Water Geopolitics

Oil has OPEC, a cartel of producers that can move markets and reshape foreign policy with a single production decision. Oil has the United States Fifth Fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf and a century of alliance structures built around securing supply. Oil has triggered wars, embargoes, and diplomatic revolutions. Yet oil, for all its strategic weight, can be substituted: nuclear power, solar panels, electric vehicles, and natural gas all offer alternatives. Water has no substitute. No technology replaces it. No alternative molecule sustains agriculture, supports human biology, or maintains the ecological systems on which civilization depends. And unlike oil, which sits in reservoirs waiting to be extracted, water flows — across borders, downstream, toward the sea — creating an inherent asymmetry between those who control its source and those who depend on its arrival.

Despite its irreplaceable importance, water lacks anything resembling the governance infrastructure that surrounds hydrocarbons. There is no water equivalent of OPEC or the International Energy Agency. The UN Watercourses Convention, adopted in 1997, did not receive enough ratifications to enter into force until 2014, and most of the world’s major riparian powers have not signed it. When Turkey builds a dam on the Euphrates, Iraq watches its marshlands wither. When Ethiopia constructs a massive hydroelectric facility on the Blue Nile, Egypt perceives an existential threat to the water source that sustains ninety-five percent of its population. When China erects a cascade of dams on the upper Mekong, farmers and fishermen across Southeast Asia find their river transformed into an instrument of another nation’s power. Water is the ultimate geographic weapon — and the twenty-first century is making it more dangerous.

Definition and Core Concept¶

Water geopolitics — sometimes called hydropolitics — refers to the intersection of freshwater resources with international power dynamics. It encompasses the competition between states over transboundary rivers and shared aquifers, the use of water infrastructure as instruments of coercion and leverage, the governance frameworks (or lack thereof) that regulate water-sharing, and the ways in which water scarcity drives political instability, migration, and conflict.

What distinguishes water from other contested resources is a combination of physical properties that make it uniquely difficult to manage through conventional statecraft. First, water cannot be substituted. Nations can transition away from oil toward renewable energy; they cannot transition away from water. Agriculture, which consumes roughly seventy percent of global freshwater withdrawals, has no waterless alternative at scale. Second, water flows across borders in ways that create structural power asymmetries. A state that controls the headwaters of a river possesses inherent leverage over every downstream state — leverage that requires no military action to exercise. Simply building a dam or diverting a channel can deprive millions of people of water they depend on for survival. Third, water is simultaneously a renewable and a finite resource: the hydrological cycle replenishes surface water, but at rates that human consumption increasingly exceeds, while groundwater aquifers that took millennia to fill are being drained in decades.

These characteristics give rise to what scholars call “hydro-hegemony” — the ability of geographically or economically powerful states to control transboundary water resources to their advantage. Hydro-hegemony does not require military force. It operates through infrastructure (dams and diversions that physically alter water flow), through institutional frameworks (treaties drafted on terms favorable to the stronger party), and through discursive power (the ability to frame water issues in ways that legitimize one’s own claims). The concept connects water geopolitics to broader patterns of climate change, resource competition, and the erosion of cooperative governance in an increasingly fragmented international system.

The Geography of Water Scarcity¶

The fundamental arithmetic of global water is stark. Roughly 97.5 percent of the Earth’s water is saltwater in the oceans. Of the remaining 2.5 percent that is fresh, approximately 69 percent is locked in glaciers and ice caps, and much of the rest lies in deep underground aquifers that are difficult or expensive to access. The water available for human use — in rivers, lakes, shallow aquifers, and rainfall — constitutes less than one percent of the planetary total. This slim margin must sustain eight billion people, their agriculture, their industry, and the ecosystems on which all of these depend.

The distribution of even this limited supply is radically unequal. A band of severe water stress stretches across North Africa, through the Middle East, into Central Asia, and across parts of South Asia. The Middle East and North Africa region, home to roughly six percent of the world’s population, possesses barely one percent of its renewable freshwater. Countries such as Yemen, Jordan, and Libya already consume more water annually than nature replenishes, surviving only by mining ancient aquifers that will eventually run dry. The Arabian Peninsula has almost no perennial rivers at all. Meanwhile, Brazil alone holds roughly twelve percent of the world’s freshwater, and the Congo River basin discharges more water into the Atlantic in a single day than the entire Middle East receives in rainfall in a month.

Groundwater depletion represents a slow-moving crisis of enormous proportions. Aquifers beneath the North China Plain, the Indo-Gangetic Basin, the Arabian Peninsula, and the American Great Plains are being drawn down far faster than precipitation recharges them. In some cases, these are fossil aquifers — water deposited thousands of years ago that, once extracted, is effectively gone. Saudi Arabia exhausted its primary aquifer for wheat production in roughly three decades, eventually abandoning domestic wheat farming entirely. Northwest India is pumping groundwater at rates that satellite gravity measurements can detect as a measurable decline in the region’s mass.

Climate change is now redistributing the global water supply in ways that compound existing scarcity. Higher temperatures increase evaporation, reducing the water available in already-arid regions. Changing precipitation patterns are making wet regions wetter and dry regions drier — a cruel amplification of existing inequality. Perhaps most consequentially, the glaciers that serve as natural water towers for billions of people are shrinking. The Himalayan glaciers, which feed the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers, have lost mass at accelerating rates. The rivers they sustain provide water to nearly two billion people across South and East Asia. As glaciers recede, these rivers will initially carry more water from accelerated meltwater — followed, within decades, by a permanent decline. The geopolitical consequences of this shift are almost impossible to overstate.

The Major Flashpoints¶

The Nile Basin¶

No river on Earth carries more geopolitical weight per cubic meter than the Nile. Egypt, a desert nation of over 110 million people, derives approximately 95 percent of its freshwater from the river. The Nile is not merely important to Egypt — it is Egypt; without it, the country would be uninhabitable beyond a narrow Mediterranean coastline. For millennia, Egypt’s position at the river’s terminus was offset by its political and military dominance over upstream states. Colonial-era treaties, particularly the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement and the 1959 bilateral treaty with Sudan, allocated the vast majority of Nile waters to Egypt and Sudan, granting Egypt an effective veto over upstream projects. Ethiopia, the source of roughly 85 percent of the Nile’s flow through the Blue Nile tributary, was not party to either agreement.

Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), under construction since 2011 on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border, has upended this arrangement. When completed, the GERD will be Africa’s largest hydroelectric facility, generating over 5,000 megawatts of electricity for a country where more than half the population lacks reliable power. For Ethiopia, the dam represents sovereign development — the right to harness a resource that originates within its own borders. For Egypt, the dam represents a potential catastrophe: control of the Blue Nile’s flow by a foreign government whose interests may not align with Egypt’s survival. Egyptian officials have at times described the GERD as an existential threat, and former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi was recorded in 2013 discussing military options against the project.

Negotiations between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia have repeatedly failed to produce a binding agreement on the dam’s filling rate or operation during droughts. The absence of an enforceable legal framework — no treaty binds the three parties, and the colonial-era agreements are rejected by Ethiopia — means the dispute is effectively governed by the balance of power on the ground. Ethiopia has proceeded with filling the reservoir unilaterally. Egypt, lacking the military capacity to destroy the dam without catastrophic escalation and possessing no direct leverage over Ethiopian water policy, has pursued diplomacy while quietly expanding its military capabilities and cultivating relationships with states surrounding Ethiopia. The Nile crisis illustrates the fundamental challenge of water geopolitics: when no governance framework exists, the upstream state holds the cards.

The Tigris-Euphrates System¶

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which gave birth to Mesopotamian civilization, have become instruments of modern coercive diplomacy. Both rivers originate in the mountains of southeastern Turkey, flow through Syria, and converge in Iraq before emptying into the Persian Gulf. Turkey’s geographic position at the headwaters has given Ankara decisive leverage — leverage that it has exercised through one of the most ambitious hydraulic engineering programs in history.

Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project (known by its Turkish acronym GAP) comprises 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants across the Tigris and Euphrates watersheds. The project’s centerpiece, the Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates, is one of the largest dams in the world. When Turkey began filling the Ataturk reservoir in 1990, it cut the Euphrates’ flow to Syria by roughly 75 percent for a month — a demonstration of hydrological power that neither Syria nor Iraq could counter. GAP was designed to transform southeastern Turkey through irrigation and electricity generation, but its downstream consequences have been devastating. Iraq’s share of the Euphrates has declined dramatically; the Mesopotamian marshlands, once the largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East and home to the Marsh Arabs for millennia, have been largely destroyed by the combined effects of Turkish and Iraqi damming and drainage.

Turkey has used its water leverage explicitly as a tool of foreign policy. During periods of tension with Syria, particularly when Damascus harbored Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan in the 1990s, Turkey’s control of the Euphrates served as implicit coercion. Ankara has never signed a comprehensive water-sharing agreement with its downstream neighbors, maintaining the position of absolute territorial sovereignty — the legal claim that a state may do as it wishes with water within its borders, regardless of downstream impact. For Iraq, whose agricultural heartland depends on rivers it does not control, this position translates into chronic vulnerability. Iraq has lost an estimated forty percent of its agricultural land since the 1970s, driven in significant part by declining water availability from the Tigris and Euphrates.

The Mekong River¶

The Mekong, Southeast Asia’s great artery, stretches over 4,300 kilometers from the Tibetan Plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. For the roughly sixty million people who depend directly on the river for food, water, and livelihoods, the Mekong is irreplaceable. Its annual flood pulse sustains the Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia — the world’s most productive freshwater fishery — and deposits nutrient-rich sediment across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, one of the planet’s most important rice-growing regions.

China has constructed a cascade of eleven major dams on the upper Mekong (which Beijing calls the Lancang River), with a combined storage capacity that gives Chinese operators significant control over downstream water flow. Studies have documented that Chinese dam operations have altered the Mekong’s natural flood-drought cycle, holding back water during wet seasons when downstream ecosystems need it and releasing it during dry seasons to generate electricity — effectively reversing the river’s natural rhythm. During the severe 2019 drought that devastated downstream communities, satellite data revealed that Chinese dams were holding back large volumes of water while downstream countries experienced record-low river levels.

The Mekong Situation illustrates how water infrastructure can function as an instrument of regional dominance without any explicit threat being made. China has declined to join the Mekong River Commission, the intergovernmental body established by the four lower Mekong states to coordinate river management, instead creating a separate Lancang-Mekong Cooperation framework under Beijing’s leadership. This institutional maneuvering ensures that China participates in water governance only on its own terms. For countries like Cambodia and Vietnam, the consequences are severe and worsening: declining fish stocks, eroding riverbanks, saltwater intrusion in the delta, and diminished agricultural productivity. The asymmetry is compounded by China’s economic weight in the region, which makes downstream states reluctant to confront Beijing directly on water issues for fear of jeopardizing trade and investment relationships.

The Indus River System¶

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, brokered by the World Bank between India and Pakistan, is frequently cited as one of the most durable water-sharing agreements in history. Negotiated in the aftermath of Partition, which split the Indus basin between two hostile states, the treaty allocated the three eastern rivers (Sutlej, Beas, Ravi) to India and the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan, while permitting India limited use of the western rivers for non-consumptive purposes such as hydroelectric generation. The treaty survived three wars and decades of hostility — a remarkable achievement in a region where bilateral cooperation is otherwise nearly nonexistent.

Yet the treaty is showing its age. India has accelerated construction of hydroelectric projects on the western rivers allocated to Pakistan, arguing that run-of-river generation is permitted under the treaty’s terms. Pakistan views these projects as a threat to its water security, fearing that Indian control of upstream infrastructure could allow manipulation of river flows. The dispute has been referred to international arbitration on multiple occasions, with both the International Court of Arbitration and a neutral expert issuing decisions that have satisfied neither party. In 2023, India issued a formal notice to modify the treaty — the first such step since its signing — arguing that the original dispute-resolution mechanisms are no longer functional.

The deeper threat to the Indus system is not legal but physical. The Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus and its tributaries are retreating under the pressure of rising global temperatures. These glaciers contribute an estimated 40 percent of the Indus system’s flow. As they shrink, the river’s total discharge will decline, making the existing allocation — already strained — increasingly untenable. Two nuclear-armed states, with a combined population approaching 1.6 billion and a history of armed conflict, will be competing for a diminishing resource. The Indus basin represents perhaps the most dangerous intersection of water scarcity, climate change, and nuclear-armed rivalry on the planet.

Water as a Weapon¶

The use of water as an instrument of coercion takes multiple forms, from the slow diplomacy of dam construction to the brutality of wartime infrastructure targeting. Dam-building is the most common and effective form of water coercion, precisely because it is difficult to characterize as aggression. A government that builds a dam on its own territory can frame the project as domestic development — hydroelectric generation, irrigation, flood control — while the downstream consequences may amount to an act of economic warfare against a neighboring state. This ambiguity is what makes water such a potent and insidious geopolitical instrument.

In active conflict zones, water infrastructure becomes a target and a weapon of more direct violence. The Islamic State, after seizing territory across Iraq and Syria in 2014, captured the Mosul Dam and threatened to flood downstream areas — a threat that prompted American airstrikes to retake the facility. ISIS also closed the gates of the Fallujah Dam to flood government-held areas and cut water supplies to Shia-majority communities. In Syria, all warring parties targeted water pumping stations, treatment plants, and dams, leaving millions without safe drinking water. The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine in 2023 — releasing a wall of water that devastated downstream communities and drained a critical reservoir — demonstrated that water infrastructure destruction remains a feature of modern warfare.

For wealthy states, desalination offers a partial escape from hydrological dependence. Israel has become a world leader in desalination technology, producing roughly 80 percent of its domestic water from the sea and recycling nearly 90 percent of its wastewater for agricultural use. Saudi Arabia operates the world’s largest desalination capacity, sustaining its population in one of the driest environments on Earth. But desalination is energy-intensive and expensive, placing it beyond the reach of most water-stressed nations. It is a solution for the rich, not a universal answer.

The concept of “virtual water” offers another form of adaptation. Nations can effectively import water by purchasing water-intensive agricultural products — grain, meat, cotton — rather than growing them domestically. The Middle East is the world’s largest net importer of virtual water, sustaining its population through food imports that would require far more freshwater than the region possesses. This strategy works in peacetime, when global trade flows are reliable. It fails when supply chains are disrupted by conflict, pandemics, or the decisions of exporting nations to restrict food sales — as several countries did during the 2008 and 2022 food price crises.

International Law and Governance¶

The governance of transboundary water resources is characterized by a gap between the scale of the problem and the capacity of existing institutions. Two principles compete in international water law, and neither has achieved dominance. The doctrine of absolute territorial sovereignty holds that a state may do whatever it wishes with water within its borders — a position favored by upstream states such as Turkey, China, and Ethiopia. The doctrine of limited territorial sovereignty, embodied in the principle of “equitable and reasonable use,” holds that upstream states must consider downstream impacts — a position favored, unsurprisingly, by downstream states such as Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan.

The 1997 UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses attempted to codify the principle of equitable and reasonable use, along with an obligation not to cause significant harm to other riparian states. But the Convention took seventeen years to gather enough ratifications to enter into force, and the world’s most powerful upstream states — China, Turkey, and the United States, among others — have not ratified it. The Convention’s provisions are thus more aspirational than enforceable, establishing norms that upstream hegemons routinely ignore.

In practice, transboundary water is governed by a patchwork of bilateral and multilateral treaties of wildly varying quality and durability. Some, like the Indus Waters Treaty, have demonstrated remarkable resilience. Others, like the colonial-era Nile agreements, have collapsed under the weight of changing power dynamics and developing-world assertions of sovereignty. Many of the world’s 310 transboundary river basins have no governing agreement at all. There is no international court with compulsory jurisdiction over water disputes, no enforcement mechanism to compel compliance with water-sharing agreements, and no institution with the authority or resources to mediate among competing claims at a global scale. In the absence of effective governance, water disputes are resolved by geography and power — which means they are resolved in favor of upstream states.

The Future of Water Conflict¶

The forces driving water geopolitics are intensifying on every front. Global population, projected to approach ten billion by mid-century, will increase demand for food and therefore for irrigation water, which already accounts for seventy percent of freshwater withdrawals. Rising living standards in the developing world increase per-capita water consumption as diets shift toward more water-intensive foods. Urbanization concentrates demand in megacities whose water infrastructure is often inadequate. On the supply side, climate change is making rainfall less predictable, shrinking glaciers, and intensifying droughts in already water-stressed regions.

The water-food-energy nexus compounds these pressures. Dams generate hydroelectricity — a valuable low-carbon energy source — but they also trap sediment that would otherwise fertilize downstream floodplains, block fish migration, and alter water flow patterns on which agriculture depends. Ethiopia’s GERD will power the country’s industrialization but may reduce the sediment load that sustains Egyptian farming. China’s Mekong dams generate gigawatts of electricity but have contributed to the collapse of fisheries that feed millions. Every water infrastructure decision involves trade-offs that cross borders and affect different populations unequally. The states that build the dams capture the benefits; the states downstream bear the costs.

The phrase “water wars” has become a staple of geopolitical commentary, but outright military conflict over water remains rare. States have far more effective instruments of water coercion than warfare: dam operations, treaty manipulation, infrastructure investment, and the slow exercise of hydro-hegemony achieve the same strategic objectives without the costs and risks of armed conflict. The more likely future is one of chronic water coercion — upstream states using infrastructure leverage to extract political concessions, downstream states accepting unfavorable terms because they have no alternative, and vulnerable populations bearing the consequences of decisions made in distant capitals. Water will not produce the next world war. But it will produce a world of deepening inequality between those who control rivers and those who depend on them, between wealthy states that can desalinate their way out of scarcity and poor states that cannot, between the upstream and the downstream. In a century defined by climate change, resource competition, and the erosion of multilateral governance, water geopolitics will only grow more central to the contests that shape the international order.

Sources & Further Reading¶

• Zeitoun, Mark. Power and Water in the Middle East: The Hidden Politics of the Palestinian-Israeli Water Conflict. I.B. Tauris, 2008. – The foundational text on hydro-hegemony, showing how power asymmetries shape water allocation in ways that international law alone cannot explain.

• Chellaney, Brahma. Water: Asia’s New Battleground. Georgetown University Press, 2011. – A comprehensive analysis of transboundary water disputes across Asia, from the Himalayan headwaters to the Mekong Delta, arguing that water is becoming the continent’s most contested resource.

• Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. Harper, 2010. – A sweeping history of how control over water has shaped the rise and fall of civilizations, providing deep historical context for contemporary water geopolitics.

• Gleick, Peter H. The World’s Water series. Island Press. – The essential reference on global freshwater data, updated biennially, combining quantitative analysis with policy discussion on water conflict, access, and governance.

• Barnaby, Wendy. “Do Nations Go to War Over Water?” Nature, 2009. – An important counterargument to the “water wars” thesis, arguing that states are more likely to cooperate over water than fight, though subsequent developments have complicated its optimism.