2015 Conference

Poster Presentation

Water security has become one of the most pressing and complex issues in the field of international security and resource scarcity issues today. Unlike many of the other scarce resources that dominate the literature of international relations, water is one of the few for which there is no substitute and whose location in countries' borders and geopolitical boundaries is constantly fluctuating. The absence of freshwater resources has increasingly become an indicator of poverty with the impact of water scarcity becoming a destabilizing force between countries and territories. I analyze the variation in cooperation between countries located in the Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan River Drainage Basins to enhance the understanding of the driving forces that impact the equitable management, use, and allocation of transboundary freshwater resources within the Middle East. I test the role of trust, socio-economic growth, each country’s overall water security, the main issue areas of each event, and the total number of stakeholders involved in each event to examine their relationship to inter-state cooperation within hydropolitics.  Preliminary data analysis indicates that the majority of inter-state relations over freshwater resources from 1948-2008 are generally neutral or cooperative in regards to their scale of intensity. There are no instances where a dispute over freshwater has led to a formal declaration of war or where countries have voluntarily unified into one nation. Of the identified main issue areas in each event, roughly 79% of all events were related to issues of water quantity and 8% to issues of infrastructure or development projects. I further analyze shifts in the frequency and intensity of cooperation within each of the two drainage basins to assess the likelihood of future cooperation and determine which factors have the greatest impact on inter-state and regional cooperation.