Trends in Transboundary Water Disputes and Dispute Resolution

Abstract

‘Water’ and ‘war’ are two topics being assessed together with increasing frequency. The approximately 250 international watersheds cover more than one half of the land surface of the globe, and affect 40 per cent of its population. Water is a resource which ignores political boundaries, fluctuates in both space and time, has multiple and conflicting demands on its use, and whose international law is poorly developed, contradictory and unenforceable. As a consequence, recent articles in the academic literature (Cooley, 1984; Starr, 1991; Gleick, 1993; and others) and popular press (Bulloch and Darwish, 1993; World Press Review, 1995) point to water not only as a cause of historic armed conflict, but as the resource which will bring combatants to the battlefield in the twenty-first century.