Shared rivers and interstate conflict

"The previous war in the Middle East was about oil, the next war will be ab out water." Such predictions have been made regularly, and particularly wit h reference to the possibility of upstream-downstream conflicts in major ri vers which cross interstate boundaries. A good case can be made that compet ition over water resources may exacerbate conflict and contribute to inters tate violence. More than 200 river systems are shared by two or more countr ies. Many rivers run between countries with a history of conflict, where wa ter plays an important part in the economic life of the country. The dramat ic statements about 'water wars', however, have a weaker foundation. As res ource optimists have pointed out, there is an abundance of water where it i s not subject to wasteful uses, human ingenuity can overcome water shortage s, and nations can cooperate rather than fight to resolve international wat er issues. This study is built on newly generated data on boundary-crossing rivers, which have been added to the Correlates of War contiguity dataset. Our results indicate that a joint river does indeed increase the probabili ty of militarized disputes and armed conflict over and above mere contiguit y. This risk factor is comparable in size to standard control variables, bu t much smaller than the effect of contiguity itself. Water scarcity is also associated with conflict, and the upstream/ downstream relationship appear s to be the form of shared river most frequently associated with conflict. But these results are not very strong and we do not have any systematic dat a on the issues involved in the shared-river conflicts. (C) 2000 Elsevier S cience Ltd. All rights reserved.