TRANSBOUNDARY WATER COOPERATION IN CENTRAL ASIA AND REGIONAL SECURITY
Abstract
This is an attempt to answer the question about the growing water deficit in Central Asia, its impact on regional security, and the ways and means of ensuring it. The authors have analyzed the contemporary state of regional water resources; investigated the conceptual approaches to the studies of water cooperation; analyzed the contradictions between the Central Asian countries caused by the transboundary management of water resources; and outlined approaches to potentially efficient management of regional water resources.
As close neighbors, the Central Asian countries are connected by common history, culture, and identical economies, while the common water resources inevitably stir up disagreements. According to experts, Central Asia is one of the regions of our planet that are moving toward great water-related contradictions. Today the region is affected by the agrarian and urban water crisis. Due to the post-Soviet economic, demographic, and political realities, all big international rivers cause or effect international disagreements.
This fully applies to the region’s two biggest rivers that empty into the Aral Sea—the Syr Darya (that runs from Kyrgyzstan and crosses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) and the Amu Darya (that begins in Tajikistan and reaches the sea via Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan). This means that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control the rivers’ sources; hence, there exist severe political disagreements between their own needs for water and those of the downstream riparians. Agriculture of the downstream countries needs much more water, while the economically weaker upstream republics are seeking wider control to get more water for power generation and their own agriculture.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, these problems attracted a lot of attention from the academic community. Much has been done by Arjen Hoekstra and Ashok Chapagain, Marc Zeitoun and Stephen C. McCaffrey to clarify the problem. The main researchers of Frederick Frey, Miriam Lowi, Sergey Zhiltsov and Igor Zonn, Waltina Scheumann and Manuel Schiffer, Nurit Kliot, Annabelle Houdret, Annika Kramer, and Alexander Carius have concentrated on determining the causes of international water-related conflicts.
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