Pyrrhic Victory in the 'Tournament of Shadows': Central Asia's Quest for Water Security (1991-2009)

摘要

Central Asia's Soviet past continues to haunt the five successor sovereign states with water, a contentious issue. Although fundamental to survival and livelihood, regional cooperation over the precious resource remains a patchwork of short-term stop-loss agreements at best and an exercise in "frameworks without content" at worst. This article seeks to explain why this is so, based on a theoretical position derived from hydro-political discourse. The eclectic explanations include the hydro-hegemonic void created by the removal of Soviet authoritarianism; the securitization of the hydro-political complex in Central Asia; unilateral and bilateral substitutes for multilateral water resource cooperation; and the ineffectiveness of international law - all of which contribute to the impasse over water cooperation.