Water and Conflict in the Middle East ed. by Marcus Dubois King (review)

According to a commentary published by the World Resources Institute (WRI), "the Middle East and North Africa is the most water-stressed region on the Earth."² This critical situation is well documented in Marcus King's edited book on Middle East water politics and conflict. Individual chapters focus on Turkey, Iraq (including Iraqi Kurdistan), Syria, Egypt, and Yemen. The authors of individual chapters in this edited book employ a case-study approach to better understand these water-stressed countries and the key issues of trans-boundary river basins, groundwater usage, unequal water allocations, water weaponization, and upstream dam construction politics.

Regional water scarcity is worsening in the Middle East, one of the hottest and driest regions on the globe, where high temperatures are rising to record-breaking levels. This volume is a welcome contribution to a much-needed conversation about the present political and security implications of an already conflict-prone region, where the gap between water supply and demand and an ever-growing need for measures to lessen the chances of water-related violence need to be addressed.

In the book's introduction, King makes the important distinction between understanding intrastate and interstate water conflict. Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on conflict between states, with a focus on dams, while Chapters 4 through 7 focus on water conflict inside the state. The chapters reflect a water security literature consensus that rejects the state-versus-state water wars thesis while accepting international cooperation on scarce water as highly probable. On a national or subnational level, however, political tension and violent water-related conflict seem to occur frequently (for example, during the Arab uprisings of 2011, the Syrian civil war since 2011, and Yemen's civil war since 2014). King notes, correctly, the lack of a strong and convincing body of evidence to support a clear causal chain between water scarcity and violent conflict inside states. Making this connection is the major challenge, not only for water security research but also for the broader environmental security field; for example, climate change and violent conflict. Despite its virtues, King's edited volume does not advance a clear framework to clarify the linkage between water and conflict. But it remains a useful source of empirical evidence for advancing what such a linkage might involve.

Recent newspaper headlines warn of a possible Middle East water war over hydroelectric dam construction. King's edited volume provides in-depth and valuable analysis of these disputes. As mentioned above, Chapters 2 and 3 focus on dams, specifically, Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile River, with Sudan and Egypt downstream, and Turkey's Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP, from the Turkish Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi) with Syria, Iraq, and their Kurdish enclaves downstream within the Euphrates and Tigris river basin. The book highlights these dams as possible flashpoints for water-related conflict. In recent years, Egypt and Ethiopia have butted heads over the construction of the GERD. China is playing a key role in financing the GERD project but is not requiring the same cooperation with downstream riparian states, which the World Bank has required of past major dam projects.

The authors of these chapters examine the likelihood of international water-related conflict. For example, Chapter 3 concentrates on the realism-influenced concept of hydro-hegemony, which focuses on riparian relative power and its upstream or downstream position on a given river. Such central factors, according to this concept, best explain water-related cooperation or conflict. In the end, as these authors point out, it is not the international variables but the domestic ones (poor governance, uncoordinated water development, political and social instability, including ethnic group mistrust) that best explain water-related conflict.

The chapters that analyze the internal aspects of water politics to better understand conflict in the Middle East are the strengths of this book. Of great interest is Chapter 4, which focuses on Iraqi Kurdistan, an important substate...