Water: A Major Stake of Conflicts in the Twenty-First Century

摘要

The need to ensure freshwater security remains sacrosanct to the survival and security of humanity. While various studies on water security continue to draw the world’s attention to future threats and risks against humanity’s better survival and security—following the current management of our various waterways. It is in this light that this paper proposes to explain why access to water may well be a major stake of conflicts in this 21st century. After debate and discussion, the results that emerge from this paper show that the multiplication of threats arising from climate change, which continues to worsen in this century, coupled with the hybrid policies and activities of various actors at stake, and combined with the singular characteristics of water—including, notably, a resource that guarantees our existence, a scarce resource, an unevenly distributed resource, and a resource that is shared among several states, nationalities and social categories—emerge two fundamental implications. The first is that of the great need for cooperation between riparian states, nationalities and various social categories; and the second is that exhibits the great likelihood of conflicts between them—to the competing uses of the shared water resource and the conquering spirits of one another. By using a few cases of bellicose rhetoric on the Tigris-Euphrates, Jordan, Indus, Syr-Daria, Nile, Congo, Colorado and Rio Grande watersheds, this paper makes a bitter observation of the predominant tendency of the second implication—the conflictual one—over the first—the cooperative one—in this twenty-first century that ostensibly denotes that water should be taken seriously as a major stake of conflicts in this century. Thus, this paper considers that it is important and time for humanity to promote transboundary water cooperation between states and nationalities of shared river basins; and integrated water management in the steps of good governance at all levels, in the sense of avoiding a flare-up of the situation and limiting to the maximum a worsening where the violins do not agree anymore .