The Hydropolitics of the Nile Revisited: Elites, Experts, and Everyday Practices in Egypt and Sudan

Almost four billion people are projected to live in river basins experiencing severe water stress in 2050, according to the OECD’s most recent environmental outlook (OECD 2012). Iconic rivers as diverse as the Colorado, Murray-Darling, Orange, and Yellow are closed or closing, often failing to meet downstream requirements for ecosystems and livelihoods (Grafton et al. 2013; Molle et al. 2010). These trends have been attributed to a confluence of factors: population growth, resource demands for food and energy security, and climate change. Increasingly, however, water crises have been framed as governance crises (OECD 2011).

Unpacking the governance crises surrounding water requires confronting—and embracing—politics (Schlager and Blomquist 2008). The politics of water involve situating water as part of a wider web of relationships between the state and society and between nation-states sharing contested waters. Water has received attention for its role in statebuilding, particularly since Wittfogel’s controversial “hydraulic society” thesis (Wittfogel 1957). The hydraulic society thesis holds that the challenges posed by arid and semi-arid water systems require a specialized bureaucracy that can breed totalitarian, or despotic, rule. The thesis has long been discredited for its association with environmental determinism and neglect of contradictory evidence of peasant revolutions and alternative forms of social organization; nevertheless, it remains deeply entrenched, as do the prescriptions for a strong state with centralized control over the resources required to master complex hydrological challenges.

International rivers have become the subject of a sprawling literature investigating evidence for the “water wars” thesis, namely that disputes over water will cascade into violent conflict between nation-states. Evidence of local violence over water exists, as is illustrated by the role of drought and climate change in the Syrian civil war (Gleick 2014). However, the causal links are complex; despite water shortages and climate variability acting as a threat multiplier, “dreaded water wars are not an empirical reality” (Verhoeven 2015). Efforts to systematically assess patterns of cooperation and conflict over water have demonstrated the prevalence of cooperation historically (Wolf 2007), hinging on the capacity of water institutions to keep pace with evolving threats in a period of rapid global change and intensifying resource scarcity. Concerns that the past willnot presage the future have fueled continued fascination and debate over water wars, stoked in 1995 by the oft-quoted statement by former vice president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, that the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.

Nowhere have the hydraulic society and water wars theses been as frequently invoked as the Nile—a cradle of ancient civilization flowing over 6,000 km and encompassing eleven nation-states, including Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan. The river has been the subject of a series of important historical treatments, including the classical account by Waterbury that coined the term “hydropolitics” (Waterbury 1979). It has since spawned a series of monographs assessing the legacy of colonial control and the evolving determinants of collective action (Tvedt 2004; Waterbury 2008).

This essay considers two recent additions to the extensive body of scholarship on the Nile, each adopting a similar analytical approach (political ecology) to provide new perspectives on the influence of water politics on the relationship between the state, society, and environment. In the first book, Water, Civilisation and Power in Sudan: The Political Economy of Military-Islamist State Building, Harry Verhoeven focuses on “state building through a very specific set of water and agricultural policies, as advanced by successive colonial and Sudanese regimes” (p. 249), a phenomenon described as a “hydro-agricultural mission” guided by transformation of a petro-economy through the construction of dams and irrigation to control the peripheral south.

Verhoeven situates his work at the intersection of two analytical approaches: political ecology and historical sociology. He draws on these two approaches to challenge three dominant frames for dissecting water politics...