The 1% Predicament: A Resource Worth Fighting? The Role of Water Critical Infrastructure during the Syrian Civil War

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the relationship between water Critical Infrastructure (wCI) and conflict has been discussed extensively; both inside and outside of academic circles. Initially, the matter was solely viewed as a one-sided relationship in which conflicts had a destructive impact on water CI and environmental resources in general. However, the mid-1990s saw a reversal of the causal arrow, as academics started to highlight how wCI can exacerbate tensions and drive conflict. A decade later, this hypothesis was questioned, and scholars began to point out how water CI enhances cooperation and promotes peace. Accordingly, since the 1990s, the majority of the discussion on the relationship of water CI and conflict has been dominated by a discourse between the 'water conflict' and the 'water peace' perspectives. However, the last decade this field of study has seen a new shift as scholars are increasingly giving more focus to an additional dimension of the relationship between water CI and conflict, namely how water CI is utilised to further political, economic, military, or terrestrial objectives. Through an analysis of the Syrian civil war, this study makes several contributions to the emerging literature on the use of water CI and its effectiveness in conflict. This paper demonstrates that wCI is used...