By Peter Schwartzstein

That future wars will be fought over water, rather than oil, has become something of a truism, particularly with regard to the Middle East. It’s also one that most water experts have refuted time and time and time again. But while this preference for cooperation over conflict may (and emphasis on may) remain true of interstate disputes, this blanket aversion to the ‘water wars’ narrative fails to account for the rash of other water-related hostilities that are erupting across many of the world’s drylands. As neither full-on warfare nor issues that necessarily resonate beyond specific, sometimes isolated areas, these ‘grey zone’ clashes don’t seem to be fully registering in the broader discussion of water conflicts. In failing to adequately account for the volume of localized violence, the world is probably chronically underestimating the extent to which water insecurity is already contributing to conflict.

Since the late 1990s, both intrastate and interstate clashes in which water has featured as a victim, weapon, or cause of conflict have soared, according to the World Water Conflict Chronology. But the number of intrastate ‘events’ has generally been about four or five times greater than the number of country-to-country ones, with an average of 30 to 40 intrastate incidents a year over the past decade. In 2018, for example, one man was killed and many more injured when Iranian police cracked down on illicit water pumps.

None of this necessarily undermines the logic of water practitioners downplaying the risk of ‘water wars’– even if some of them have been overly dismissive of water’s destabilizing potential. It’s just that most sub-national clashes sway to a slightly different beat than their transboundary counterparts. With higher stakes among agriculture-dependent districts, for example, there can be more incentive to violence among individual communities than there is for nation states, few of whom could hope to pilfer more water from their neighbors, no matter how desperate they might be. Their options for winning over more water are severely limited. That’s not so at a more local level, where resources can be more easily secured and where the balance of power can be much more fluid than it is among nation states.
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