Double-Edged Hydropolitics on the Nile - Center for Security Studies ...

International River Basins: Management and Conflict Perspectives
blurred the conceptual boundaries of ‘environmental conflict’ approaches.
Early studies focusing on conflicts related to renewable resources concluded
that scarcity and / or degradation of natural resources are the major causes
of ‘resource conflicts’ (Baechler and Spillmann 1996; Homer-Dixon 1999).
An expansion of the ‘resource conflict’ discourse to include non-renewable
and / or lootable resources such as oil and diamonds led other scholars to
postulate other causes and characteristics of resources conflict (De Soysa
2000; Gleditsch 2004). In parallel to the conceptual broadening of the notion
of ‘environmental conflict’, the early findings were subjected to greater
scientific scrutiny by several comparative large-N studies, by the analysis of
‘null’ cases where resource scarcity did not result in conflict or even resulted in
cooperation, and by expanding the range of explanatory variables (Hagmann
2005). The insights from these conceptual and methodological refinements
supported early doubts about the explanatory power of postulated causal
relationships between resources scarcity and violent conflict.
The general findings that linkages between resources utilization and intergroup
conflicts are complex and elude simple cause-effect relationships are
also applicable in the case of ‘water conflicts’ (Salman 2006). While conflicts
of interests between water users holding competing claims for finite water
resources have to be expected under conditions of population growth, the
likelihood that such conflicts will turn violent is obviously not only a function
of the status of water resources and the urgency of the stakeholders’ claims.
‘Environmental conflict’ researchers have defined additional ‘intervening’
factors that determine the chances for resolution or escalation in ‘resource
conflicts’, namely, the socio-economic and political situation, the existence
of religious, ethnical, or cultural fault lines, and the available capacity for
conflict transformation (Baechler and Spillmann 1996; Homer-Dixon 1999;
Gleditsch 2001).
Early ‘environmental conflict’ researchers were quick to raise doubts
concerning the ‘water war’ hypothesis in its generality (Homer-Dixon 1995).
Competition over the use of water resources is found to be only one of multiple
inter-linked causes of a conflict, and (violent) conflict is but one possible
consequence of diverging interests regarding water resources allocation and
management. Rather than directly causing open or violent conflict, the
persistence of non-violent transboundary disputes in water-stressed river
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