Water Conflict and Cooperation Case Studies

Predictions that future wars would be fought primarily over water gained wide circulation in the 1990s, most famously through a remark attributed to Ismail Serageldin, then a vice president of the World Bank, in 1995, that "the wars of the next century will be about water." This "water wars" thesis found a receptive audience given ongoing tensions in basins such as the Nile, the Jordan, and the Indus, yet it has been directly challenged by the empirical research of scholars including Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University, whose Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database catalogs international water-related interactions since 1948 and finds that the overwhelming majority of them, well over 200 water treaties concluded in that period against only a small handful of minor skirmishes directly over water, have been cooperative rather than violent, a pattern Wolf, Stephen Yoffe, and Mark Giordano set out in their 2003 study "International Waters: Identifying Basins at Risk" in the journal Water Policy.