Water and Conflicts, Hobbes v. Ibn Khaldun: The Real Clash of Civilizations?

Abstract

This chapter will begin by considering the two opposing schools of thought concerning water wars. A first school of thought has maintained since the 19805 that competition over water will lead to wars as relative water scarcity increases around the planet. A second school of thought has emerged as a response, arguing that competition for water, far from leading states to wage war on each other, will rather incite them to cooperate. The arguments of each of these schools of thought and the common hypotheses that underlie both sets of theories will be explored. The evolution of war in an era of globalization and of a state’s involvement in competition for water will be examined, which will lead to revisiting the concepts of water wars and water cooperation. How the various theories of war that emerged from the three great Western ideologies, conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, limited the definition of issues and the choice of factors that were deemed relevant when examining water conflicts will be studied. This chapter details how a Hobbesian prism was used to look on a Khaldunian reality, which has prevented us from understanding the coming water conflicts and has left us ill equipped to deal with them. ‘Water conflicts will cause the wars of the twenty-first century.’ This is more than a catchy statement: it is the object of numerous arguments and counter-arguments in the scientific community as much effort has been devoted to either proving or disproving the causal connection between water scarcity and water wars. Thomas Naff and Ruth Matson (1984: 181) seem to have launched the debate by arguing that ‘water runs both on and under the surface of politics in the Middle East’, and analysing the role played by water in riparian state relations. A series of publications followed that supported the concept of the causal link between water and war (Starr 1988,1991) (Bulloch and Darwish 1993; Biswas 1994; Soffer 1999). The development of this literature led Hussein Amery (2001: 51) to refer to ‘the well-established and thoroughly documented positive link between resource scarcity and violent conflict’.