Conflict management of riparian disputes

This paper builds on a large literature that explores the linkages between resource scarcity and interstate conflict. Focusing on competing claims over cross-border rivers, we analyze peaceful and militarized techniques used by states to manage river claims, and compare the success of these techniques for resolving the issues under contention. We focus on two key factors to account for variance in the use and effectiveness of conflict management strategies: water scarcity and institutions. We argue that high levels of water scarcity increase the frequency of explicit claims over fresh water, increase the chances of militarized conflict over these claims, and make it more difficult for conflict management institutions to be created or to be effective. We also examine the role of peace-promoting institutions, both river-specific and general institutions, arguing that institutional membership should promote peaceful attempts to resolve river claims. Analyzing data on river claims (1900–2001) from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project, we find that greater water scarcity increases the likelihood of both militarized conflict and peaceful third party settlement attempts, while river-specific institutions reduce militarized conflict and increase the effectiveness of peaceful settlement attempts.     

Come rain,or come wells: How access to groundwater affects communal violence

This article empirically analyzes the relationship between groundwater scarcity and incidences of communal violence. Case studies suggest that appropriating water is more likely when resource scarcities are not effectively mitigated and where property rights are disputed. Yet, covering water more broadly remains piecemeal in quantitative research on communal conflict. While water scarcity features in large-N literature on climate variability and nonstate conflicts, such studies rely heavily on rainfall data which covers only one aspect of the hydrological cycle. Employing precipitation data alone neglects the use of groundwater, an important factor for drought resilience and the source for 50% of global drinking water. While rainfall remains key for agriculture, pastoralists and smallscale farmers in particular rely on groundwater as a buffer during dry periods. Thus, analyses on water scarcity and conflict ought to combine measures for groundwater, surface water, and precipitation. While controlling for other sources of water, the lack of groundwater access is hypothesized to increase incidences of violent communal conflict. The effect of groundwater on communal violence is also argued to vary with the presence of drought, low rainfall, in densely populated areas, and with state presence. These propositions are tested through large-N analyses using previously not utilized data on water availability with incidence data on violent conflict for Africa and the Middle East (1990–2014). The results show that lacking access to groundwater is associated with a higher risk of communal violence. Further, the effect of groundwater access on communal violence is conditioned by precipitation levels as well as population density. The results also suggest that the effect of groundwater on violence is smaller in areas with higher state presence.     

Climate change,environmental degradation and armed conflict

Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement. However, considerable uncertainties exist with regard to the extent and geographical distribution of these changes. Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence human societies and political systems necessarily involves an even higher degree of uncertainty. The direst predictions about the impacts of global warming warn about greatly increased risks of violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources such as freshwater and arable land. We argue that our best guess about the future has to be based on our knowledge about the relationship between demography, environment and violent conflict in the past. Previous rigorous studies in the field have mostly focused on national-level aggregates. This article represents a new approach to assess the impact of environment on internal armed conflict by using georeferenced (GIS) data and small geographical, rather than political, units of analysis. It addresses some of the most important factors assumed to be strongly influenced by global warming: land degradation, freshwater availability, and population density and change. While population growth and density are associated with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant. The results indicate that the effects of political and economic factors far outweigh those between local level demographic/environmental factors and conflict.     

Jeremy Bentham,choice architect: law,indirect legislation,and the context of choice

ABSTRACT

The goal of this paper is to locate indirect legislation within Bentham’s art of legislation, and to distinguish it, as far as possible, from direct legislation. Along the way, some parallels are drawn between indirect legislation on the one hand, and the Nudge theory of Thaler and Sunstein on the other. It will be argued that many expedients categorized by Bentham as indirect legislation are simultaneously exercises of direct legislation. Another set of indirect expedients act on knowledge, and involve efforts to eliminate asymmetries of information between potential offender and potential victim by providing official standards and disseminating a plethora of factual information. Other forms of indirect legislation threaten the coherence of Bentham’s theory of law, firstly by regarding all government actions as exercises in legislation, and secondly by turning the formers of public opinion into legislators. Insofar as some forms of indirect legislation operate by sleight of hand, they conflict with Bentham’s commitment to transparency in the exercise of public power, reflecting a tension between reality and appearance which runs through his thought.     

Conflicts over shared rivers: Resource scarcity or fuzzy boundaries?

Countries that share rivers have a higher risk of military disputes, even when controlling for a range of standard variables from studies of interstate conflict. A study incorporating the length of the land boundary showed that the shared river variable is not just a proxy for a higher degree of interaction opportunity. A weakness of earlier work is that the existing shared rivers data do not distinguish properly between dyads where the rivers run mainly across the boundary and dyads where the shared river runs along the boundary. Dyads with rivers running across the boundary would be expected to give rise to resource scarcity-related conflict, while in dyads where the river forms the boundary conflict may arise because river boundaries are fluid and fuzzy. Using a new dataset on shared water basins and two measures of water scarcity, we test for the relevance of these two scenarios. Shared basins do predict an increased propensity for conflict in a multivariate analysis. However, we find little support for the fuzzy boundary scenario. Support for a scarcity theory of water conflict is somewhat ambiguous. Neither the number of river crossings nor the share of the basin upstream is significant. Dry countries have more conflict, but less so when the basin is large. Drought has no influence. The size of the basin, however, is significantly associated with conflict. Modernization theory receives some support in that development interacted with basin size predicts less conflict, and we find some evidence here for an environmental Kuznets curve. The importance of basin size suggests a possible ‘resource curse’ effect for water resources.     

Shared rivers and conflict – A reconsideration

Neomalthusians have regularly predicted "water wars" while cornucopians have argued that there is no inherent water scarcity and liberal institutionalists have seen cooperation as a more likely outcome of competition for limited water resources than violent conflict. Three earlier studies have found a positive statistical relationship between shared rivers and low-level interstate conflict. Based on a more comprehensive dataset, an improved model of conflict, and a more appropriate control for geographical opportunity, we argue that these results are spurious and that we cannot establish a conflict-inducing effect of shared rivers over and beyond contiguity itself. In fact, the new dataset presented here makes it clear that nearly all neighbors in the international system share at least one river. This calls for a different approach to investigating interaction in shared river basins. This notwithstanding, freshwater and other shared resources may still provide a mechanism to explain why contiguity is robustly associated with conflict, so the water-conflict scenario cannot be dismissed. Indeed, our results show that among river-sharing states, basins with an upstream/downstream configuration increase the risk of conflict. The article finally discusses how river interaction should be further investigated based on these results and what new data are needed to enable such research.     

Climate change,human security and violent conflict

Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that climate change may increase the risk of violent conflict. This paper integrates three disparate but well-founded bodies of research – on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change, on livelihoods and violent conflict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conflict. It explains that climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to sustain livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine the capacity of states to provide the opportunities and services that help people to sustain their livelihoods. We argue that in certain circumstances these direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security may in turn increase the risk of violent conflict. The paper then outlines the broad contours of a research programme to guide empirical investigations into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.     

Resolving Water Conflicts: A Comparative Analysis of Interstate River Compacts

This paper examines compacts used by U.S. western states to engage in shared governance of interstate rivers. Compacts are viewed as inflexible, rigid governance structures incapable of responding to changing environmental and institutional settings because of the use of unanimity rules and the inability to directly regulate water users. Using data from a study of 14 western interstate river compacts we examine this claim. In particular, we explore the response of compacts to water conflicts. We find that members of compacts, closely related water agencies, and compact governments are capable of responding to conflicts. To better understand this finding, we identify the conditions under which compacts are likely to address conflicts, as well as the types of conflict solutions compact governments adopted.     

Rethinking transboundary waters: A critical hydropolitics of the Mekong basin

Efforts to understand the geographical and political complexities of transboundary river basins—both within national jurisdictions and at international levels—must embrace critical interdisciplinary perspectives. In this paper, we focus attention on underdeveloped aspects of transboundary water conflicts and cooperation—e.g., how ecological understandings of river basins are transformed within transboundary institutional arrangements; the way multiple actors in transboundary basins construct geographical scales; and how control over water is represented and exercised within governance and management institutions. We advance the notion of critical hydropolitics as a way of explicating these processes. We draw on a case study of conflict over and within the transboundary waters of the Mekong River basin to illustrate this approach. Our aim is to complement and extend ongoing research and policy debates concerning transboundary waters.     

Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance

High levels of conflict among coalitions in a policy process are often attributed to belief divergence and may lead to policy gridlock. Thus, reducing belief divergence may facilitate negotiation and open the door for policy change. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change, however, especially in high-conflict settings. Collaborative governance has been touted as one method for mitigating conflict to a level where negotiation is possible by means including but not limited to belief change. This study investigates the relationship between belief divergence as a driver of policy conflict and collaborative governance as a conflict mitigation tool by analyzing the beliefs of two opposing coalitions as they participate in a decade-long collaborative environmental governance process that ended in negotiated agreement. Using longitudinal survey and interview data, we find that coalitions' beliefs diverge more at a later point in the process, due primarily to the reinforcement and strengthening of one coalition's beliefs; however, we also identify aspects of the collaborative process that helped foster negotiated agreement amidst this growing belief divergence. These findings can inform scholarship on conflict mitigation in environmental governance as well as the design of more effective collaborative processes in high-conflict settings.     

Remote Sensing,Land Quotas and Mass Relocation: China's Governance of Farmland

There is increasing interest in understanding China's environmental governance through the lens of governmentality. This article contributes to that discussion by using the Foucauldian analytical apparatuses of discipline and security to understand China's governance of farmland. It argues that the Chinese state applies these two apparatuses simultaneously: on the one hand, it disciplines and deters local states from illegal land grabs by utilizing surveillance tools such as remote sensing and national land surveys; on the other hand, it relies on indirect governance through the land quota market to achieve grain security, transforming both local states and peasants into autonomous market players, and reconstructing China's rural landscape by launching mass peasant relocation programmes. The study also reveals the contingent effects of those power tactics: the state's governance is compromised by the local states’ counter‐conduct, such as data fabrication and concealment, and by the peasants’ denial of their new subjectivity as market players. When the tactics are effective, as in the case of local states actively assuming roles of land quota producers and traders, the villages and peasant households suffer from deprivation of land rights.     

The unintended consequences of emergency food aid: neutrality,sovereignty and politics in the Syrian civil war, 2012–15

This article dissects the role of emergency food aid during the current Syrian conflict. Drawing on Séverine Autesserre's concept of frames and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty, we argue that the neutrality frame, which undergirds the majority of humanitarian relief efforts in Syria, obfuscates the impact of emergency food aid, both on sovereign power relations and local political dynamics. While neutrality appears benign, it has had a tangible impact on the Syrian civil war. Through close scrutiny of various case‐studies, the article traces how humanitarian efforts reinforce the bases of sovereign politics while contributing to a host of what Mariella Pandolfi (1998) terms ‘mobile sovereignties’. In the process, humanitarian organizations reaffirm sovereign power while also engaging in similar activities. We then analyse how and why ostensibly neutral emergency food aid has unintentionally assisted the Assad regime by facilitating its control over food, which it uses to buttress support and foster compliance. By bringing external resources into life‐or‐death situations characterized by scarcity, aid agencies have become implicated in the conflict's inner workings. The article concludes by examining the political and military impact of emergency food assistance during the Syrian conflict, before discussing possible implications for the humanitarian enterprise more broadly.     

Shared rivers and interstate conflict

“The previous war in the Middle East was about oil, the next war will be about water.” Such predictions have been made regularly, and particularly with reference to the possibility of upstream–downstream conflicts in major rivers which cross interstate boundaries. A good case can be made that competition over water resources may exacerbate conflict and contribute to interstate violence. More than 200 river systems are shared by two or more countries. Many rivers run between countries with a history of conflict, where water plays an important part in the economic life of the country. The dramatic statements about ‘water wars’, however, have a weaker foundation. As resource optimists have pointed out, there is an abundance of water where it is not subject to wasteful uses, human ingenuity can overcome water shortages, and nations can cooperate rather than fight to resolve international water issues. This study is built on newly generated data on boundary-crossing rivers, which have been added to the Correlates of War contiguity dataset. Our results indicate that a joint river does indeed increase the probability of militarized disputes and armed conflict over and above mere contiguity. This risk factor is comparable in size to standard control variables, but much smaller than the effect of contiguity itself. Water scarcity is also associated with conflict, and the upstream/downstream relationship appears to be the form of shared river most frequently associated with conflict. But these results are not very strong and we do not have any systematic data on the issues involved in the shared-river conflicts.     

The European Policy on Water Use at the Urban Level in the Context of the Water Framework Directive. Effectiveness,Appropriateness and Efficiency

The current European policy on water resources use in cities is undergoing radical reform in an attempt to confront the water quality problems and the dramatically intensified water scarcity. Among the most elaborate documents concerning current water policy is the Water Framework Directive (WFD), which spells out the targets of water policy at the European level. The confrontation of water scarcity, deterioration in quality, and the reduction in costs of the water supply industry emerge as decisive principles of the new European policy on water use in cities. These targets are currently assimilated in the agendas of national water policies in almost all European countries. To achieve these objectives several policy instruments have been applied in Europe. The more prevailing instruments are: demand management, privatization of water companies and efficient/full cost pricing of water use. The present article aims at systematically evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the current water policy for urban systems, by examining the coherence of its instruments as well as their appropriateness for achieving the policy's targets. To start with, the paper presents an elementary economic analysis of the current water policy. The effects of the most common policy instruments are systematically traced in the framework of economic analysis. Next, three indicative case cities are presented and examined. As it turns out, however, the results of the implementation of the main instruments are contradictory. This drastically reduces the effectiveness of the water policy. We indicate that these contradictory effects are inherent in the water policy and originate in the lack of appropriate social processes and institutions for the management of natural resources.     

A Moral Economy of Water: Charity Wells in Egypt's Nile Delta

Though commonly viewed as a human right, access to water is often difficult and highly unequal within and between communities, depending on various social and power relations, access mechanisms and property rights regimes. However, moral norms and subsistence ethics can also play a balancing role, enhancing access to water for vulnerable groups and individuals, particularly in contexts of water scarcity. Using the example of a Nile Delta village, this article explores the role of charitable water wells (sobol) in influencing both irrigation and drinking water access relations, by understanding their different modes of governance and the motivations behind their emergence. The article argues that charitable norms underlying sobol are dynamic. They stem from certain moral ideologies concerning religion, property and reciprocity, and while they do greatly enhance access to water, it is with varying degrees, limitations and remaining access discrepancies. Sobol alter property rights relations, extending entitlements to water, but their effectiveness is also limited by existing property rights regimes. Sobol are also limited by existing anti‐cooperative actions, and being embedded in an inequitable access system, they may not fully counterbalance inequitable water access. The limitations of cooperative water access arrangements should be counterweighed and complemented by overarching and equitable water distribution systems.     

Growth responses of sessile oak to climate and hydrological regime in the Zbytka Nature Reserve, Czech Republic

Complex of Nature reservation Zbytka is the rest of various fen vegetation in the northeast part of the Czech Republic. It represents an important spring area which provides high quality potable water for more than 150 000 inhabitants. Waterworks utilization was started in the 1960s and the change of land-use practices has had a strong effect on the ecosystem. Oak chronology has been showing different tree growth trends since the start of the waterworks utilization. Also the occurrences of negative pointer years differ markedly before and after initiation of pumping underground water. Dendroclimatological analyses primarily revealed a close relationship between the temperature and tree growth ?? positive influence of spring and summer temperature. The period 1983?C1992 of maximum artesian water pumping is expressed as higher tree-ring increments, but linear model analyses showed that the growth reaction of oak is not due to simple causality between temperature and under-ground water level. The radial increments reacted positively to the combination of high temperature during the vegetation season and low or, the contrary, high depth of underground water level. No direct relationship was detected between tree growth and fluctuation of underground water level; despite of the results dendrochronological data may be useful in historical ground water modelling studies. Results are also crucial for conflict of interests between nature preservation and potable water supply.     

LOCAL PUBLIC SERVICE PROVISION AND SPATIAL INEQUALITY IN CHINESE CITIES: THE ROLE OF RESIDENTIAL INCOME SORTING AND LAND‐USE CONDITIONS

Spatial inequality refers to unequal access to local public services between high‐ and low‐income households in relation to their residential locations. We examine two hypotheses regarding the role of income sorting and land‐use conditions in shaping spatial inequality in Chinese cities, where residents have little direct influence on local public service provision. First, in the presence of resource indivisibility, travel cost, and location‐based rationing, scarcity of public‐service resources in a city makes access to public services more uneven across neighborhoods, thus exacerbating income sorting and spatial inequality in the city. Second, the exacerbating effect of resource scarcity is mitigated by land‐use conditions that limit income sorting. Estimates of willingness to pay by households of different income levels for public‐service resources across cities corroborate both the exacerbating effect of resource scarcity and the mitigating effect of inclusive land‐use conditions.     

Historical essay: electroconvulsive therapy, memory, and self in America

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) practitioners and anti-ECT activists have divergent interpretations of both the treatment and its history. Despite claims by ECT opponents that practitioners do not acknowledge memory side effects, the published literature on the procedure demonstrates psychiatrists' awareness of this issue. And though current ECT practitioners claim that memory side effects were mostly the result of outmoded methods, investigators continue to publish studies that indicate ongoing memory problems. This article explores the conflict between pro- and anti-ECT groups around the issue of memory side effects in the broader context of changes in American psychiatry and society.     

Building blocks of polycentric governance

Success or failure of a polycentric system is a function of complex political and social processes, such as coordination between actors and venues to solve specialized policy problems. Yet there is currently no accepted method for isolating distinct processes of coordination, nor to understand how their variance affects polycentric governance performance. We develop and test a building-blocks approach that uses different patterns or “motifs” for measuring and comparing coordination longitudinally on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Our approach confirms that polycentric governance comprises an evolving substrate of interdependent venues and actors over time. However, while issue specialization and actor participation can be improved through the mobilization of venues, such a strategy can also fragment overall polycentric capacity to resolve conflict and adapt to new problems. A building-blocks approach advances understanding and practice of polycentric governance by enabling sharper diagnosis of internal dynamics in complex environmental governance systems.     

Water,Geopolitics, and Economic Development in the Conceptualization of a Region

Two U.S.-based geographers outline three dimensions (geopolitical, economical, and biophysical) used to define the basin of the Mekong River as a region, which reveal multi-scalar water governance policies and discourses that lie at the core of current challenges and tensions within the basin. Drawing on their extensive knowledge and fieldwork, the authors demonstrate that processes integral to the framing of the Mekong as a region of economic integration and international cooperation (water resource development through construction of large dams) conflict sharply with the functioning of the Mekong as a region of highly connected biophysical processes. The approach utilized in the paper can be applied to the study of other transboundary river-basin regions in Eurasia and elsewhere facing similar contradictions among the geopolitical, economic, and biophysical dimensions used to define them. By focusing on a region as constructed simultaneously through multiple social and biophysical processes, the authors contribute to current debates within geography and related fields on the nature of regions.