Palestine, and Jordan; and the Nile River basin, shared, among others, by Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The roots of these conflicts are to be found, for example, in an unequal geographical water distribution, seemingly incompatible water demands (such as those of irrigation and hydropower), poor governance, weak institutional frameworks, and water mismanagement. But more than anything else, I will argue, conflict and cooperation over water resources depend on a highly nuanced variety of power dynamics and power asymmetries. While water is not political by default, it is the medium through which politics unfold (Mirumachi, 2015). The transient nature of water crea...
