3. The Reality of international water politics

Despite the prominence of the “water-war-thesis”, reality in the international river basin has proven it wrong. Empirical research conducted at Oregon State University in the context of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD) has revealed that most events in the international basins have been cooperative in nature, while only one third of all 1831 events coded for the years 1948 to 1999 were conflictive. Among the latter ones, only 37 involved any form of violence, all below the threshold of war. Moreover, 109 out of the 263 international rivers in the world have experienced the signature of international water treaties.
In fact, some scholars believe that there have been no war over water since an event some 4,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq—and that countries have usually responded to transboundary water competition through cooperation rather than conflict.
Moreover, the director of the TFDD, Wolf, states that evidence suggests that water resources were not factors in strategic planning during the hostilities of 1948, 1967, 1978, or 1982 between Israel and Arab countries. The decision to go to war and strategic decisions made during the fighting, including the question of which territory was necessary to capture, were not influenced by water scarcity or the location of water resources.
Besides the water-cooperation-thesis scholars who have denied that a water war has never existed in history, we can also gain some insight from a paper by Gleick, the most famous scholar on the “water war thesis”, who has listed a Water Conflict Chronology from 3000BC to 2008. Included in the list, there are only 19 conflicts which have occurred between nations and that were caused partly by development disputes about water. Most of the events listed by Gleick involve domestic conflicts or simply using water as a weapon in war and have no correlation with gaining access to more water. The war for water seems to have never happened.