Water, Politics and Conflict in Africa

Historically, water has offered minimal opportunities for greed and exploitation, so has only had a limited threat of conflict, but as water resources are put under increasing pressure, this is beginning to change ( Alao 2007 ). This blog post examines some of the prophesied causes of conflict over water. Figure 1: A Picture of the Okavango River.  Inequality This was touched upon in my introductory blog post , but unequal access to water has been approached in a few ways: Structural Inequality Discourse: ( Turton 2000 ) Conflict may arise if there is unequal access to water. Africa has unevenly distributed water resources, and countries within the same basin may experience different levels of social, economic and political development (Ashton 2002 ).  Uneven water resource use between upstream and downstream riparian states (coupled with the pollution of water bodies) can be a contentious issue ( Ashton 2002 ; Pallett 1997;   SARDC 1996 ), especially if water is u...

Conflict and natural resources are connected; the struggle for resource control has underpinned many modern and ancient wars. Water is a valuable natural resource, dubbed ‘blue gold’, and is necessary for sustaining human life ( Alao 2007 ; Ashton 2002 a,b; Treszkai 2018 ). Greater demand for water increases the potential for water-related conflict, which is conflict directed at acquiring access to water (Ashton 2000). Transboundary water resources are particularly vulnerable to disagreement, because water resources are distributed across neighbouring countries meaning, the consequences of activities in upstream riparian states flow downstream ( Ashton 2002 a, b, 2000). Figure 1 highlights locations of potential transboundary conflicts across the African continent.  Figure 1: A Map of Africa showing river basins and the locations of actual/potential water-related conflicts (Ashton 2002a, 237). The proliferation of competing water uses has placed stress upon Africa’s finite water so...