River Conflicts and Hydrological Dominance
Publisher: Environment and Security
Author(s): Christina Boyes and Katherine Lynch-Dombroski
Date: 2025
Topics: Conflict Prevention, Governance, Peace Agreements, Renewable Resources
How do the direction of river flow and the dynamics of power within a river basin affect international conflict and cooperation? Studies of border disputes suggest that the presence of institutionalized agreements can decrease conflict over rivers. What factors determine the likelihood of institutionalized agreements is less well understood. In this paper, the authors argue that relative hydrological dominance can be a crucial determinant of states’ strategic interests over rivers and willingness to cooperate or engage in river-related militarized interstate disputes, particularly when climate-change-related variability in supply, abundance, and scarcity is accounted for. The authors test these hypotheses on a global dataset of rivers and the agreements governing them from 1946 to 2018.